Check out the games - arcade classics and games developed on the Torque engine for $10.
Admittedly you need to be on X-Box live to get this, but nonetheless MS are using their online service to enter the low priced market.
It's inevitable. Paying full price for a AAA that has graphics better than anything you've seen before is kinda worth it, but most games are merely slight improvements over previous incarnations. The back catalogue will catch up with the games market. And as graphics improvements become less noticable, as is looking to be the case when comparing the next generation of consoles with the previous generation, it will become increasingly difficult to sell games that are 3-4 times the price of games that are almost the same.
It's really surprising and impressive that drupal has so many projects in the list. Kudos to the folks who are working on it, they obviously have their stuff together.
VR was a convenient name to legitimize the study of interactive computer graphics at Universities a good name. It's like AI is the name given to studying functional programming, logical languages and algorithms for figuring out 'knowledge'.
In the 1990s it was suggested that interactive computer graphics coupled with new displays could provide useful methods for training, improving and testing skills and for visualization. However, people vastly under-estimated the cost in producing useful training applications. Try creating a training application for being a mechanic that uses a cyber glove or whatever. It would require millions of dollars and produce something that was probably inferior to giving them a go on the real thing. It has had some successes, particularly in the medical area, where the real training that doctors perform is on their live patients.
The main use for real time computer graphics is in entertainment. At SIGGRAPH 2000 at some panel it was suggested that the computer graphics industry is split 80 20 between entertainment and business applications. With the growth of the games industry it is probably more like 90 10 today. The thing is that entertainment hardly funds academic research. Today, computer graphics is being improved by ATI, NVidia, Sony and Microsoft but almost entirely for the purposes of creating entertainment. This leaves academic research in the weird position of being behind industry.
We don't and probably won't ever, have VR or AI, but we will find applications that use technologies developed whilst studying these fields.
Why do people get so excited about this? A dial up net connection is fine for most people. You can still surf the net, do your banking and get email pretty much fine.
How much of net use is used for downloading entertainment and playing games?
Having a net connection is really important, but having much cheaper dial-up as opposed to broadband may not be that much of a gain.
This stat seems to get thrown up by people who are either in the broadband business and want concessions from government or are in the business of saying 'America is going downhill fast'.
True, you don't need meetup to have a group, however
meetup.com provided was a central place where you could find all those groups. If you check your local city you'll find heaps of groups that are surprising.
The pity about this is that while some groups may not mind the fees there are many little groups that are tried and another hurdle has been placed in their way.
It's a pity that they can't organise some kind of cheaper system. Really, meetup doesn't provide that much.
You have to wonder how long it will be before the Yahoo, Google or even craigslist step up to fill the void.
Umm. So does this mean right wingers can't do maths?
Secondly, the claim that a magazine that opposes the death penalty and supports gay marriage is right-wing rag (which presumably you meant in US terms, is kinda amusing.
The Economist, correctly stated, is a liberal magazine. It supports liberal economics and liberal social policy. Unfortunately the word 'liberal' in the US has been badly distorted.
When will the producers of shows like BattleStar Galactica and Dr Who realize that the internet has already made an alternative distribution network possible for niche content. All that is required is for them to work out a revenue system.
The explosion of BT has shown that the net now has enough bandwidth to distribute TV shows.
Surely a custom, encrypted and DRM'd player and torrent style client would now work for downloading TV shows. I'd pay a buck or two for each episode of BattleStar Galactica if I could download reasonably quickly and without hassle.
Film reviews have the same problems and the same methods can be used to get useful information.
Sites like game rankings give you the review numbers from a number of sites. Given that you get a fairly good idea of where a game sits. For films movies does the same for films. Given that and active reviewers on the site gives you a fair idea of what is good.
Knowing your reviewers is the other way to get good information. If you regularly read a particular reviewer you'll get a good idea about what they like and what they don't like. This is easier with films than games, but still possible.
Reviews are definitely subjective, but are still a useful way to make your money and time go further and if a bit of thought is used are well worth looking at.
Let us blow them up into teeny weeny little pieces with our huge gonads (gun of nasty destroying spray) and stomp them into little pieces so that we can save the supporting character with huge, errr, tracts of land and listen to the rousing musical score.
Ah, stereotypes, schmereotypes. They have their uses, who doesn't stereotype people at least a little. Let's not get excited and not over do these things and keep to the really important stuff - finding new and exciting ways to blow stuff up.
That's exactly right. The amount of fanboy jumping up and down about Halo 2 is bizaare. Get someone who hasn't been fed all the hype about Doom 3 and Halo 2 and get them to play those two games and Far Cry and Far Cry would sweep the floor. Doom 3, is the same level, a thousand times! Halo 2, yesterdays pixel shaders and the problem of FPS's on consoles.
But who cares? The Hype machine, including rabid fanboy posting on slashdot makes Doom 3 and Halo 2 sell, sell, sell while a new title without the amazing marketing clout of Doom 3 or Halo 2 almost disappears.
One factor that slows Thunderbirds success is that so many people are locked in to Outlook as there isn't cross platform alternative.
Thunderbird also doesn't yet have the calendering and shared contacts lists and all the other stuff that Outlook has.
This is coming in related projects, but right now would it be wise to tell Joe the sales rep that he should dump Outlook and lose his shared calendar and contacts for Thunderbird whereas getting him to use a better, faster, safer browser in Firefox is a no brainer.
There is a push to get games recognized as art. Perhaps people should compare the working hours and the rewards of other arts like music, novel writing and the film industry.
All these industries have a common compensation scheme. Many, many people work very hard for very little money, a small fraction make a great deal of money. Read this for how writers make out. If you look there are countless other examples of this.
It is partly due to the nature of entertainment. Our tastes are fickle. Some Hollywood producer famously said Nobody knows anything about what films will be successful. (Check out William Goldman's book Adventures in the Screen trade for the quote). Who can really predict which one of the hundreds of projects starting this year will produce a great new game? Sure, EA can buy huge franchises and make a reasonable amount of money, but even there games like Pro Evolution Soccer threaten their name based primacy.
With music, in almost every town there are bands that are 90% as good as REM, U2 or whatever band you like. And they make very little money and work pretty hard and tend to be pretty smart.
Entertainment is not now, nor has it ever been stable. That said, working people huge hours tends not to produce inspired work. But making anything great, or even good, involves a lot of time and the economics of entertainment isn't likely to change either.
EA isn't efficient, but they are very effective. Have you ever talked to people who've worked in the big EA shops that produce Madden, Fifa, NASCAR etc that make the bucks for them? Ask them about efficiency.
They use the cash generated this way to buy up smaller firms which to produce creative new stuff, and then put 'managers' in to, umm, assist them which usually winds up in EA selling off all their physical assets. Origin anyone?
But hey, EA makes a profit.
A mate of mine works in a firm that works exactly the way you describe and they make great money. You may be right, it is quite possibly the way of the future.
Slashdot Mirror
The same sort of daft point could be made about actors, a few are very, very successful, some get by and the rest are waiters.
There are no upfront costs involved.
Also, I'd like to point out that I have no affiliation with lulu, I just was looking around for a site that did what they do.
Check out the games - arcade classics and games developed on the Torque engine for $10.
Admittedly you need to be on X-Box live to get this, but nonetheless MS are using their online service to enter the low priced market.
It's inevitable. Paying full price for a AAA that has graphics better than anything you've seen before is kinda worth it, but most games are merely slight improvements over previous incarnations. The back catalogue will catch up with the games market. And as graphics improvements become less noticable, as is looking to be the case when comparing the next generation of consoles with the previous generation, it will become increasingly difficult to sell games that are 3-4 times the price of games that are almost the same.
In much of the third world unemployment is massive, in Iraq, it is currently estimated to be around 40%.
It may be that we have simply been living in a historical blip of employment.
It's really surprising and impressive that drupal has so many projects in the list. Kudos to the folks who are working on it, they obviously have their stuff together.
Not ground breakingly innovative, but other than Smalltalk and perhaps the first compiler, function language and precious little else really is.
Yes, the bits had been around, but the way they glued them all together was innovative.
They are all GPLd.
metafilter charges $5 to join and people and links get booted occasionally. Again, it works. Contrast this to the decline of Kuro5hin.
In the 1990s it was suggested that interactive computer graphics coupled with new displays could provide useful methods for training, improving and testing skills and for visualization. However, people vastly under-estimated the cost in producing useful training applications. Try creating a training application for being a mechanic that uses a cyber glove or whatever. It would require millions of dollars and produce something that was probably inferior to giving them a go on the real thing. It has had some successes, particularly in the medical area, where the real training that doctors perform is on their live patients.
The main use for real time computer graphics is in entertainment. At SIGGRAPH 2000 at some panel it was suggested that the computer graphics industry is split 80 20 between entertainment and business applications. With the growth of the games industry it is probably more like 90 10 today. The thing is that entertainment hardly funds academic research. Today, computer graphics is being improved by ATI, NVidia, Sony and Microsoft but almost entirely for the purposes of creating entertainment. This leaves academic research in the weird position of being behind industry.
We don't and probably won't ever, have VR or AI, but we will find applications that use technologies developed whilst studying these fields.
How much of net use is used for downloading entertainment and playing games?
Having a net connection is really important, but having much cheaper dial-up as opposed to broadband may not be that much of a gain.
This stat seems to get thrown up by people who are either in the broadband business and want concessions from government or are in the business of saying 'America is going downhill fast'.
It isn't international, which meetup was but does seem to provide much of the same stuff.
The pity about this is that while some groups may not mind the fees there are many little groups that are tried and another hurdle has been placed in their way.
It's a pity that they can't organise some kind of cheaper system. Really, meetup doesn't provide that much.
You have to wonder how long it will be before the Yahoo, Google or even craigslist step up to fill the void.
Secondly, the claim that a magazine that opposes the death penalty and supports gay marriage is right-wing rag (which presumably you meant in US terms, is kinda amusing.
The Economist, correctly stated, is a liberal magazine. It supports liberal economics and liberal social policy. Unfortunately the word 'liberal' in the US has been badly distorted.
The explosion of BT has shown that the net now has enough bandwidth to distribute TV shows.
Surely a custom, encrypted and DRM'd player and torrent style client would now work for downloading TV shows. I'd pay a buck or two for each episode of BattleStar Galactica if I could download reasonably quickly and without hassle.
Sites like game rankings give you the review numbers from a number of sites. Given that you get a fairly good idea of where a game sits. For films movies does the same for films. Given that and active reviewers on the site gives you a fair idea of what is good.
Knowing your reviewers is the other way to get good information. If you regularly read a particular reviewer you'll get a good idea about what they like and what they don't like. This is easier with films than games, but still possible.
Reviews are definitely subjective, but are still a useful way to make your money and time go further and if a bit of thought is used are well worth looking at.
Let us blow them up into teeny weeny little pieces with our huge gonads (gun of nasty destroying spray) and stomp them into little pieces so that we can save the supporting character with huge, errr, tracts of land and listen to the rousing musical score.
Ah, stereotypes, schmereotypes. They have their uses, who doesn't stereotype people at least a little. Let's not get excited and not over do these things and keep to the really important stuff - finding new and exciting ways to blow stuff up.
But who cares? The Hype machine, including rabid fanboy posting on slashdot makes Doom 3 and Halo 2 sell, sell, sell while a new title without the amazing marketing clout of Doom 3 or Halo 2 almost disappears.
The Compiere have a page all about how they'll port the product if paid to do so.
So why aren't we still using IBM products if no one ever got fired for buying them?
Thunderbird also doesn't yet have the calendering and shared contacts lists and all the other stuff that Outlook has.
This is coming in related projects, but right now would it be wise to tell Joe the sales rep that he should dump Outlook and lose his shared calendar and contacts for Thunderbird whereas getting him to use a better, faster, safer browser in Firefox is a no brainer.
All these industries have a common compensation scheme. Many, many people work very hard for very little money, a small fraction make a great deal of money. Read this for how writers make out. If you look there are countless other examples of this.
It is partly due to the nature of entertainment. Our tastes are fickle. Some Hollywood producer famously said Nobody knows anything about what films will be successful. (Check out William Goldman's book Adventures in the Screen trade for the quote). Who can really predict which one of the hundreds of projects starting this year will produce a great new game? Sure, EA can buy huge franchises and make a reasonable amount of money, but even there games like Pro Evolution Soccer threaten their name based primacy.
With music, in almost every town there are bands that are 90% as good as REM, U2 or whatever band you like. And they make very little money and work pretty hard and tend to be pretty smart.
Entertainment is not now, nor has it ever been stable. That said, working people huge hours tends not to produce inspired work. But making anything great, or even good, involves a lot of time and the economics of entertainment isn't likely to change either.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of dupe comments!
EA isn't efficient, but they are very effective. Have you ever talked to people who've worked in the big EA shops that produce Madden, Fifa, NASCAR etc that make the bucks for them? Ask them about efficiency.
They use the cash generated this way to buy up smaller firms which to produce creative new stuff, and then put 'managers' in to, umm, assist them which usually winds up in EA selling off all their physical assets. Origin anyone?
But hey, EA makes a profit.
A mate of mine works in a firm that works exactly the way you describe and they make great money. You may be right, it is quite possibly the way of the future.
That is so fscking cool. Just had to say so.
Mod the parent up. Seriously.