The Gamecube was specifically designed to do one thing very well: play games. (Whether or not you feel it has games worth playing is moot.)
The Revolution, similarly, is meant to play games and do very little else. Nintendo has said several times that they want to make GAME consoles, because people already have all that other stuff, and they can remain more focused this way.
There's nothing terrible about Sony's approach, but it MAY confuse some people. It certainly seems to be lifting the price.
Maybe you should have read the text of the story. There's a diluted version that sells in 7-11 stores that is basically pre-mixed. It only includes 2 recommended doses. If he had chugged the concentrated version, he would have died.
Reading comprehension for the win. Try it sometime.
Here's one that you should maybe stay away from
on
An Energy Drinks Roundup?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Quite Possibly the Most Powerful Energy Drink Ever October 7th, 2005 3:34 pm
Seriously, the drink may mean the end of this blog. In the before time, conversations generally went a little something like this:
So, whats a good energy drink in terms of strength?
Well theres a lot to choose from, based on caffeine content, taurine, ginseng, green tea extracts
Well what if Im just interested in caffeine content?
Well just go to The Caffeine Database and look around!
The point, probably lost, is that theres a lot of drinks, in varying sizes and caffeine contents, that also contain a lot of other things.
So then this new thing came out. Its called VPX Redline Fat Burner. Amazon is lacking a little information, so heres a little more:
Check out this freaky scientific VPX breakthrough: RED LINE®: is the only matrix ever developed to shred fat through the shivering response in the body. By shivering the body burns huge amounts of stored bodyfat for energy in an effort to keep the body warm. Thats not all! In addition to shivering, youll also be sweating up a thermogenic storm. The combined mechanisms of these two processes results in unparalleled fat loss!
What fun. Now, its pretty obvious looking at the ingredients that theres caffeine. But get this: all of the aforementioned goodness, and the serving size is FOUR ml. About one TENTH of an ounce. The whole bottle has 240 ml, or 60 servings. Basically, a bottle of this, less than the size of a normal can of coke, WILL kill you. This is nothing to be playing around with.
I have friends. Not just normal friends, mind you. The kind of friends that voluntarily live on the streets. The kind of friends who, when drinking, race to forgetting. The kind of friends who take caffeine pills, ephedrine pills, and asprin.. all at once. One, in particular, drinks and consumes over a gram of caffeine daily, to stave off the headaches. So you know this is a serious review:
oh yeah, its definately 90% caffeine. the aftertaste is unmistakeable. the best part is that since i didnt have my normal dose this morning, i probably wont actually feel sh*t.
[10 minutes later]
the caffeine kicked in a lot faster than i expected. though in retrospect, it normally does when its in syrup form and tastes like ass.
feel oddly cold too. took me a minute to realize that while i still was warm, it was that shiver reflex kicking in. its a lot like when you get a chill at the back of your neck, but somewhat continuous.
So whats in this magical bottle of awesome? Caffeine, Green Tea, Yerba Mate, 5-HTP (5 hydroxy-1-tryptophan), cAMP, Yohimbe, Evodiamine, and Vinpocetine. And a few other things.
I know, I know, so heres some more info:
cAMP is cyclic adenosine monophosphate. It supposedly sparks many intercellular processes. Whatever that means. Increased concentrations supposedly raise thyroid horomone levels, and help fat burning (would help explain why its in a fat-burning supplement).
Yohimbe is a bark extract from a tree in Africa. Its considered a natural aphrodisiac, and sold here to treat imotency, dialate pupils, and stimulate fat loss. It can also mess with your blood pressure, so watch out.
Evodiamine is derived from some Chinese fruit called Evodia Rutaecarpa. Supposedly burns fat.
Vinpocetine is an alkaloid derived from some periwinkle plant. It is used in Europe, Japan, and Mexico to treat crebrovascular and cognitive disorders. Some people claims it elevates metabolism, but with no proof.
And the interesting one in the group: 5-HTP. I made sure to spell it out, so the smart ones in the group have already figured out the key: Tryptophan. It
Okay, I easily stand corrected on the team size - I didn't bother to check.
Still, the team size has tripled for a cutting edge FPS since Doom's time. Is there any reason to believe that it hasn't increased similarily for other game types?
I hear that EA has teams in the 200-300 person range these days.
I don't disagree with a single thing that you said. At the moment though, it seems that companies may be caught up in their own hype, trying to push the most polys and biggest textures. I would suggest that the XBox 360 and PS3 are a direct result.
I'm a Nintendo fan, myself. Great gameplay and story always trump cutting edge graphics in my book. It's why I'm glad I work where I do.
In theory, all development costs including marketing should be generating increased sales. If spending extra money on a physics system doesn't generate increased sales, you probably shouldn't be spending it, right?:)
However, because these companies are out to make money, they're trying to reduce their risk when producing a game, so in-game advertising would certainly reduce any risks associated, while still allowing them to go balls-out on features and marketing.
In that case, our argument is merely a disagreement in scale. The parent post to mine was trying to say (in my mind) that production costs haven't gone up over time, so there's OBVIOUSLY no reason to ever need to find additional income streams when making a game. Our games don't have ads in them, but that doesn't mean that they don't cost more to make than ever before. To say that just because nobody needed ads in games in times past means that nobody should need them at all now is a very short view of the industry.
A great deal has to do with the genre of game that you're making of course. I'd wager that at BioWare we have more designers and writers than they have at either Id or Valve. Conversely, they're much more likely to have programmers that are concerned with graphics or game engine work. Our games may not look as graphically spectacular (Valve and Id being cutting edge shops that also make games as a sort of advertisement so people will license their engine), but our gameplay is generally considered deeper and more involved.
To an extent, I can also agree with the parent posters. Games MAY take more money to make than they should. However, even pointing out that Doom 3 took 30 people (or thereabouts) proves my point. How many people wrote Doom? It was a LOT LESS THAN 30. It was basically a two person job, which means that even for a game like Doom 3, the team size has gone up an entire order of magnitude.
We're probably not even counting office staff into this - the people that answer the phones, handle payroll and handle legal matters and whatnot. Even if they're not directly involved in the production of the game, they have to be paid, too.
I don't know if in-game ads are necessary. All I'm trying to say is that making a game today isn't as cheap as it used to be, which is the point that the GP was trying to make. "If we didn't need them before, why would we need them now," is a very naive view of the industry. Things change and get more expensive. Programmers are worth more now, if nothing else.
Yes, I agree, but Doom 3 was the first one where people noticed and COMPLAINED.:)
It's getting harder to do it and get away with it. Even individual aliens have to be different. One of the big complaints about KotOR, if I recall correctly, was that there weren't enough different looking heads on the NPCs.
As games start to look better, people will nitpick the games about details like that a lot more.
Considering where I work, I think you'd be wrong. I do agree that a lot of money goes into marketing, voice, licensing and CEO salaries. However, it's simply untrue to claim that the time it takes to generate content hasn't greatly increased. People want to see accurate facial animation now, with deforming skin and expressive eyes. Someone has to do all the work to put in visual effects, decide where they go, and what it takes to make an environment properly immersive. In-game characters can't look all the same either, or people complain. Compare that to the original Doom where all the enemies of the same type had exactly the same model. That just doesn't fly as easily anymore.
People expect more out of their games than they used to. Gameplay, writing and design are all expensive to prototype and develop for triple-A titles. Games go through several iterations where they may only have gone through one or two 10 or 12 years ago.
All I'm saying is that comparing development costs for games of today to games of decades past is silly and unreasonable. It used to cost very little to film movies, too, and now blockbuster movies have budgets in the tens or hundreds of millions.
What's changed is that games aren't as easy to make as they used to be. Content is harder to create. Instead of having 2-10 person teams working on a game, a single game can take literally a hundred people several years to make.
In some cases, you're probably right that the team sizes could be a little smaller. However, things like photorealistic environments, physics, writing, and design are all complicated to produce. The more detailed the environments get, the more work artists have to do to make the game look up to snuff. The amount of time it takes has not scaled linearly with technology. Newer graphics engines are fairly big projects, and reasonable physics simulations aren't the sort of thing that you can crack off in a day.
On top of that you've got giant marketing budgets so that games can try and outsell each other before a copy is even pressed, and the realities of dealing with a global market.
There are lots of good games still made by small teams. However, most of the games that people want are definitely not small games with small budgets. Maybe that's something that's wrong with the industry. I don't know.
I live in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. We have a place in town called 'refinery row'. A considerable amount of the crude oil that's dug out of the tar sands only a few hundred kilometres north comes through those refineries. At the height of gas prices, we were still seeing gas around $1/litre, which is $4CDN/gallon (roughly) -about $3.35US/gallon. Living in a refinery town proximal to the source of crude oil doesn't seem to diminish our prices much, though I heard that prices got up over $1.50/L in some places in Canada.
There have been rumblings that they were going to take the NSX hybrid because of the great torque curve of electric engines. Nothing's quite materialized yet, but I suspect that you'll see something like that sooner than you think.
Besides, I think the Civic hybrid looks pretty hot for a sedan.
It is NOT legal because you've paid for it through levies. It's legal because IT'S LEGAL.
Those levies are a red herring. It would be legal even without the levies. It has been for years. Don't bring those into this. They're just a money grab.
Don't use the levies as an excuse, either. Not only have they stopped collecting levies on things like iPods, but paying for things beforehand like this aren't an excuse for bad behaviour. If you buy bullets with a levy on them to compensate families of shootings, you aren't allowed to go out and shoot people.
The only thing that you have to say when talking about downloading files in Canada is that it's legal. End of story. Any other justifications just weaken your position.
There is evidence to back evolution. You can look at the fossil record in many different places, and find out a little bit more about how evolution might occur. You can propose a hypothesis like, "I think that if some birds get moved from this island to that island, these morphologies will change, and speciation will be observed." The test is to go find a place where such a change did or did not occur. The test isn't simple; you have to trace back quite far in the fossil record to find what you're looking for. In many ways, you have to be lucky. The fossil evidence will either support or reduce your hypothesis.
Evolution has found many cases where a hypothesis can be made and the fossil record provides the evidence. The theory is incomplete, but it is by far the best one that we have.
ID can't be tested. It can't. What's the test for 'design'? We'd have to find the designer. We have no evidence for a designer, but we have no proof that one doesn't exist. Because I can't prove a negative (ie. there is no designer) logically speaking, I can never falsify this claim.
ID works on lack of evidence. How does something like the wing evolve? If you don't know, just say that it's evidence of design. They said the same thing about the eye you know (that is, it must have been designed because it's very complex, and a proto-eye would be useless), but now there's very good evidence for how the eye evolved, and creatures that have the proto-eye that was claimed to be useless. At best, ID can be used as a stopgap, but it's a stupid one since it would exist only so that we could come up with something to replace it later.
It's true that you can believe in whatever deity you want in ID, but most ID proponents are pushing for one specific creator, which is to say the Christian God.
I'm not saying Evolution is the complete answer, or necessarily the answer at all. But it is the BEST answer that we have, and it has evidence to back it up. The only evidence for ID is that we don't understand some things, which is pretty weak.
I read a good analogy a couple weeks ago (from Salon.com letters to the editor):
Just think of the "irreducible complexity" found in an archway. Remove one stone, and the whole thing collapses. You cannot build an archway with the stones alone. You need a scaffold until you place the keystone, which you will later remove. However, if you used irreducible complexity in the way that I.D. people use it, they would look at an archway and say, "Hmm, I guess God made that."
I submit that Darwinist proponents make it to step 3 all the time. There are at least a couple of camps that argue over things like wings seeming to spontaneously generate in the fossil record. Look up 'punctuated equilibrium' sometime. Actually, I'll do it for you: Wikipedia to the rescue.
In any case, no proper scientist pretends that evolution is a solved problem. We know that it's not, and there are good people working to find out more. However, if you adopt the theory of Intelligent Design, we may as well give up now. We don't understand what's going on, so God (or something) must have done it. When there's an out like that, who needs to study anything?
ID isn't a theory. You can't test it and you can't falsify it (there's no falsifying case - a matter of faith can't be contested). ID belongs in Church, not in science class. It's telling that they had to REDEFINE the word 'science' to make this whole thing fly. If it were actually science, they wouldn't have done anything.
Interestingly, science was borne of religion as a way to explain the things that didn't fit with religious teachings. It's the search for how things work and happen. Religion has ever purported itself to be the 'why', but I guess some people got bored of that.
It's worth noting that Gregor Mendel was a monk, obviously religious, and now is someone so important to our knowledge of basic genetics that we all learn about him in high school. Scholars of all kinds have come out of Churches and religions, so it's depressing how big a step back we're starting to take. If Mendel had been an IDer, he would have given up the moment he saw two different breeds of peas and declared the whole situation unknowable.
I've started to notice a different breed of religious person that I like to call the rational religious. I'm sure they've existed throughout the ages, but they seem to be scarce. Thankfully, they're becoming more populous. Of course, these are the people that understand not only science, but their faith and themselves. More and more, I've seen that people that don't understand science don't understand their church or themselves either.
That it's possible to work around the problem doesn't mean that the problem is invalid.
Yes, you can come up with a way that you can organize data and tables so that this problem is easier to solve, but there's certainly a way that the data and the language can be made so that you don't have to fiddle with that sort of crap.
And that said, someone may have an instance where, for whatever reason, the data absolutely should be laid out in a table that large. They shouldn't be punished for using the system in that manner if the system itself doesn't restrict them from doing something like that.
Languages and databases are our TOOLS. If we have to work around their deficiencies that much, they're pretty lousy tools.
...what makes a flu deadly? Obviously, most of us have been exposed to 'ordinary' influenza, and manage to come out with little more than a week or two of being miserable. I know these things are generally hard on the very young and the very old, but the humans that died of this Avian Flu were largely middle aged, right? Weren't some of them even in the hospital when they died? How does a flu cause that much trouble?
NO. Downloading music and movies is legal because it is legal. The tariff is there as something extra, but it has never impacted the legality of downloading musing and movies. The tariff is a transparent money-grab by the recording industry, and the government has recently recognized it as such, which is why if you bought an iPod in 2003-2004, you can apply to get the levy back.
Leave the levy out of this. Levies never give you the right to do anything - it would not be legal to shoot people if there were a levy on bullets trying to compensate victims' families. The levy is there because the industry is greedy and antiquated.
Hah. Not only that, but I'd put everyone on starvation rations and kill them off until I was the only one left! Then I'd gorge myself on my vast stores of buffalo.
And I'm tired of people that think that because they don't know what's best for other people that nobody should ever decide anything for them.
Do you argue with the car companies for putting the gas pedal on the right and the clutch on the left? Do you argue strenuously that you should be able to put the steering wheel on the ceiling because it fits your sense of aesthetics better? You really do believe that by mounting all the mirrors on the dash, you have what you claim is a better view of what's behind you?
No, you don't. You don't because that's asinine. The car companies pick where things go, an you get to chose the paint job. Don't like it? Too bad. Because someone made these decisions for you a long time ago, you also can get into basically any car and know how to get it moving, assuming that it isn't busted.
You should be allowed to pick the colour of your text and the picture in your background, but most of your choices should end there. Users DON'T know what's best for them most of the time, despite their strenuous accusations that they feel more productive when their windows are arranged in a star pattern that resembles a birthmark on their left buttock.
If you give someone a well designed and well thought out interface, studies have shown that people will be objectively (that is, measurably) more productive, even if they feel subjectively (that is, emotionally) more productive.
The reason why you NEED preferences (and yes, right now I think it's probably the case that you DO need them) is because the interface on your computer sucks. It's terrible. Almost everything is designed to slow you down. Keyboards and mice are designed to only give you the most basic control of your machine, with everything else implemented in software. Why do you think the scroll wheel was adopted so quickly? Grabbing the scroll bar or clicking on the little arrows sucks - it's a stupid way to scroll up and down unless you're trying to do it to get around quickly in a long document.
My view on preferences is this: if you can change it to something better, why isn't it always better? If one way is better for one person, and another way is better for another person, I'm not convinced that except for trivial matters, there isn't a third way that's better for all people that doesn't need a preference set.
This guy's article fails in that these aren't reasons why HCI is in the dark age, they're the results of us being in the dark age.
Like I mentioned in another thread, I use the system to indicate my preferred frequency of play for the song. One star means that it's just around so that I'm not missing parts of an album, and 5 means that I love the song so much I can listen to it continuously for hours on end. If you only use part of the rating system, it just means that you're missing out on some granularity. The 0-5 star system doesn't mean anything except what you decide to make it mean.
If you own the music, you already know that you like it. Just rate the music so you know HOW MUCH you like it.
I use the stars to indicate how often things should be played.
* - Never play. It's only in the list for the sake of completeness (I hate having partial albums)
** - Play very rarely. If I'm in the mood, I might listen to it.
*** - I'll listen to it at least once a week. If it comes up randomly on the shuffle, I won't take it out of the list.
**** - I can listen to this several times in a day.
***** - I'll listen to this song anytime, anywhere. If it comes up twice in a row, no problem. If my playlist only has this song on it, I can cope with that for at least a few hours.
This means that I have to periodically re-rate the songs. That seems only reasonable, though. Why would songs stay at the same rating forever? As the novelty wears off, I can relegate a song to 4 or 3 stars.
I also keep extensive smart playlists that make sure that songs that are 3 stars or less only get played once every few days.
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The Gamecube was specifically designed to do one thing very well: play games. (Whether or not you feel it has games worth playing is moot.)
The Revolution, similarly, is meant to play games and do very little else. Nintendo has said several times that they want to make GAME consoles, because people already have all that other stuff, and they can remain more focused this way.
There's nothing terrible about Sony's approach, but it MAY confuse some people. It certainly seems to be lifting the price.
Maybe you should have read the text of the story. There's a diluted version that sells in 7-11 stores that is basically pre-mixed. It only includes 2 recommended doses. If he had chugged the concentrated version, he would have died.
Reading comprehension for the win. Try it sometime.
Here's the text of the review of Redline, though.
Quite Possibly the Most Powerful Energy Drink Ever
October 7th, 2005 3:34 pm
Seriously, the drink may mean the end of this blog. In the before time, conversations generally went a little something like this:
So, whats a good energy drink in terms of strength?
Well theres a lot to choose from, based on caffeine content, taurine, ginseng, green tea extracts
Well what if Im just interested in caffeine content?
Well just go to The Caffeine Database and look around!
The point, probably lost, is that theres a lot of drinks, in varying sizes and caffeine contents, that also contain a lot of other things.
So then this new thing came out. Its called VPX Redline Fat Burner. Amazon is lacking a little information, so heres a little more:
Check out this freaky scientific VPX breakthrough: RED LINE®: is the only matrix ever developed to shred fat through the shivering response in the body. By shivering the body burns huge amounts of stored bodyfat for energy in an effort to keep the body warm. Thats not all! In addition to shivering, youll also be sweating up a thermogenic storm. The combined mechanisms of these two processes results in unparalleled fat loss!
What fun. Now, its pretty obvious looking at the ingredients that theres caffeine. But get this: all of the aforementioned goodness, and the serving size is FOUR ml. About one TENTH of an ounce. The whole bottle has 240 ml, or 60 servings. Basically, a bottle of this, less than the size of a normal can of coke, WILL kill you. This is nothing to be playing around with.
I have friends. Not just normal friends, mind you. The kind of friends that voluntarily live on the streets. The kind of friends who, when drinking, race to forgetting. The kind of friends who take caffeine pills, ephedrine pills, and asprin.. all at once. One, in particular, drinks and consumes over a gram of caffeine daily, to stave off the headaches. So you know this is a serious review:
oh yeah, its definately 90% caffeine. the aftertaste is unmistakeable. the best part is that since i didnt have my normal dose this morning, i probably wont actually feel sh*t.
[10 minutes later]
the caffeine kicked in a lot faster than i expected. though in retrospect, it normally does when its in syrup form and tastes like ass.
feel oddly cold too. took me a minute to realize that while i still was warm, it was that shiver reflex kicking in. its a lot like when
you get a chill at the back of your neck, but somewhat continuous.
So whats in this magical bottle of awesome? Caffeine, Green Tea, Yerba Mate, 5-HTP (5 hydroxy-1-tryptophan), cAMP, Yohimbe, Evodiamine, and Vinpocetine. And a few other things.
I know, I know, so heres some more info:
cAMP is cyclic adenosine monophosphate. It supposedly sparks many intercellular processes. Whatever that means. Increased concentrations supposedly raise thyroid horomone levels, and help fat burning (would help explain why its in a fat-burning supplement).
Yohimbe is a bark extract from a tree in Africa. Its considered a natural aphrodisiac, and sold here to treat imotency, dialate pupils, and stimulate fat loss. It can also mess with your blood pressure, so watch out.
Evodiamine is derived from some Chinese fruit called Evodia Rutaecarpa. Supposedly burns fat.
Vinpocetine is an alkaloid derived from some periwinkle plant. It is used in Europe, Japan, and Mexico to treat crebrovascular and cognitive disorders. Some people claims it elevates metabolism, but with no proof.
And the interesting one in the group: 5-HTP. I made sure to spell it out, so the smart ones in the group have already figured out the key: Tryptophan. It
Fair warning: if you come work at the company, you'll have to stop calling them 'wool caps' and start calling them 'toques'.
I thought you should know up front.
Okay, I easily stand corrected on the team size - I didn't bother to check.
Still, the team size has tripled for a cutting edge FPS since Doom's time. Is there any reason to believe that it hasn't increased similarily for other game types?
I hear that EA has teams in the 200-300 person range these days.
I don't disagree with a single thing that you said. At the moment though, it seems that companies may be caught up in their own hype, trying to push the most polys and biggest textures. I would suggest that the XBox 360 and PS3 are a direct result.
I'm a Nintendo fan, myself. Great gameplay and story always trump cutting edge graphics in my book. It's why I'm glad I work where I do.
In theory, all development costs including marketing should be generating increased sales. If spending extra money on a physics system doesn't generate increased sales, you probably shouldn't be spending it, right? :)
However, because these companies are out to make money, they're trying to reduce their risk when producing a game, so in-game advertising would certainly reduce any risks associated, while still allowing them to go balls-out on features and marketing.
In that case, our argument is merely a disagreement in scale. The parent post to mine was trying to say (in my mind) that production costs haven't gone up over time, so there's OBVIOUSLY no reason to ever need to find additional income streams when making a game. Our games don't have ads in them, but that doesn't mean that they don't cost more to make than ever before. To say that just because nobody needed ads in games in times past means that nobody should need them at all now is a very short view of the industry.
A great deal has to do with the genre of game that you're making of course. I'd wager that at BioWare we have more designers and writers than they have at either Id or Valve. Conversely, they're much more likely to have programmers that are concerned with graphics or game engine work. Our games may not look as graphically spectacular (Valve and Id being cutting edge shops that also make games as a sort of advertisement so people will license their engine), but our gameplay is generally considered deeper and more involved.
To an extent, I can also agree with the parent posters. Games MAY take more money to make than they should. However, even pointing out that Doom 3 took 30 people (or thereabouts) proves my point. How many people wrote Doom? It was a LOT LESS THAN 30. It was basically a two person job, which means that even for a game like Doom 3, the team size has gone up an entire order of magnitude.
We're probably not even counting office staff into this - the people that answer the phones, handle payroll and handle legal matters and whatnot. Even if they're not directly involved in the production of the game, they have to be paid, too.
I don't know if in-game ads are necessary. All I'm trying to say is that making a game today isn't as cheap as it used to be, which is the point that the GP was trying to make. "If we didn't need them before, why would we need them now," is a very naive view of the industry. Things change and get more expensive. Programmers are worth more now, if nothing else.
Yes, I agree, but Doom 3 was the first one where people noticed and COMPLAINED. :)
It's getting harder to do it and get away with it. Even individual aliens have to be different. One of the big complaints about KotOR, if I recall correctly, was that there weren't enough different looking heads on the NPCs.
As games start to look better, people will nitpick the games about details like that a lot more.
Considering where I work, I think you'd be wrong. I do agree that a lot of money goes into marketing, voice, licensing and CEO salaries. However, it's simply untrue to claim that the time it takes to generate content hasn't greatly increased. People want to see accurate facial animation now, with deforming skin and expressive eyes. Someone has to do all the work to put in visual effects, decide where they go, and what it takes to make an environment properly immersive. In-game characters can't look all the same either, or people complain. Compare that to the original Doom where all the enemies of the same type had exactly the same model. That just doesn't fly as easily anymore.
People expect more out of their games than they used to. Gameplay, writing and design are all expensive to prototype and develop for triple-A titles. Games go through several iterations where they may only have gone through one or two 10 or 12 years ago.
All I'm saying is that comparing development costs for games of today to games of decades past is silly and unreasonable. It used to cost very little to film movies, too, and now blockbuster movies have budgets in the tens or hundreds of millions.
What's changed is that games aren't as easy to make as they used to be. Content is harder to create. Instead of having 2-10 person teams working on a game, a single game can take literally a hundred people several years to make.
In some cases, you're probably right that the team sizes could be a little smaller. However, things like photorealistic environments, physics, writing, and design are all complicated to produce. The more detailed the environments get, the more work artists have to do to make the game look up to snuff. The amount of time it takes has not scaled linearly with technology. Newer graphics engines are fairly big projects, and reasonable physics simulations aren't the sort of thing that you can crack off in a day.
On top of that you've got giant marketing budgets so that games can try and outsell each other before a copy is even pressed, and the realities of dealing with a global market.
There are lots of good games still made by small teams. However, most of the games that people want are definitely not small games with small budgets. Maybe that's something that's wrong with the industry. I don't know.
I live in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. We have a place in town called 'refinery row'. A considerable amount of the crude oil that's dug out of the tar sands only a few hundred kilometres north comes through those refineries. At the height of gas prices, we were still seeing gas around $1/litre, which is $4CDN/gallon (roughly) -about $3.35US/gallon. Living in a refinery town proximal to the source of crude oil doesn't seem to diminish our prices much, though I heard that prices got up over $1.50/L in some places in Canada.
There have been rumblings that they were going to take the NSX hybrid because of the great torque curve of electric engines. Nothing's quite materialized yet, but I suspect that you'll see something like that sooner than you think.
Besides, I think the Civic hybrid looks pretty hot for a sedan.
No! NO!
It is NOT legal because you've paid for it through levies. It's legal because IT'S LEGAL.
Those levies are a red herring. It would be legal even without the levies. It has been for years. Don't bring those into this. They're just a money grab.
Don't use the levies as an excuse, either. Not only have they stopped collecting levies on things like iPods, but paying for things beforehand like this aren't an excuse for bad behaviour. If you buy bullets with a levy on them to compensate families of shootings, you aren't allowed to go out and shoot people.
The only thing that you have to say when talking about downloading files in Canada is that it's legal. End of story. Any other justifications just weaken your position.
There is evidence to back evolution. You can look at the fossil record in many different places, and find out a little bit more about how evolution might occur. You can propose a hypothesis like, "I think that if some birds get moved from this island to that island, these morphologies will change, and speciation will be observed." The test is to go find a place where such a change did or did not occur. The test isn't simple; you have to trace back quite far in the fossil record to find what you're looking for. In many ways, you have to be lucky. The fossil evidence will either support or reduce your hypothesis.
Evolution has found many cases where a hypothesis can be made and the fossil record provides the evidence. The theory is incomplete, but it is by far the best one that we have.
ID can't be tested. It can't. What's the test for 'design'? We'd have to find the designer. We have no evidence for a designer, but we have no proof that one doesn't exist. Because I can't prove a negative (ie. there is no designer) logically speaking, I can never falsify this claim.
ID works on lack of evidence. How does something like the wing evolve? If you don't know, just say that it's evidence of design. They said the same thing about the eye you know (that is, it must have been designed because it's very complex, and a proto-eye would be useless), but now there's very good evidence for how the eye evolved, and creatures that have the proto-eye that was claimed to be useless. At best, ID can be used as a stopgap, but it's a stupid one since it would exist only so that we could come up with something to replace it later.
It's true that you can believe in whatever deity you want in ID, but most ID proponents are pushing for one specific creator, which is to say the Christian God.
I'm not saying Evolution is the complete answer, or necessarily the answer at all. But it is the BEST answer that we have, and it has evidence to back it up. The only evidence for ID is that we don't understand some things, which is pretty weak.
I read a good analogy a couple weeks ago (from Salon.com letters to the editor):
Just think of the "irreducible complexity" found in an archway. Remove one stone, and the whole thing collapses. You cannot build an archway with the stones alone. You need a scaffold until you place the keystone, which you will later remove. However, if you used irreducible complexity in the way that I.D. people use it, they would look at an archway and say, "Hmm, I guess God made that."
I submit that Darwinist proponents make it to step 3 all the time. There are at least a couple of camps that argue over things like wings seeming to spontaneously generate in the fossil record. Look up 'punctuated equilibrium' sometime. Actually, I'll do it for you: Wikipedia to the rescue.
In any case, no proper scientist pretends that evolution is a solved problem. We know that it's not, and there are good people working to find out more. However, if you adopt the theory of Intelligent Design, we may as well give up now. We don't understand what's going on, so God (or something) must have done it. When there's an out like that, who needs to study anything?
ID isn't a theory. You can't test it and you can't falsify it (there's no falsifying case - a matter of faith can't be contested). ID belongs in Church, not in science class. It's telling that they had to REDEFINE the word 'science' to make this whole thing fly. If it were actually science, they wouldn't have done anything.
Interestingly, science was borne of religion as a way to explain the things that didn't fit with religious teachings. It's the search for how things work and happen. Religion has ever purported itself to be the 'why', but I guess some people got bored of that.
It's worth noting that Gregor Mendel was a monk, obviously religious, and now is someone so important to our knowledge of basic genetics that we all learn about him in high school. Scholars of all kinds have come out of Churches and religions, so it's depressing how big a step back we're starting to take. If Mendel had been an IDer, he would have given up the moment he saw two different breeds of peas and declared the whole situation unknowable.
I've started to notice a different breed of religious person that I like to call the rational religious. I'm sure they've existed throughout the ages, but they seem to be scarce. Thankfully, they're becoming more populous. Of course, these are the people that understand not only science, but their faith and themselves. More and more, I've seen that people that don't understand science don't understand their church or themselves either.
That it's possible to work around the problem doesn't mean that the problem is invalid.
Yes, you can come up with a way that you can organize data and tables so that this problem is easier to solve, but there's certainly a way that the data and the language can be made so that you don't have to fiddle with that sort of crap.
And that said, someone may have an instance where, for whatever reason, the data absolutely should be laid out in a table that large. They shouldn't be punished for using the system in that manner if the system itself doesn't restrict them from doing something like that.
Languages and databases are our TOOLS. If we have to work around their deficiencies that much, they're pretty lousy tools.
...what makes a flu deadly? Obviously, most of us have been exposed to 'ordinary' influenza, and manage to come out with little more than a week or two of being miserable. I know these things are generally hard on the very young and the very old, but the humans that died of this Avian Flu were largely middle aged, right? Weren't some of them even in the hospital when they died? How does a flu cause that much trouble?
NO. Downloading music and movies is legal because it is legal. The tariff is there as something extra, but it has never impacted the legality of downloading musing and movies. The tariff is a transparent money-grab by the recording industry, and the government has recently recognized it as such, which is why if you bought an iPod in 2003-2004, you can apply to get the levy back.
Leave the levy out of this. Levies never give you the right to do anything - it would not be legal to shoot people if there were a levy on bullets trying to compensate victims' families. The levy is there because the industry is greedy and antiquated.
Hah. Not only that, but I'd put everyone on starvation rations and kill them off until I was the only one left! Then I'd gorge myself on my vast stores of buffalo.
And I'm tired of people that think that because they don't know what's best for other people that nobody should ever decide anything for them.
Do you argue with the car companies for putting the gas pedal on the right and the clutch on the left? Do you argue strenuously that you should be able to put the steering wheel on the ceiling because it fits your sense of aesthetics better? You really do believe that by mounting all the mirrors on the dash, you have what you claim is a better view of what's behind you?
No, you don't. You don't because that's asinine. The car companies pick where things go, an you get to chose the paint job. Don't like it? Too bad. Because someone made these decisions for you a long time ago, you also can get into basically any car and know how to get it moving, assuming that it isn't busted.
You should be allowed to pick the colour of your text and the picture in your background, but most of your choices should end there. Users DON'T know what's best for them most of the time, despite their strenuous accusations that they feel more productive when their windows are arranged in a star pattern that resembles a birthmark on their left buttock.
If you give someone a well designed and well thought out interface, studies have shown that people will be objectively (that is, measurably) more productive, even if they feel subjectively (that is, emotionally) more productive.
The reason why you NEED preferences (and yes, right now I think it's probably the case that you DO need them) is because the interface on your computer sucks. It's terrible. Almost everything is designed to slow you down. Keyboards and mice are designed to only give you the most basic control of your machine, with everything else implemented in software. Why do you think the scroll wheel was adopted so quickly? Grabbing the scroll bar or clicking on the little arrows sucks - it's a stupid way to scroll up and down unless you're trying to do it to get around quickly in a long document.
My view on preferences is this: if you can change it to something better, why isn't it always better? If one way is better for one person, and another way is better for another person, I'm not convinced that except for trivial matters, there isn't a third way that's better for all people that doesn't need a preference set.
This guy's article fails in that these aren't reasons why HCI is in the dark age, they're the results of us being in the dark age.
Like I mentioned in another thread, I use the system to indicate my preferred frequency of play for the song. One star means that it's just around so that I'm not missing parts of an album, and 5 means that I love the song so much I can listen to it continuously for hours on end. If you only use part of the rating system, it just means that you're missing out on some granularity. The 0-5 star system doesn't mean anything except what you decide to make it mean.
If you own the music, you already know that you like it. Just rate the music so you know HOW MUCH you like it.
I use the stars to indicate how often things should be played.
* - Never play. It's only in the list for the sake of completeness (I hate having partial albums)
** - Play very rarely. If I'm in the mood, I might listen to it.
*** - I'll listen to it at least once a week. If it comes up randomly on the shuffle, I won't take it out of the list.
**** - I can listen to this several times in a day.
***** - I'll listen to this song anytime, anywhere. If it comes up twice in a row, no problem. If my playlist only has this song on it, I can cope with that for at least a few hours.
This means that I have to periodically re-rate the songs. That seems only reasonable, though. Why would songs stay at the same rating forever? As the novelty wears off, I can relegate a song to 4 or 3 stars.
I also keep extensive smart playlists that make sure that songs that are 3 stars or less only get played once every few days.