Have you actually tried running X on the ps2? It's ass-slow, because the ps2 is basically a graphics accelerator strapped to an auxiliary processor. Even with a version of XFree optimized for ps2, it'd still be subpar. Ultimately, game consoles are computers - just specialized ones. You could use a ps3 just fine, i'm sure, for web surfing, but that's like trying to word-process on your cell phone.
Christ, won't these people ever give it a rest? I believe I heard similar nonsene when the PlayStation came out, and again with the PS2, and other current-generation hardware. Someone is always ready to trumpet the retirement of PCs into a "niche market". What these people don't realize is that videogaming has *always* been a niche market, and is only recently becoming a mainstream form of entertainment. Sure, I know plenty of people who enjoy a good game of UT 2003, but I know even more people who just discovered that their PC was a viable gaming platform. I know even more people who just play playstation or other consoles.
An excellent example is to look at games that make it to both platforms. Summoner is a good example. As a PC game, it sold around 50,000 copies. As a PS2 game, it sold three times that. Consoles outselling PC games is nothing new, either. The PsOne has an installed base bigger than all three current consoles combined, and it shows when you look at what constitutes a 'hit' in the respective markets. A PC game selling 100k units is an unqualified success. A console game often has to sell two to three times that to be considered a major sucess or even a break-even. Console hits often sell in the millions of units. PC games that do that kind of business are insanely popular.
What you're really seeing is a lot of PC developers (like Epic with Unreal Championship) trying out console development in-house. And I wouldn't bet the farm that Epic is getting out of the PC development buisiness any time soon. Developing for PC is cheaper, often by hundreds of thousands of dollars, than developing for consoles.
I have to point out that USB isn't so hard to implement that it's not done... *someone* wrote the software for my wireless mouse (or specifically, someone at Microsoft wrote the DirectInput USB interface, and someone in the wild OpenSource ether wrote a USB driver for Linux).
The increasing complexity of computers requires increasing specialization, since one person is no longer able to manage an entire project that may balloon to 800k lines of code. This is unfortunate, but unavoidable, since the march of technology demands more complex applications, and more complex applications demand faster technology.
And finally, the word 'engineer' is as much of a catch-all as 'doctor'. I sure as heck wouldn't go to a podiatrist for cranial surgery, even if said podiatrist has some idea of what constitutes cranial surgery - a specialist is assumed to be better. Similarly, I may have a conception of the fundamentals of structural engineering, but you'd be better off hiring me to do software engineering - in fact, you'd be best off hiring me for my specific specialties within software engineering. It's not that I couldn't maintain your legacy FORTRAN database code, but there are people who could do it much faster and better than me. Specialization is a direct result of an increased population size.
Well, let's take that relatively Darwinian attitude and apply it to people. Biologically, your only purpose is to procreate. Yet, rape is by no means an acceptable form of spreading your genes, though it may be the most efficient. To carry it further, maximum effictiveness could be obtained (by males, at least) by extreme polygamy with the intent of fathering children. By the mores of our society, such behavior would be reprehensible. Ethically, it's unacceptable to father children with concern only for the survival of your bloodline.
Corporations have rights similar to people, so it's about time we held them accountable to ethical standards of behavior.
While I agree it's nice to see the development teams get some credit here, note that the only people mentioned in the article are the producers, and they seem to get the credit for 'doing' the game most of the time. Not one mention of the programmer who prototyped that wireframe engine in just a few days, or the artists responsible for the stellar terrain.
But, then again, it's hard to credit every member of a team, and it's a lot more sympathetic to associate a product with one or two quirky individuals rather than 20 or 30. Still, it's distressing to see the efforts of an entire team reduced to one person's efforts. Plight of the engineer, I suppose...
But by the time that we have machines that can perform perfect speech control/dictation, face recognition, etc, we'll have new sky-high benchmarks to shoot for. Take any exponential-time problem, and increase the dataset size. Or whatever.
I'd hesitate to put any upper limit on CPU speed where I could say "they're fast enough".
I don't think it's contempt that techies feel towards computers as learning aids... it's a realization that there's just not as much there as some might think.
The need to teach "computers" to kids from day one is a direct result of a subset of parents feeling inadequate with their job skills, and trying to vicariously compensate through their kids. They don't seem to get that all the familiarity anybody really ever needs with a computer comes from just having one in the environment.
I wonder if Mythic lost this suit (which I doubt), if they'd be liable for preventing fraud in the types of transactions BSI deals in.
If I were Mythic, I'd be pretty worried about players getting ripped off and then turning to me for compensation. That may be why they take such an aggressive stance on the issue now.
What could make a judge so hostile to clearly valid academic concerns? Pressure from DOJ or other big-buisiness government interests? The knowledge that her decision ultimately didn't mean squat since the decision would get appealed for decades?
But seriously, what judge could turn down an appeal here? The decision was obviously one-sided.
Are you kidding me? The good ones (No One Lives Forever, Grim Fandango, etc) all do horribly in terms of sales, while the total crap (deer hunter, who wants to be a millonare) continually top the bestseller list.
The I-glasses aren't used for much anymore (I think DOOM was a killer-app for them back in the day) because the resolution on those tiny little LCD's isn't anything close to high enough to play a decent game of UT. At least, that's my understanding.
Great. So when the redneck behind you plows into the back of your econobox, gets out, and knocks your head off with a shotgun in a fit of machine-unsuppressed road rage, you can have the satisfaction of knowing, "thanks to toyota, at least i did not succumb!"
Attempting to develop anything other than database query applications on Prolog is akin to trying to change your tire using only your tounge. Sure, you might think it's a neat challenge, but realize that trying to do anything other than databases results in nasty-looking spaghetti code as you just start making predicates for every state your system could be in...
Hey, if you want to follow the fast track to your degree and ignore all the opportunities to learn stuff you'd never touch otherwise, go ahead. You'll kick yourself later on in life when you realize that you'll learn all those pooty programming languages and API's and such in the first two weeks on the job, and all that time in school you spent on the straight and narrow has crippled your ability to think outside the box.
Any good employer hires you for your ability to learn and your ability to think independently, as well as the skills you currently posess.
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Have you actually tried running X on the ps2? It's ass-slow, because the ps2 is basically a graphics accelerator strapped to an auxiliary processor. Even with a version of XFree optimized for ps2, it'd still be subpar. Ultimately, game consoles are computers - just specialized ones. You could use a ps3 just fine, i'm sure, for web surfing, but that's like trying to word-process on your cell phone.
getting assaulted by free candy and caffinated drinks when ALL YOU WANTED was to GET A FUCKING DRINK OF WATER AND GET BACK TO WORK!
I'm surprised game developers live past 40.
They just want to come in last place this fiscal year so that their chances in the draft improve.
Well just imagine the poor Lego man who has to wipe his ass with it. He'd end up with a TP trail like 90% of the time!
Christ, won't these people ever give it a rest? I believe I heard similar nonsene when the PlayStation came out, and again with the PS2, and other current-generation hardware. Someone is always ready to trumpet the retirement of PCs into a "niche market". What these people don't realize is that videogaming has *always* been a niche market, and is only recently becoming a mainstream form of entertainment. Sure, I know plenty of people who enjoy a good game of UT 2003, but I know even more people who just discovered that their PC was a viable gaming platform. I know even more people who just play playstation or other consoles.
An excellent example is to look at games that make it to both platforms. Summoner is a good example. As a PC game, it sold around 50,000 copies. As a PS2 game, it sold three times that. Consoles outselling PC games is nothing new, either. The PsOne has an installed base bigger than all three current consoles combined, and it shows when you look at what constitutes a 'hit' in the respective markets. A PC game selling 100k units is an unqualified success. A console game often has to sell two to three times that to be considered a major sucess or even a break-even. Console hits often sell in the millions of units. PC games that do that kind of business are insanely popular.
What you're really seeing is a lot of PC developers (like Epic with Unreal Championship) trying out console development in-house. And I wouldn't bet the farm that Epic is getting out of the PC development buisiness any time soon. Developing for PC is cheaper, often by hundreds of thousands of dollars, than developing for consoles.
That's fine, until you realize that any sufficiently complicated Lisp program has an ad-hoc, bug-ridden implementation of Prolog.
It stops with Prolog, though, since any sufficiently complicated Prolog program fails to work at all.
I have to point out that USB isn't so hard to implement that it's not done... *someone* wrote the software for my wireless mouse (or specifically, someone at Microsoft wrote the DirectInput USB interface, and someone in the wild OpenSource ether wrote a USB driver for Linux).
The increasing complexity of computers requires increasing specialization, since one person is no longer able to manage an entire project that may balloon to 800k lines of code. This is unfortunate, but unavoidable, since the march of technology demands more complex applications, and more complex applications demand faster technology.
And finally, the word 'engineer' is as much of a catch-all as 'doctor'. I sure as heck wouldn't go to a podiatrist for cranial surgery, even if said podiatrist has some idea of what constitutes cranial surgery - a specialist is assumed to be better. Similarly, I may have a conception of the fundamentals of structural engineering, but you'd be better off hiring me to do software engineering - in fact, you'd be best off hiring me for my specific specialties within software engineering. It's not that I couldn't maintain your legacy FORTRAN database code, but there are people who could do it much faster and better than me. Specialization is a direct result of an increased population size.
Well, let's take that relatively Darwinian attitude and apply it to people. Biologically, your only purpose is to procreate. Yet, rape is by no means an acceptable form of spreading your genes, though it may be the most efficient. To carry it further, maximum effictiveness could be obtained (by males, at least) by extreme polygamy with the intent of fathering children. By the mores of our society, such behavior would be reprehensible. Ethically, it's unacceptable to father children with concern only for the survival of your bloodline.
Corporations have rights similar to people, so it's about time we held them accountable to ethical standards of behavior.
No, it's more like this:
"X's policies on online freedom are reprehensible, so run a big ad campaign against him and make sure he doesn't get reelected."
It's more about negative reinforcement for our congressmen then about prioritizing issues.
While I agree it's nice to see the development teams get some credit here, note that the only people mentioned in the article are the producers, and they seem to get the credit for 'doing' the game most of the time. Not one mention of the programmer who prototyped that wireframe engine in just a few days, or the artists responsible for the stellar terrain.
But, then again, it's hard to credit every member of a team, and it's a lot more sympathetic to associate a product with one or two quirky individuals rather than 20 or 30. Still, it's distressing to see the efforts of an entire team reduced to one person's efforts. Plight of the engineer, I suppose...
But by the time that we have machines that can perform perfect speech control/dictation, face recognition, etc, we'll have new sky-high benchmarks to shoot for. Take any exponential-time problem, and increase the dataset size. Or whatever.
I'd hesitate to put any upper limit on CPU speed where I could say "they're fast enough".
First with conventional weaponry, then with bombs and missiles.
I don't think it's contempt that techies feel towards computers as learning aids... it's a realization that there's just not as much there as some might think.
The need to teach "computers" to kids from day one is a direct result of a subset of parents feeling inadequate with their job skills, and trying to vicariously compensate through their kids. They don't seem to get that all the familiarity anybody really ever needs with a computer comes from just having one in the environment.
I wonder if Mythic lost this suit (which I doubt), if they'd be liable for preventing fraud in the types of transactions BSI deals in.
If I were Mythic, I'd be pretty worried about players getting ripped off and then turning to me for compensation. That may be why they take such an aggressive stance on the issue now.
What was going through that judges head when she dismissed your case in 25 minutes? What was the scene in the courtroom?
On the flip side, do you think this makes your case for appeal stronger?
What could make a judge so hostile to clearly valid academic concerns? Pressure from DOJ or other big-buisiness government interests? The knowledge that her decision ultimately didn't mean squat since the decision would get appealed for decades?
But seriously, what judge could turn down an appeal here? The decision was obviously one-sided.
Are you kidding me? The good ones (No One Lives Forever, Grim Fandango, etc) all do horribly in terms of sales, while the total crap (deer hunter, who wants to be a millonare) continually top the bestseller list.
Of course they're art.
"or, if you want a dirt cheap Cave setup, simply get 3 PCs, two LCD projectors, and an empty white corner"
Come on, man! What kind of UT fanatic has these kind of resources? I mean, a blank corner?
My low budget suggestion? Take your laptop to a real cave, play UT, and have your buddy throw a rock at your head every time you get fragged.
The I-glasses aren't used for much anymore (I think DOOM was a killer-app for them back in the day) because the resolution on those tiny little LCD's isn't anything close to high enough to play a decent game of UT. At least, that's my understanding.
You've got to wonder how fast 10,000 PCs combined in one second really is. I mean, they're not really designed to withstand high-speed impact.
Great. So when the redneck behind you plows into the back of your econobox, gets out, and knocks your head off with a shotgun in a fit of machine-unsuppressed road rage, you can have the satisfaction of knowing,
"thanks to toyota, at least i did not succumb!"
Attempting to develop anything other than database query applications on Prolog is akin to trying to change your tire using only your tounge. Sure, you might think it's a neat challenge, but realize that trying to do anything other than databases results in nasty-looking spaghetti code as you just start making predicates for every state your system could be in...
that's funny, I get lots of messages in ALL CAPS that I can't seem to recall. But I do know the gist was something like:
HOT HOT HOT TEEN SLUTS WAITING FOR YOU
And as history has proven, those types of ventures are financially brilliant and successful in every degree.
Someone call credit suisse!
Hey, if you want to follow the fast track to your degree and ignore all the opportunities to learn stuff you'd never touch otherwise, go ahead. You'll kick yourself later on in life when you realize that you'll learn all those pooty programming languages and API's and such in the first two weeks on the job, and all that time in school you spent on the straight and narrow has crippled your ability to think outside the box.
Any good employer hires you for your ability to learn and your ability to think independently, as well as the skills you currently posess.