All of the WMD's we found in Iraq were unstable chemical weapons... weapons which would have simply neutralized themselves over time, and which you would have a hard time killing more than 100 people without a real delivery system. By the estimates of the National Ground Intelligence Center, the 500 or so shells found contained degraded chemical weapons that appeared to be manufactured "before 1991." The report refers to them as degraded but "Hazardous and potentially lethal," with the DoD spokesperson referring to them as "not in usable condition." "Potentially lethal?" That doesn't sound like mass destruction to me.
Mustard and Sarin gas are bad, grant you, but A: they're short-range weapons, B: they degrade over time, and C: Saddam thought Al-Queda was a bunch of religious nutballs and wanted nothing to do with them.
Really, it all comes down to risk. Clinton authorized Desert Fox against Iraq to force Saddam to play straight with weapons inspectors. He eventually complied, and the risk of actual WMD's was ruled to be minimal. Bush kicked out weapons inspectors for a full-scale invasion, and the risk of actual WMD's was difinitively ruled to be minimal.
Also, while Obama has said that Iran needs to straighten up and Secretary of State Clinton is saying that they have the opportunity to return to the community of nations, that's a far cry from Bush putting them on an Axis of Evil and making them a black-and-white adversary.
Respect. The USA does not treat countries without nukes with the same kind of respect as they do otherwise.
US:"Iraq, you have nukes and we must stop you immediately." Iraq:"No we don't. Look, inspect all you like." [Iraq is invaded]
US:"North Korea, you have nukes and we must stop you immediately." North Korea:"Damned right we do. What are you going to do about it?" [North Korea is ignored]
Let's wake up from the idea that our technological progress was related to our inherent superior american-ness, and not our now-defunct levels of education and reserch investments.
In the first case, only we can lead. But if anyone can have brilliant humans simply by hard work and a real commitment to education, and we're not doing that anymore, then our continued access to Gossip Girl is in trouble.
I have found this just gets people conditioned to give their password out to any application that asks for it.
If you really want her not to install applications, just give your mom a limited-rights user account and don't give her the administrator password.
In the grand scheme of things, though, computer systems need to strive to be mom-proof. Why don't control panels know that changes are being made by scripts and not by the user? Why does installers for single-use applications have the right to stomp all over other application installations?
I kind of agree with the less-is-more approach to end user interactions. I get a lot of clients who have learned to cope with the modern click-prompt overload by simply clicking somewhat randomly on everything that comes up in front of them. Frequently, this leads to disabling some vitally important part of their computer in a way that any person who actually read prompts would have easily avoided.
Sadly, the less computer savvy you are, the more likely you are to be constantly deluged with upgrade prompts from Adobe, install requests for Safari from Apple, and the multitude of prompts when Hewlett Packard's genuinely awful drivers crash. Prompts to continue subscriptions to Symantec, upgrade to the latest acrobat, log in to windows messenger, etc. And, of course, each separate component has its own prompts. "Click here to upgrade. I see you've clicked here to upgrade, would you like me to go to the internet and upgrade? Upgrade will begin when you click the OK button below. Upgrading... Upgrade has completed, click OK below to continue. Thank you for upgrading, please visit unintelligiblylongwebsite.com/pagenobodywilleverclickon.html to give us feedback on this process. Press Dismiss below to return to the installer. Thank you for returning to the installer. If you are satisfied with this interaction, press OK below."
90% of users have no idea what their computer is doing, or should be doing, under the hood. If they weren't already suffering from click-fatigue, they wouldn't be the right people to decide on technical issues anyway.
Obviously, it shouldn't be possible to disable UAC without actually getting a UAC prompt. But in general, UAC is an annoying system that most users completely tune out. Instead of hightening user knowledge, it simply drowns out any real issues.
When the superbowl halftime show starts, there is a visible drain on water resources across the country. Due to these spikes, the water provider simply cannot maintain full water pressure, and overall water pressure suffers. If they were to maintain full pressure, they would need to greatly overbuild the system for normal usage, and everyone's water bills would double or more.
Same thing with the internet. Most people use network resources in random bursts (with certain trend-lines throughout the day). If you have enough bandwidth for all of your customers to have a saturday evening without hitting max, you've provided a solid level of service. However, when one person on a switch can consume the full bandwidth of a T1 , and attempts to do so all the time, it's bad. When you have apartments full of people doing that, there is simply no way that can be maintained at the asking price range. I remember when a network that I was helping to administer was brought down in 2002 because one computer was in direct communication with 5,000 other computers, and the computers innocently started DDOSing us with requests.
A full T1 with dedicated bandwidth used to cost 500 dollars a month (probably less now). A cable modem that gets used sporadically and in bursts costs about 50 dollars per month. Almost anyone who really wants one can still get a dedicated T1 installed in their home, but few people do. It just isn't worth it. On the flip side, properly explaining the intracacies of selling shared bandwidth takes pages and pages of explanation... pages that you actually did recieve when you signed up for the service, and which is about as efficient as you can do it.
How much are they overselling is another question, but if done correctly people will (and have been) jumping at the overall price difference without any noticeable difference in service.
The linked article summary makes the quite logical proposition that if your estimated safety margin is much smaller than the chance that your estimate is wrong, then your real safety margin is equal to the chance that your estimate is wrong. The summary of the paper seems to imply that they take a mathematical approach to estimating the chance that something is wrong.
The headline, while technically correct, is intentionally inflamatory. And I would estimate there is a 90% chance of this being used incorrectly. But the underlying theory seems valid, assuming that you can create a solid statistical system to estimate a logistical margin of error.
Do note that a 1 in 10,000 estimate does not mean that there is a 1 in 10,000 chance that we're all going to die, but rather that there is a 1 in 10,000 chance that the assurances are as useless as insurance from AIG.
Of course, this is somewhat useless except in the narrow case of estimating the chance of catastrophic destruction. It doesn't help the advancement of scientific knowledge, but rather how much policy makers can rely upon it.
Ultimately, this will probably be abused to cast doubt on anything that may contradict particular people's dogma. But as an advancement in understanding, that isn't the fault of the theory.
Actually, PlaysForSure was rather different in the grand scheme of things. Plays For Sure was a device and vendor agnostic certified compatibility layer. Which meant that a user could buy a DRM'ed track from Rhapsody or Napster or MSN and have it work in a player from any number of hardware makers. Essentially, it was the open DRM scheme that people have been hoping for, except it all filters through MS's coffers.
I feel like Microsoft has been suffering from shortsighted business practices. Plays for Sure is exactly the sort of platform play that MS is good at, and which might take years of concerted effort to catch on. Instead, they threw it out for the Zune, which they could control end-to-end but which wasn't worth bothering about.
Let me posit a parallel explanaiton for what happened to the Zune. It is a regular off-the-shelf greybox MP3 player, and just isn't anything special. It allows you to buy music from MSN (which they proved nobody should do anyway), and wirelessly share music (in a way that is functionally useless). Sony tried, and failed, with exactly the same play for exactly the same reason: So what? The iPod was lighter, smaller, and had a pleasing UI. Now it is entrenched in every aspect. The Zune, on the other hand, might as well be another Samsung or Archos or Qbe or any other greybox MP3 maker. Add in that the Zune management software is even worse than iTunes, and you have an ok player in a market where it needs to be an amazing one.
I believe granparent's point was that the open and available nature of Windows Mobile was not sufficient to make people like it. People moaning that smartphones would be great if they were only open platforms generally forget that the great majority over the years were, yet that wasn't enough to set the world on fire.
Apple wanted a friendly way to distribute applications on the platform, and their network partner needed a way to ensure that they can continue to charge ridiculous rates for SMS and laptop pairing. I would guess they have contractual obligations around usages of the GPS in their phone as well.
Don't focus on the app store. That piece of kit actually works surprisingly well. Focus on the policy of the gateway to the platform. Nobody had managed a proper phone application distribution system up until this point, especially one that could potentially provide revenue for the software makers.
I suspect that while we grew up with the concept of "final" versions of thing, including truth, people who grow up with the Web as a reference will think of works as constantly evolving and never rooted. Truth, as it is, will always be revised to be (hopefully) more accurate, or occasoinally defaced.
Somehow this seems better than the authoratative books in the library which still say that dinosaurs were slow lizards and there is no water on mars.
As a friend of mine put it: "Even if Wikipedia is only right 80% of the time, that's a lot more right than we need to get a satisfying answer to why the Star Trek Experience in Vegas closed down."
Speaking is definitely annoying to others in the same room, yet we pack call-center operators in like sardines. It's also something which requires zero education, and which people can (and do) do constantly non-stop from morning until night. Really, the only thing that stops it from being production-ready right now for mundane typing tasks is the somewhat intensive training period. Go download Dragon Naturally Speaking, spend two weeks training it, and tell me it doesn't write as well as most awful interoffice e-mails. I'd much rather have a version of Dragon running in my phone, than trying to type with that godawful iPhone virtual keyboard.
Listen, if we don't take a few swings for the fence, we're going to be stuck with QWERTY for the next hundred years. Has anyone tried combining a 10-key keyboard with predictave imput? A gesture-based syllable system? Come on people, the alternative inputs need our support, not our scorn.
Thousands of years of brute force is one month of a small computer lab after ten years of Moore's law. Or an instant, if we ever get quantum computing working. It might be just one day of computing today for a large botnet.
In the grand scheme of things, Dvorak is like trying different wheel layouts to make a faster horse-drawn buggy. At some point, voice recognition will be accurate enough for daily use, and will supplant QWERTY. And beyond that, there may be some form of direct muscle twitch reading or brain synapse reading that would be more efficient than talking, and that will probably take over. Or maybe chording syllabic imput triggers will be faster. Or some genious pen gesture input.
Dvorak? Dvorak is a side show in a larger progression. We shouldn't be focusing on how to make a slightly better keyboard, but how to make a massively better input.
I've been interested in alternative keyboards for some time now, but the speed increase from Dvorak seems tiny compared to what would be needed to make it worthwile. Also, switching back and forth between dvorak and qwerty made me physically nauseous. They're just too close in style for that mental shift to be made comfortably.
Do you have links to proper chorded keyboards that you recommend? Or, to anyone, are there better-than-dvorak input systems out there that you would recommend?
In a lot of cases, demos are built with the last stable bits before you make your final push / overhauls (usually an E3 build). The game will oscillate between periods of being stable and periods of making major changes to make things work, and those major changes tend to break everything. Hence, demos tend to be built from code 3 or 4 months prior to gold (depending on dev cycle), as that is the last stable bits before everything has to be broken for final fixes / changes.
Everyone in the industry recognizes the value of demos, or we wouldn't make them. They're a complete PITA. And to their credit, PC demos do exist for most titles. However, if you look at GTA IV's numbers on Amazon.com, the 360 version has a sales rank of 64, the PS3 version has a sales rank of 112, and the PC version is way, way, way down at 504. This puts its current sales well behind such hits as the Baulder's Gate Compilation DVD-ROM, Disney Princess: Magical Jewels, Imagine Teacher, and some Xbox 1 titles.
PC games just don't sell. There was a time when the macintosh was looked at like the bastard stepchild, as a macinbox would sell about 15% of what the equivalent PC box would sell. Well, we're at the point where PC sales account for less than 14% of total industry revenue, and that INCLUDES the sick amount of money that WoW makes.
I've talked to a lot of developers who are getting out of PC gaming entirely. I doubt it will go the way of arcades, but PC is looking more and more niche as time goes on. Being late to the digital distribution game that it should be dominating doesn't help. I suspect PC's will evolve into the experimental romping grounds of up-and-coming developers, but that dedicated boxes will take the high-end from here on out. After all, if you think finding a box that can run a high-end game is problematic, try developing a high-end game that has to run on every combination of hardware and operating systems that have been released in the past 8 years.
On a practical matter, this is far more true than it should be. Also, your team will burn out in that final push to go gold... there is at least 3 weeks of vacation / uselessness before anyone can be productive again.
Making a demo is a complete PITA. You have to take premature code that isn't ready, splice everything in such a way that it kind of hangs together, finish your most polished level in a way that will probably need to be re-done anyway, and throw it all out there in a package that hopefully doesn't crash. Then re-do all of that emergency hack-job work for real. A demo can easily steal one to four development weeks from a team. And sadly, I have never used, seen, or built a demo with the skill or interest that a movie trailer can generate.
A big part of that is that you simply have to teach the player how to play. And as you build up your game, you should be training the player in all of the various types of things they will need as they develop new powers and abilities. Essentially, if you're going to provide a 15 minute taste of the full game, you have to provide the first 15 minutes of the difficulty curve, and maybe throw in a spectacular boss fight earlier than when it would normally occur. If you were to provide a highlight reel of the game, you would be rapid-fire throwing disparate gameplay systems at the player in ways that your loading time and finish level can't support (remember, the demo is usually made before the game is finished). If your game was that ready, you'd ship it. And, as these are taken from the general development team and budget, any time spent polishing your demo is less time spent polishing your game.
Compared to software and game demos, movie trailers are easy.
How many people want to make video games, rather than play them? LBP was a game made for game makers, not people who just want to get lost in a fantasy. And while Mirror's Edge was a great concept, the execution definitely could have been better. Age of Conan a World of Warcraft killer? Do they have any idea how many MMO's lie dead now due to trying to go Head to Head with WoW's incredible installbase?
To step back to a bigger scale, 80% of good games fail to recoup. It's just a fact that making a great game is not enough to make great sales. There is that magical 20% that happens to strike the fancy of the time and catch on. The three games in the example were in the 80% (except, of course, LBP, which more than made a profit).
He does ramble to the point, that a demo can tap the excitement from a game rather than stoke it, but most games don't have the luxury of being as well known as Grand Theft Auto or Metal Gear Solid. There are bad demos, in that they either fail to interest, stifle existing interest, or simply satisfy interest. I seriously doubt any of the examples that he cites fall into that last category.
On a personal note, I played the Skate 2 demo last night. That definitely converted me into a potential future buyer. The same was true with Burnout Revenge, Dead Rising, and all of the XBL games I've picked up.
They mention an e-mail system, so I wouldn't be surprised if they were running Exchange. For some reason, people seem to have trouble realizing that IMAP does basically everything that Exchange does, but with complete compatibility and reduced risk.
No UAV is capable of fighting a mannned air craft and winning.
I'm curious as to why this is. UAV's should be able to pull a lot more G's, respond more quickly, and should have a 360^2 view of the battlefield. Is it related to having a remote pilot in the loop? Or perhaps less development dollars over the years? Or are pilots really that much better than automated systems?
Slashdot Mirror
All of the WMD's we found in Iraq were unstable chemical weapons... weapons which would have simply neutralized themselves over time, and which you would have a hard time killing more than 100 people without a real delivery system. By the estimates of the National Ground Intelligence Center, the 500 or so shells found contained degraded chemical weapons that appeared to be manufactured "before 1991." The report refers to them as degraded but "Hazardous and potentially lethal," with the DoD spokesperson referring to them as "not in usable condition." "Potentially lethal?" That doesn't sound like mass destruction to me.
Mustard and Sarin gas are bad, grant you, but A: they're short-range weapons, B: they degrade over time, and C: Saddam thought Al-Queda was a bunch of religious nutballs and wanted nothing to do with them.
Really, it all comes down to risk. Clinton authorized Desert Fox against Iraq to force Saddam to play straight with weapons inspectors. He eventually complied, and the risk of actual WMD's was ruled to be minimal. Bush kicked out weapons inspectors for a full-scale invasion, and the risk of actual WMD's was difinitively ruled to be minimal.
Also, while Obama has said that Iran needs to straighten up and Secretary of State Clinton is saying that they have the opportunity to return to the community of nations, that's a far cry from Bush putting them on an Axis of Evil and making them a black-and-white adversary.
Respect. The USA does not treat countries without nukes with the same kind of respect as they do otherwise.
US:"Iraq, you have nukes and we must stop you immediately."
Iraq:"No we don't. Look, inspect all you like."
[Iraq is invaded]
US:"North Korea, you have nukes and we must stop you immediately."
North Korea:"Damned right we do. What are you going to do about it?"
[North Korea is ignored]
Let's wake up from the idea that our technological progress was related to our inherent superior american-ness, and not our now-defunct levels of education and reserch investments.
In the first case, only we can lead. But if anyone can have brilliant humans simply by hard work and a real commitment to education, and we're not doing that anymore, then our continued access to Gossip Girl is in trouble.
I have found this just gets people conditioned to give their password out to any application that asks for it.
If you really want her not to install applications, just give your mom a limited-rights user account and don't give her the administrator password.
In the grand scheme of things, though, computer systems need to strive to be mom-proof. Why don't control panels know that changes are being made by scripts and not by the user? Why does installers for single-use applications have the right to stomp all over other application installations?
I kind of agree with the less-is-more approach to end user interactions. I get a lot of clients who have learned to cope with the modern click-prompt overload by simply clicking somewhat randomly on everything that comes up in front of them. Frequently, this leads to disabling some vitally important part of their computer in a way that any person who actually read prompts would have easily avoided.
Sadly, the less computer savvy you are, the more likely you are to be constantly deluged with upgrade prompts from Adobe, install requests for Safari from Apple, and the multitude of prompts when Hewlett Packard's genuinely awful drivers crash. Prompts to continue subscriptions to Symantec, upgrade to the latest acrobat, log in to windows messenger, etc. And, of course, each separate component has its own prompts. "Click here to upgrade. I see you've clicked here to upgrade, would you like me to go to the internet and upgrade? Upgrade will begin when you click the OK button below. Upgrading... Upgrade has completed, click OK below to continue. Thank you for upgrading, please visit unintelligiblylongwebsite.com/pagenobodywilleverclickon.html to give us feedback on this process. Press Dismiss below to return to the installer. Thank you for returning to the installer. If you are satisfied with this interaction, press OK below."
90% of users have no idea what their computer is doing, or should be doing, under the hood. If they weren't already suffering from click-fatigue, they wouldn't be the right people to decide on technical issues anyway.
Obviously, it shouldn't be possible to disable UAC without actually getting a UAC prompt. But in general, UAC is an annoying system that most users completely tune out. Instead of hightening user knowledge, it simply drowns out any real issues.
5. lower your targets. 12-key rubber membrane keypad attached to a 4-line LCD screen.
When the superbowl halftime show starts, there is a visible drain on water resources across the country. Due to these spikes, the water provider simply cannot maintain full water pressure, and overall water pressure suffers. If they were to maintain full pressure, they would need to greatly overbuild the system for normal usage, and everyone's water bills would double or more.
Same thing with the internet. Most people use network resources in random bursts (with certain trend-lines throughout the day). If you have enough bandwidth for all of your customers to have a saturday evening without hitting max, you've provided a solid level of service. However, when one person on a switch can consume the full bandwidth of a T1 , and attempts to do so all the time, it's bad. When you have apartments full of people doing that, there is simply no way that can be maintained at the asking price range. I remember when a network that I was helping to administer was brought down in 2002 because one computer was in direct communication with 5,000 other computers, and the computers innocently started DDOSing us with requests.
A full T1 with dedicated bandwidth used to cost 500 dollars a month (probably less now). A cable modem that gets used sporadically and in bursts costs about 50 dollars per month. Almost anyone who really wants one can still get a dedicated T1 installed in their home, but few people do. It just isn't worth it. On the flip side, properly explaining the intracacies of selling shared bandwidth takes pages and pages of explanation... pages that you actually did recieve when you signed up for the service, and which is about as efficient as you can do it.
How much are they overselling is another question, but if done correctly people will (and have been) jumping at the overall price difference without any noticeable difference in service.
The linked article summary makes the quite logical proposition that if your estimated safety margin is much smaller than the chance that your estimate is wrong, then your real safety margin is equal to the chance that your estimate is wrong. The summary of the paper seems to imply that they take a mathematical approach to estimating the chance that something is wrong.
The headline, while technically correct, is intentionally inflamatory. And I would estimate there is a 90% chance of this being used incorrectly. But the underlying theory seems valid, assuming that you can create a solid statistical system to estimate a logistical margin of error.
Do note that a 1 in 10,000 estimate does not mean that there is a 1 in 10,000 chance that we're all going to die, but rather that there is a 1 in 10,000 chance that the assurances are as useless as insurance from AIG.
Of course, this is somewhat useless except in the narrow case of estimating the chance of catastrophic destruction. It doesn't help the advancement of scientific knowledge, but rather how much policy makers can rely upon it.
Ultimately, this will probably be abused to cast doubt on anything that may contradict particular people's dogma. But as an advancement in understanding, that isn't the fault of the theory.
Actually, PlaysForSure was rather different in the grand scheme of things. Plays For Sure was a device and vendor agnostic certified compatibility layer. Which meant that a user could buy a DRM'ed track from Rhapsody or Napster or MSN and have it work in a player from any number of hardware makers. Essentially, it was the open DRM scheme that people have been hoping for, except it all filters through MS's coffers.
I feel like Microsoft has been suffering from shortsighted business practices. Plays for Sure is exactly the sort of platform play that MS is good at, and which might take years of concerted effort to catch on. Instead, they threw it out for the Zune, which they could control end-to-end but which wasn't worth bothering about.
Let me posit a parallel explanaiton for what happened to the Zune. It is a regular off-the-shelf greybox MP3 player, and just isn't anything special. It allows you to buy music from MSN (which they proved nobody should do anyway), and wirelessly share music (in a way that is functionally useless). Sony tried, and failed, with exactly the same play for exactly the same reason: So what? The iPod was lighter, smaller, and had a pleasing UI. Now it is entrenched in every aspect. The Zune, on the other hand, might as well be another Samsung or Archos or Qbe or any other greybox MP3 maker. Add in that the Zune management software is even worse than iTunes, and you have an ok player in a market where it needs to be an amazing one.
I bet your schools have books, too.
I believe granparent's point was that the open and available nature of Windows Mobile was not sufficient to make people like it. People moaning that smartphones would be great if they were only open platforms generally forget that the great majority over the years were, yet that wasn't enough to set the world on fire.
Apple wanted a friendly way to distribute applications on the platform, and their network partner needed a way to ensure that they can continue to charge ridiculous rates for SMS and laptop pairing. I would guess they have contractual obligations around usages of the GPS in their phone as well.
Don't focus on the app store. That piece of kit actually works surprisingly well. Focus on the policy of the gateway to the platform. Nobody had managed a proper phone application distribution system up until this point, especially one that could potentially provide revenue for the software makers.
I suspect that while we grew up with the concept of "final" versions of thing, including truth, people who grow up with the Web as a reference will think of works as constantly evolving and never rooted. Truth, as it is, will always be revised to be (hopefully) more accurate, or occasoinally defaced.
Somehow this seems better than the authoratative books in the library which still say that dinosaurs were slow lizards and there is no water on mars.
As a friend of mine put it: "Even if Wikipedia is only right 80% of the time, that's a lot more right than we need to get a satisfying answer to why the Star Trek Experience in Vegas closed down."
Funny, this immediately made me wonder what was wrong with those other 30%.
Speaking is definitely annoying to others in the same room, yet we pack call-center operators in like sardines. It's also something which requires zero education, and which people can (and do) do constantly non-stop from morning until night. Really, the only thing that stops it from being production-ready right now for mundane typing tasks is the somewhat intensive training period. Go download Dragon Naturally Speaking, spend two weeks training it, and tell me it doesn't write as well as most awful interoffice e-mails. I'd much rather have a version of Dragon running in my phone, than trying to type with that godawful iPhone virtual keyboard.
Listen, if we don't take a few swings for the fence, we're going to be stuck with QWERTY for the next hundred years. Has anyone tried combining a 10-key keyboard with predictave imput? A gesture-based syllable system? Come on people, the alternative inputs need our support, not our scorn.
Thousands of years of brute force is one month of a small computer lab after ten years of Moore's law. Or an instant, if we ever get quantum computing working. It might be just one day of computing today for a large botnet.
In the grand scheme of things, Dvorak is like trying different wheel layouts to make a faster horse-drawn buggy. At some point, voice recognition will be accurate enough for daily use, and will supplant QWERTY. And beyond that, there may be some form of direct muscle twitch reading or brain synapse reading that would be more efficient than talking, and that will probably take over. Or maybe chording syllabic imput triggers will be faster. Or some genious pen gesture input.
Dvorak? Dvorak is a side show in a larger progression. We shouldn't be focusing on how to make a slightly better keyboard, but how to make a massively better input.
I've been interested in alternative keyboards for some time now, but the speed increase from Dvorak seems tiny compared to what would be needed to make it worthwile. Also, switching back and forth between dvorak and qwerty made me physically nauseous. They're just too close in style for that mental shift to be made comfortably.
Do you have links to proper chorded keyboards that you recommend? Or, to anyone, are there better-than-dvorak input systems out there that you would recommend?
In a lot of cases, demos are built with the last stable bits before you make your final push / overhauls (usually an E3 build). The game will oscillate between periods of being stable and periods of making major changes to make things work, and those major changes tend to break everything. Hence, demos tend to be built from code 3 or 4 months prior to gold (depending on dev cycle), as that is the last stable bits before everything has to be broken for final fixes / changes.
Everyone in the industry recognizes the value of demos, or we wouldn't make them. They're a complete PITA. And to their credit, PC demos do exist for most titles. However, if you look at GTA IV's numbers on Amazon.com, the 360 version has a sales rank of 64, the PS3 version has a sales rank of 112, and the PC version is way, way, way down at 504. This puts its current sales well behind such hits as the Baulder's Gate Compilation DVD-ROM, Disney Princess: Magical Jewels, Imagine Teacher, and some Xbox 1 titles.
PC games just don't sell. There was a time when the macintosh was looked at like the bastard stepchild, as a macinbox would sell about 15% of what the equivalent PC box would sell. Well, we're at the point where PC sales account for less than 14% of total industry revenue, and that INCLUDES the sick amount of money that WoW makes.
I've talked to a lot of developers who are getting out of PC gaming entirely. I doubt it will go the way of arcades, but PC is looking more and more niche as time goes on. Being late to the digital distribution game that it should be dominating doesn't help. I suspect PC's will evolve into the experimental romping grounds of up-and-coming developers, but that dedicated boxes will take the high-end from here on out. After all, if you think finding a box that can run a high-end game is problematic, try developing a high-end game that has to run on every combination of hardware and operating systems that have been released in the past 8 years.
On a practical matter, this is far more true than it should be. Also, your team will burn out in that final push to go gold... there is at least 3 weeks of vacation / uselessness before anyone can be productive again.
Mod parent up.
Making a demo is a complete PITA. You have to take premature code that isn't ready, splice everything in such a way that it kind of hangs together, finish your most polished level in a way that will probably need to be re-done anyway, and throw it all out there in a package that hopefully doesn't crash. Then re-do all of that emergency hack-job work for real. A demo can easily steal one to four development weeks from a team. And sadly, I have never used, seen, or built a demo with the skill or interest that a movie trailer can generate.
A big part of that is that you simply have to teach the player how to play. And as you build up your game, you should be training the player in all of the various types of things they will need as they develop new powers and abilities. Essentially, if you're going to provide a 15 minute taste of the full game, you have to provide the first 15 minutes of the difficulty curve, and maybe throw in a spectacular boss fight earlier than when it would normally occur. If you were to provide a highlight reel of the game, you would be rapid-fire throwing disparate gameplay systems at the player in ways that your loading time and finish level can't support (remember, the demo is usually made before the game is finished). If your game was that ready, you'd ship it. And, as these are taken from the general development team and budget, any time spent polishing your demo is less time spent polishing your game.
Compared to software and game demos, movie trailers are easy.
How many people want to make video games, rather than play them? LBP was a game made for game makers, not people who just want to get lost in a fantasy. And while Mirror's Edge was a great concept, the execution definitely could have been better. Age of Conan a World of Warcraft killer? Do they have any idea how many MMO's lie dead now due to trying to go Head to Head with WoW's incredible installbase?
To step back to a bigger scale, 80% of good games fail to recoup. It's just a fact that making a great game is not enough to make great sales. There is that magical 20% that happens to strike the fancy of the time and catch on. The three games in the example were in the 80% (except, of course, LBP, which more than made a profit).
He does ramble to the point, that a demo can tap the excitement from a game rather than stoke it, but most games don't have the luxury of being as well known as Grand Theft Auto or Metal Gear Solid. There are bad demos, in that they either fail to interest, stifle existing interest, or simply satisfy interest. I seriously doubt any of the examples that he cites fall into that last category.
On a personal note, I played the Skate 2 demo last night. That definitely converted me into a potential future buyer. The same was true with Burnout Revenge, Dead Rising, and all of the XBL games I've picked up.
They mention an e-mail system, so I wouldn't be surprised if they were running Exchange. For some reason, people seem to have trouble realizing that IMAP does basically everything that Exchange does, but with complete compatibility and reduced risk.
No UAV is capable of fighting a mannned air craft and winning.
I'm curious as to why this is. UAV's should be able to pull a lot more G's, respond more quickly, and should have a 360^2 view of the battlefield. Is it related to having a remote pilot in the loop? Or perhaps less development dollars over the years? Or are pilots really that much better than automated systems?