Re:Middleware is the Solution
on
Razor Blade Games?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
That would be a small bedroom programmer with the thousands of dollars neccesary to purchase development equipmenet and/or a middleware license. Licensing Renderware would cost you like $200,000. Licensing Havok would cost you another 50k probably. Unless said small bedroom was in a really big mansion, it'd be unlikely that its occuopant could afford the extremely large fixed costs associated with console development.
That's exactly it. The mod community is a hotbed of innovation. Games like Counterstrike or Natural Selection innovated in ways that large, for-profit teams are hesitant to try. Or look at Garage Games[garagegames.com] for an interesting approach to encouraging independent development of games. Or, if you're looking for straight-up bizzare games, check out like Mister Mosqito or Stretch Panic or some other wacky Japanese games that were brought over here as budget titles. You're gonna have to look hard, though, as most publishers are more interested in trend-chasing than innovation.
Bottom line, the large publishers in this business are *extremely* risk-averse - games cost a lot to develop, and the people funding them want to mitigate their risk. It's short-sighted, and keeping games from wide acceptance as an art form, but until the market shows a desire for something richer than the next GTA, it's the way things are.
Schools are, however, an excellent place to learn about broad, conceptual, theory-level issues... and that understanding is critical to being able to quickly adapt to different domains.
If you want to limit yourself to a quickly-outdated specific domain, or hire staff that won't easily grasp new technologies as they arrive, then that's your perogative. If you want adaptable, flexible staff, then a decent degree is a good idea.
Not neccesarily a grad degree though. If you're looking to move up in the IT world, and do strategic-level planning and design, then a grad degree would be helpful.
It's funny how, to the slashdot crowd, immortality is equivalent to any fantasy they'd care to have.
Though when i think about it, x/1 * t, t going from 0->infinity, and x 1 doesn't equal 1, does it? I've totally forgotten what special exception there is for this in statistics.
Of course, if *everyone* has saved up 1 million or whatever, and intends to live off it for the rest of their 200+ years of life, you run into an interesting conundrum - who does the work? If every class in our society ends up not contributing to the workforce for the majority of their lives, then it's likely (just from my intuition) that the system would collapse.
Of course, this assumes that life-extension would be available to everyone. In all likelihood, the treatments would be prohibitively expensive, creating a near-immortal, super-wealthy elite. I would imagine that at some point, the elite would realize, as the treatments became available to the common man, that it would be in their best interests to keep immortality from the working class.
Who's written about this? It sounds like a fairly apparent sci-fi premise.
What I find interesting is how the Metallica backlash affected the tactics the RIAA is adopting now. They saw that goading their artists to speak out against filesharing had a perceptibly negative impact on the artists image, so now there's no artists offically attached to the RIAA's actions. I guess their logic is that it'd be hard for people to boycott every label involved with the RIAA.
It's also pretty interesting that the RIAA has basically abandoned any attempts to sway the public to their point of view, instead approaching the problem using only intimidation. This seems like a strategy that could backfire in the long term.
I know I shouldn't expect the Slashdot community to try to take in the subtleties of these answers, but still, the parent disturbs me, inasmuch as it's indicative of the kind of blinders-on, hands-on-ears mentality that's really prevalent here (i'm new here, aren't I?) What did you expect, raging opposition to IP law as it stands? The DMCA is indicative of a disturbing trend towards crippled, rights-managed content, but the DoJ guy had an excellent point when he said that it was ultimately up to the market to decide whether that type of shit would fly, and I think if there's one thing consumers are good at, it's attempting to get their money's-worth ( arguments about the actual worth of major-label music notwithstanding ). I personally think the DoJ guys did an excellent job helping to decipher a law that most people don't really understand.
The point is, this law is subtle, and ultimately is a (imo) reasonable extension of existing copyright law to cover new means of distribution. I'm not saying it's great, and its implications scare me as far as the future of the established content industry, but honestly, the real shame is the barratry that the RIAA is engaging in. I don't think we can gut the DMCA just because it's being used in a heavy-handed fashion; it's got a real use, and that's protecting the person trying to make a living off of the software they wrote.
that's exactly the thing - no one ever said it was illegal to circumvent copyright protection, it's just illegal to traffic in devices whose main purpose is to do so. I wish I had mod points, because the fine points are the most important ones to grasp here, and make the difference between outlawing your right to do what you want with content or outlawing distribution of mechanisms the same.
This is the one thing for which I see a use for the DMCA. Encrypt this sort of evil, diabolical music, and sue the straight bejeezus out of anyone that tries to decrypt it for future generations to suffer to. It's a crime against humanity that Leonard Nimoy's "Highly Illogical" is now preserved for posterity - that's the sort of dangerous material that should be buried forever, only to be unearthed by supervillians.
Fancy restaurant starts you off cheap, with like a 4 dollar beer or 7 dollar mixed drink... but by the end of the night you're shelling out $200 for the dom perignon to maintain the drunken stupor!
Get the word out to the people! This is an injustice!
Of course, if the nation of Israel had never been created from land that belonged to Arabs that the Allies displaced post-WWII, then this whole mess wouldn't even be an issue now would it?
Regardless, if you're *trying to keep the peace*, you have to grin and bear it when people abuse you. Just cause IDF troops have rifles gives them no license to use them unless *deadly* force is being applied against them - deadly force being much more substantial than rocks. To do otherwise is simply barbarism.
I think raped is an adequate way to describe defamation in a national newspaper. The reporter apparently violated thedeacon's trust on several counts, and to do it in a national newspaper is outright heinous.
Thedeacon has a point when he says that private figures are not subject to the scrutiny of public figures. If the cost of law weren't so prohibitive, he'd probably sue, and would be absolutely justified in doing so. This sort of scandalous reporting deserves some serious publicity.
and my roomate can never remember where he saves his documents. A feature that enabled him to search by author or by title in *reasonable* time would seriously help people who find sprawling directory trees intimidating.
Just curious, but is an engrosser someone you pass your essay to to make it more gripping? Like you give it to your editor, then your engrosser, or maybe the other way around?
Since I've never heard of them, they can't be too expensive, and I've been feeling that my writing could use a little more spice as of late...
Not to mention that the PS2 sucks balls for anything other than pushing triangles. X is so slow on the PS2 that I could, well, not use it.
That aside, if they stuck some mp2 player software in here, so I don't have to boot with a linux CD every time i want my ps2 to do stuff other than gaming, that'd be nice. Of course, this thing will be way too expensive for anyone to want.
Whoa, I missed the part where they said real-time NURBS. That's especially interesting since no consumer electronics (video cards, consoles, whatever) bothered with real-time NURBS. I'd be mighty surprised if sony put out a NURBS processor on their handheld, seeing as how it'd probably eat up power like nothing else. And the installed base of ps2's doesn't really matter since this is a new product, not a handheld that plays ps2 games.
An optical drive is a mistake, since you're just adding weight and reducing battery life, and I can't imagine that any high-res textures would really visible on a little LCD.
Sony's sort of on the right track by not making a GBA clone, but what the handhelds really need is wireless.
I doubt developers moved from DOS because of performance reasons, but then again, no one exactly misses having to manage drivers by hand to get games to run. The shift to windows came because it was increasingly inconvenient to run dos games in a windows environment, which was rapidly beoming the standard.
.NET introduces no incompatibilities with basic development - it's not like I *have* to switch or else my program won't run right. All.NET is for is making a common interface across multiple languages to Windows functionality. Since most games use very little windows functionality, other than starting up a rendering rendering environment,.NET means little to a game developer It means nothing to someone not developing for an MS platform i.e., PS2 or Gamecube. PC developers *could* use.NET, but games require such fanatical management of memory that garbage collection is out of the question. Programming high-performance games requires programming habits that garbage-collecting languages don't really encourage - you don't want stuff in memory if it doesn't need to be.
You're absolutely right. A ps2 T10k costs thousands, plus thousands more for a seat license for the tools. Not to mention that sony (along with nintendo, and MS) are quite interested in controlling the content available for their system and won't let someone without real financial backing actually release a game for their system.
Consoles are stagnant - it's an unavoidable side-effect of the business model. But if you look at the PC, you get games like the Total War series, Syberia, or what have you. PC is the only platform where a low-volume strategy is really viable.
Your experiment works when dealing with the hippocampus (or could concievably work) because the hippocampus is simple and relatively well-understood. As far as complexity of the brain is concerned, replacing it is like replacing the pipe that spits experiences into long-term storage - like replacing the bus to your hard drive.
Bear in mind that replacing "progressively larger" parts of the brain is far from an easy task, and doesn't logically follow from replacing the hippocampus.
Keep in mind that this implant only passes signals on in a predefined way to other parts of the brain. From what I understand, the hippocampus isn't responsible for interpretation of the data, it just does some encoding and passes it on to our long-term storage.
I'll preface this with the statement that I don't know anymore concrete details of Sony's plan than the rest of you, but here's my insights, be they valuable or not:
"Grid" computing, at least in games, isn't so much of a distributed computing system, since the latency and bandwidth over the internet (or any network) wouldn't be sufficient to take care of any really critical game processing. As far as I can tell, it's more like a massive peer-to-peer multiplayer setup, as opposed to client-server: each ps2 takes some of the load of hosting the game, so that instead of being on the norrath4 server or whatever, you're on your ps2 plus the ones of those in your immediate area. You'd still need a significant overhead to run the entire system efficiently (a la napster's master servers) but the bulk of the workload would be taken on by the participants.
Picture the old Unreal links (a super-cool idea that wasn't really ready for primetime), or the server links in Neverwinter Nights, but a little more seamless.
Amen. The only reason, as far as I can guess, that the ps2 has such a monstrous lead on xbox and gamecube was the lead-time it had to market. Everyone I know prefers developing for gamecube and xbox, but no publishers are interested in those platforms.
Moreover, it just seems like Sony is making a bigass mistake all over again. Anyone remember the problems they had getting their last really complex chip design to fab? And the system shortages that resulted?
Slashdot Mirror
That would be a small bedroom programmer with the thousands of dollars neccesary to purchase development equipmenet and/or a middleware license. Licensing Renderware would cost you like $200,000. Licensing Havok would cost you another 50k probably. Unless said small bedroom was in a really big mansion, it'd be unlikely that its occuopant could afford the extremely large fixed costs associated with console development.
That's exactly it. The mod community is a hotbed of innovation. Games like Counterstrike or Natural Selection innovated in ways that large, for-profit teams are hesitant to try. Or look at Garage Games[garagegames.com] for an interesting approach to encouraging independent development of games. Or, if you're looking for straight-up bizzare games, check out like Mister Mosqito or Stretch Panic or some other wacky Japanese games that were brought over here as budget titles. You're gonna have to look hard, though, as most publishers are more interested in trend-chasing than innovation.
Bottom line, the large publishers in this business are *extremely* risk-averse - games cost a lot to develop, and the people funding them want to mitigate their risk. It's short-sighted, and keeping games from wide acceptance as an art form, but until the market shows a desire for something richer than the next GTA, it's the way things are.
Schools are, however, an excellent place to learn about broad, conceptual, theory-level issues... and that understanding is critical to being able to quickly adapt to different domains.
If you want to limit yourself to a quickly-outdated specific domain, or hire staff that won't easily grasp new technologies as they arrive, then that's your perogative. If you want adaptable, flexible staff, then a decent degree is a good idea.
Not neccesarily a grad degree though. If you're looking to move up in the IT world, and do strategic-level planning and design, then a grad degree would be helpful.
It's funny how, to the slashdot crowd, immortality is equivalent to any fantasy they'd care to have.
Though when i think about it, x/1 * t, t going from 0->infinity, and x 1 doesn't equal 1, does it? I've totally forgotten what special exception there is for this in statistics.
Of course, if *everyone* has saved up 1 million or whatever, and intends to live off it for the rest of their 200+ years of life, you run into an interesting conundrum - who does the work? If every class in our society ends up not contributing to the workforce for the majority of their lives, then it's likely (just from my intuition) that the system would collapse.
Of course, this assumes that life-extension would be available to everyone. In all likelihood, the treatments would be prohibitively expensive, creating a near-immortal, super-wealthy elite. I would imagine that at some point, the elite would realize, as the treatments became available to the common man, that it would be in their best interests to keep immortality from the working class.
Who's written about this? It sounds like a fairly apparent sci-fi premise.
What I find interesting is how the Metallica backlash affected the tactics the RIAA is adopting now. They saw that goading their artists to speak out against filesharing had a perceptibly negative impact on the artists image, so now there's no artists offically attached to the RIAA's actions. I guess their logic is that it'd be hard for people to boycott every label involved with the RIAA.
It's also pretty interesting that the RIAA has basically abandoned any attempts to sway the public to their point of view, instead approaching the problem using only intimidation. This seems like a strategy that could backfire in the long term.
I know I shouldn't expect the Slashdot community to try to take in the subtleties of these answers, but still, the parent disturbs me, inasmuch as it's indicative of the kind of blinders-on, hands-on-ears mentality that's really prevalent here (i'm new here, aren't I?) What did you expect, raging opposition to IP law as it stands? The DMCA is indicative of a disturbing trend towards crippled, rights-managed content, but the DoJ guy had an excellent point when he said that it was ultimately up to the market to decide whether that type of shit would fly, and I think if there's one thing consumers are good at, it's attempting to get their money's-worth ( arguments about the actual worth of major-label music notwithstanding ). I personally think the DoJ guys did an excellent job helping to decipher a law that most people don't really understand.
The point is, this law is subtle, and ultimately is a (imo) reasonable extension of existing copyright law to cover new means of distribution. I'm not saying it's great, and its implications scare me as far as the future of the established content industry, but honestly, the real shame is the barratry that the RIAA is engaging in. I don't think we can gut the DMCA just because it's being used in a heavy-handed fashion; it's got a real use, and that's protecting the person trying to make a living off of the software they wrote.
that's exactly the thing - no one ever said it was illegal to circumvent copyright protection, it's just illegal to traffic in devices whose main purpose is to do so. I wish I had mod points, because the fine points are the most important ones to grasp here, and make the difference between outlawing your right to do what you want with content or outlawing distribution of mechanisms the same.
This is the one thing for which I see a use for the DMCA. Encrypt this sort of evil, diabolical music, and sue the straight bejeezus out of anyone that tries to decrypt it for future generations to suffer to. It's a crime against humanity that Leonard Nimoy's "Highly Illogical" is now preserved for posterity - that's the sort of dangerous material that should be buried forever, only to be unearthed by supervillians.
Fancy restaurant starts you off cheap, with like a 4 dollar beer or 7 dollar mixed drink... but by the end of the night you're shelling out $200 for the dom perignon to maintain the drunken stupor!
Get the word out to the people! This is an injustice!
Of course, if the nation of Israel had never been created from land that belonged to Arabs that the Allies displaced post-WWII, then this whole mess wouldn't even be an issue now would it?
Regardless, if you're *trying to keep the peace*, you have to grin and bear it when people abuse you. Just cause IDF troops have rifles gives them no license to use them unless *deadly* force is being applied against them - deadly force being much more substantial than rocks. To do otherwise is simply barbarism.
"journalists, even ones that write for the most reputable publications, sometimes lie through their teeth."
If only you were an NYT reporter, then that statement would have some serious irony to it.
I think raped is an adequate way to describe defamation in a national newspaper. The reporter apparently violated thedeacon's trust on several counts, and to do it in a national newspaper is outright heinous.
Thedeacon has a point when he says that private figures are not subject to the scrutiny of public figures. If the cost of law weren't so prohibitive, he'd probably sue, and would be absolutely justified in doing so. This sort of scandalous reporting deserves some serious publicity.
and my roomate can never remember where he saves his documents. A feature that enabled him to search by author or by title in *reasonable* time would seriously help people who find sprawling directory trees intimidating.
Just curious, but is an engrosser someone you pass your essay to to make it more gripping? Like you give it to your editor, then your engrosser, or maybe the other way around?
Since I've never heard of them, they can't be too expensive, and I've been feeling that my writing could use a little more spice as of late...
Not to mention that the PS2 sucks balls for anything other than pushing triangles. X is so slow on the PS2 that I could, well, not use it.
That aside, if they stuck some mp2 player software in here, so I don't have to boot with a linux CD every time i want my ps2 to do stuff other than gaming, that'd be nice. Of course, this thing will be way too expensive for anyone to want.
Whoa, I missed the part where they said real-time NURBS. That's especially interesting since no consumer electronics (video cards, consoles, whatever) bothered with real-time NURBS. I'd be mighty surprised if sony put out a NURBS processor on their handheld, seeing as how it'd probably eat up power like nothing else. And the installed base of ps2's doesn't really matter since this is a new product, not a handheld that plays ps2 games.
An optical drive is a mistake, since you're just adding weight and reducing battery life, and I can't imagine that any high-res textures would really visible on a little LCD.
Sony's sort of on the right track by not making a GBA clone, but what the handhelds really need is wireless.
I doubt developers moved from DOS because of performance reasons, but then again, no one exactly misses having to manage drivers by hand to get games to run. The shift to windows came because it was increasingly inconvenient to run dos games in a windows environment, which was rapidly beoming the standard.
.NET introduces no incompatibilities with basic development - it's not like I *have* to switch or else my program won't run right. All .NET is for is making a common interface across multiple languages to Windows functionality. Since most games use very little windows functionality, other than starting up a rendering rendering environment, .NET means little to a game developer It means nothing to someone not developing for an MS platform i.e., PS2 or Gamecube. PC developers *could* use .NET, but games require such fanatical management of memory that garbage collection is out of the question. Programming high-performance games requires programming habits that garbage-collecting languages don't really encourage - you don't want stuff in memory if it doesn't need to be.
I can't think of anything more typcially slashdot than a karma whore bitching about slashdot being typcially slashdot.
You're absolutely right. A ps2 T10k costs thousands, plus thousands more for a seat license for the tools. Not to mention that sony (along with nintendo, and MS) are quite interested in controlling the content available for their system and won't let someone without real financial backing actually release a game for their system.
Consoles are stagnant - it's an unavoidable side-effect of the business model. But if you look at the PC, you get games like the Total War series, Syberia, or what have you. PC is the only platform where a low-volume strategy is really viable.
Your experiment works when dealing with the hippocampus (or could concievably work) because the hippocampus is simple and relatively well-understood. As far as complexity of the brain is concerned, replacing it is like replacing the pipe that spits experiences into long-term storage - like replacing the bus to your hard drive.
Bear in mind that replacing "progressively larger" parts of the brain is far from an easy task, and doesn't logically follow from replacing the hippocampus.
Keep in mind that this implant only passes signals on in a predefined way to other parts of the brain. From what I understand, the hippocampus isn't responsible for interpretation of the data, it just does some encoding and passes it on to our long-term storage.
I once heard that Mountain Dew has the closest chemical composition to urine of any soda.
Admittedly, that's not saying much, but it makes you wonder about Code Red...
ooh, that was bad.
I'll preface this with the statement that I don't know anymore concrete details of Sony's plan than the rest of you, but here's my insights, be they valuable or not:
"Grid" computing, at least in games, isn't so much of a distributed computing system, since the latency and bandwidth over the internet (or any network) wouldn't be sufficient to take care of any really critical game processing. As far as I can tell, it's more like a massive peer-to-peer multiplayer setup, as opposed to client-server: each ps2 takes some of the load of hosting the game, so that instead of being on the norrath4 server or whatever, you're on your ps2 plus the ones of those in your immediate area. You'd still need a significant overhead to run the entire system efficiently (a la napster's master servers) but the bulk of the workload would be taken on by the participants.
Picture the old Unreal links (a super-cool idea that wasn't really ready for primetime), or the server links in Neverwinter Nights, but a little more seamless.
Pretty smart way to run a MMORPG if you ask me.
Amen. The only reason, as far as I can guess, that the ps2 has such a monstrous lead on xbox and gamecube was the lead-time it had to market. Everyone I know prefers developing for gamecube and xbox, but no publishers are interested in those platforms.
Moreover, it just seems like Sony is making a bigass mistake all over again. Anyone remember the problems they had getting their last really complex chip design to fab? And the system shortages that resulted?