I don't normally write cheerleading testimonials, but its also rare I find something this cool that I want to gush about it.
The first tutorial (I saw it right here on Slashdot!) got me curious about RoR. I went home and installed it that night. A couple weeks later (total of maybe 10 hours invested) I had completely converted my community website over to rails (from a servlets site), and am launching it fairly soon. The funny thing is, the actual code to drive this thing is really small. No boring, repetative database code, automatic validation, lots of helpful classes (authentication is downloading a new package and running a make script). Things in the tutorial make it look like you're limited to standard naming conventions, but I assure you that you can override everything if you've got an existing database that doesn't match the RoR naming scheme.
I've found the community very helpful. Hosting is a bit limited now, but I'm getting a textdrive.com account soon to get my new site up and running.
This is definately worth an install and the 20 minutes it takes to do the tutorial, check it out!
And right now every TV sold in the US has a V-Chip. FX plays a commercial for it before every adult themed show they have (Nip/Tuck, The Shield, etc). They tell you exactly how to make your TV turn off TV-M rated content. Most TV's let you lock out entire channels, so if you only wanted your kid watching Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network (pre-Adult Swim of course), you could easily have it do that AND put the V-Chip on to make sure Adult Swim isn't shown.
So as a parent I could control what little Billy is watching if I took the time to learn about the available technology. There are of course problems with mis-rating program content and the Janet Jackson gaffe. Has there been any proof that some kid was seriously scarred because of a boob?
I think one main issue is that most houses have tons of TVs now. In my house there was one TV (and later another one in my parent's room). I did not have my own TV with cable, so if I was watching something it was in the living room. At the ages where I could see psychological damage (say under 12 or something) I really wasn't alone with the TV. Parents aren't parenting I guess.
And to make a final point, how come government institutions are so all powerful and can seriously crush major corporate interests when it comes to broadcast media? Why doesn't the EPA have the same bite on chemical companies as the FCC does on the media? Are the checks being cut by the broadcasters not big enough? What's going on here? What kind of priorities are these?
I don't think being forced to stay home on Friday is a top concern here.:)
Get a Tivo if you're worried about missing it! Plus there's 0 work involved with downloading it.
Unless Sony delivers an online experience on par or exceeding XBox Live, they're going to get a drumming come XBox2. Halo2 is one of the nicest and easiest to use online expereinces I've had on any game platform, and unless Sony can match it they're going to fall behind in that arena.
I saw that, and the philosophy of giving half their income back to the project is _awesome_. What a way to fund an OSS project, and especially cool in this case because they can convert people (like me) with websites for small clubs or groups that would like to try Rails but don't have an ISP that can do it.
One question about all this though, how long has the company been around? Are they kind of fly by night? I could see a real nightmere if they collapsed and you were left swinging without any place to run your webapp.
Seeing as you're an anime fan, its amazing that you can't accept a derivative work based on an original. Isn't half of all manga unlicensed derivatives off a common theme (sorry, I don't know much about it, but someone explained that to me one time and it seemed really cool that the publishers don't crack down on that and instead allow it to flourish, thus making their works even more popular)?
Anyways, its an _adaptation_, i.e. someone else's interpretation of the work. No one said they were making LotR: The Book: The Movie. Just like how the Superman movies and new books are retellings of a common story. This is not J.R.R. Tolkien's LotR. This is Peter Jackson's LotR. Its not WRONG because that's how he decided to tell it. With a story as powerful and as epic as the trilogy, it can stand to have multiple points of view.
Did you really want to see 50 characters that have two lines and never come back? Did you really want a musical? Did you really want them to chill out for a whole movie at the council of Rivendell?
Also, as a final point, you should think about how many people were exposed to the work through the movies, and then decided to read the books afterwards. If anything, the books delve into a much richer setting, and the reader gets a lot more out of the books after seeing the movie. If they were the exact same, there would be no reason to read the books, and THAT would be a true tradgedy.
If you're buying a computer from Wal-Mart odds are you do not know how to install windows. You probably don't even know how to turn the thing on. You probabably do know how to skin a deer, and you probably own a t-shirt that says "Who Farted?"
I actually thought that was more of a "cut n' paste" manuever. I've often wanted a way to quickly move something from one setup to another without having to go though some clumbsy file transfer or such. I suppose those are USB drives in 50 years.
Although, I think with those fancy gloves he could have made a "cut" gesture on one screen and a paste on the next and have the network transparently move it for him.
No, you have it dead on. Its distributed processing on the PS3. I.E., its a dual/quad processor machine. The big advantage is that IBM has promised to provide support and tools for easily scaling these things, so that the nastiness that is writing code to ship to the VU and RPC from EE->IOP on the PS2, and all the wonderful synchronization problems are largely handled by some nice API. This is a huge step forward, and deserves some good conversation.
What sucks is that a bunch of people think "OMG, my Sony TV and Receiver are going to make playing the PS3 that much better, I better go buy one!", when in fact they aren't going to be networking and building a cluster in your home out of Sony components. The distributed "network" is a bunch of linked cell processors on your PS3. Having 8 PS3's doesn't make your game any better, it just makes you poorer.
Where is the V-Chip in all this? I thought the V-Chip was supposed to handle a rating (TV-MA, etc), and block the show if the parents had the TV configured to do that.
Are people not using it? How are kids watching these shows?
I'm not being a luddite, I'm offering you a view from the marketing and technical standpoint of consoles. The console market is MUCH different from the PC market. While the PC is a very "open" platform, consoles are closed and done so by the manufactuers, who impose a very strict guideline on the content produced by publishers and developers for their systems. This means establishing a system of technical certifications every game must pass. These are things like loading times, stability, user interface, etc. All these guide games made for a platform towards a standard that the manufactuer wishes everyone to follow. And since they actually make the discs, you have no choice in the matter.
So yes, I see that technically you COULD offload AI to enhance graphic performance, but like another poster replying to this message said, you have to do the game anyways at the same level without the extra help. Not doing so would risk fragmenting your market. Console players do not want to have to worry about having installed two extra CPU units, they just want to play the game on the back of the box. They aren't used to not getting a uniform experience.
The dynamic LOD point was a case for "some platforms use lower poly models, some can perform with the full poly versions" Nothing to do with a console using dynamic LOD, and many games do. I was saying that because you have a standard platform, you can optomize all your data once for a specific set of hardware and be done with it. Even user created content can be preprocessed exactly as the memory and hardware would expect it to be by the creating console or publisher.
The console is NOT a PC. The hardware remains consistant because that's one of its strong selling points - award winning and excellent games still come out 5 years after you've plopped down $300 for the system, unlike PCs where 3 years later you can't play any new games.
Adding an upgrade curve back into the equation will only serve to fragment your market, and that means less dollars, and THAT my friend is why you won't see it happen....the bottom line, and that's it.
These are console games, not PC. Players of console games have much bigger expectations than PC gamers as far as QC. If I play HalfLife 2, I might expect that there are some driver issues I would have to deal with, or problems if I don't have enough memory or hard disk space.
And you're completely wrong about level loading and the such. Console games run off disks. That means you cache the data in a preprocessed state in the exact order it will be read off the disk. When you game MUST load in 15 seconds (no exceptions or Sony refuses to publish your game), level loading is as completely optomized as it can be.
Where is the win with more than one processor? The bottleneck in level loading is not the processing time, its reading the data off the DVD, which on modern consoles is an asycnh process given to an IO processor with DMA. Generally the format read off the disc matches pretty closely whats in memory, because there isn't any type of LOD considerations, or considerations for how powerful the player's machine is. You can't increase texture levels because everyone displayes the same textures.
Usermods (mainly just maps), are fairly new in the cosole world. Right now I can only think of a few instances, and those are made with ingame editors and submitted to a common clearing house for approval by the publisher.
And like I stated, yes, you could offload AI, but what would be the poitn. Not graphics. The deadlines are too hard, and the bandwidth too intensive.
Do people actually believe this (tr)hype? Were you the same people actually getting giddy about the awfully named "Emotion Engine" allowing realistic hair or somehow providing better human reactions to characters in 1999?
Console games work and develop well because of one thing: standardization of platform. If you put your game in any console of the same type, it will run the same (besides various regional differences (PAL, NTSC) and maybe some hardware changes later on in a production run, ala XBox's two DVD drives)
You do not design for "potential extra processing" from someone's TV, toaster, aibo, or whatever. You design for the LCD, which is the unit that everyone buys. You might be able to take advantage of extra hardware like voice headsets or harddrives, but even then your game has to work well without it. (Example: Xbox allows you to precache data from the DVD on the harddrive, but you still need to be able to meet loading time standards without it. i.e. you can do better than 15 seconds with the harddrive, but no worse than without).
Can you imagine the testing nightmare of "better AI" if someone has a Sony DVD player nearby? Do you test every level with every combination of chip configuration out there?
This of course has been written with the thought that this is at all possible. Well, sorry, it isn't, and the super IBM cell processor isn't going to make it so. Console games work off extremely hard deadlines, and that's the refresh rate on your TV. Every 16 or 32 ms you need to have a new frame rendered and ready to go. You can't schedule a few frames for processing on the microwave and ask for them back whenever. What your drawing depends on the real state of user input, ai, physics, lighting, scripted events, etc. The state of the game at any point in the future is unknown, and thus in those 16 ms you have to figure out what needs to be updated, how the world should change, and finally render that to the screen. The actual rendering time might not even be half of the time you have for a frame. Do you have the bandwidth to send that data out and expect it back in the same frame? If so let me know so I can get some of that!
I could see remote AI processing, MAYBE, but that still has to be able to be done on the console anyways for the LCD case. AI is one of the worst things to debug in game development as a lot of times it can be non-deterministic. You do not want to throw another variable into the testing, especially not when its hardware.
Sony has a very good marketing department for continuing to push this crap. They've said "we will use this cell technology in other products besides the PS2" and "In the future the PS platform will interact with other Sony brand components", thus meaning that maybe your PS2 can start popping popcorn or something, but that has nothing to do with processing, its just networking. But somehow the two get combined on fan sites to mean "OMG, buy 28 PS3s and Jaxter and Dax runs at 6000FPS!!!"
What you will see with cell processing is a continuation of the mulitprocessor platform the PS2 had, but in a more generic sense. This should allow very interesting stuff to be done, and while games will be initially harder to develop, there's going to be some really cool stuff coming out of this. But don't believe you're going to suddenly see a sentient household that's drawing a few extra pixels in GTA VI: The Quest for More Money.
"A FLAC5.1 CD might weigh in at close to a GB"
What I was really getting at is that you called it a "CD", which implied the information you were encoding at some point fit on a CD. Where did the 5.1 information come from in the first place? DVDAudio? i.e. How can you encode something in 5.1 that wasn't originally in that format, and if it was delivered on a single CD, where did the extra information come from?
I think you hit it right on the head there. We actually live in a great age for film. The sheer number of giant multiplexes has lead to theaters with tons and tons of extra screens that they can put films on that a smaller audience might enjoy along side the giant blockbusters. Film isn't going anywhere, and I doubt the summer popcorn films are either. Saying the failure of "Alexander" predicts a trend discounts every other giant hit this year (Spiderman 2, Incredibles, etc)
XBL only provides matchmaking services, friends lists, stats, messaging, etc. It does no actual game hosting unless publishers pay extra, and so far I don't think any have. Its bandwidth costs would probably be comparable to Gamespy's or AIM (though with far less users but in a more secure environment).
You average MMOG provides continuous bandwidth during gameplay, patching, user interaction, and huge database services tracking monster, players, levels, etc.
I doubt it costs that much to play, but the fact is that people are willing to pay the price, and they seem fine with the user base that the costs provide. If they don't get enough people they'll surely lower the costs, and if demand is high enough they'll probably raise them.
Well, I was giving a more slashdot slanted POV from a programmer, but for designers, most definately there's no where to start but from the bottom. And by that, I mean pretty much from QA. Programming there's plenty of opportunity to make a parallel move from a related field (graphics, database work, networking, etc), and its not completely from the bottom, but you _will_ not be hired as a level designer without having some industry experience. Hell, even designers I know who have worked two or three projects have trouble getting jobs.
Not true at all. There are plenty of back doors, and for all its derision EA provides a lot of them. A small 15-20 person company can't take on the risk of hiring someone without game experience. I was pretty lucky getting into one after a year of working at a dotbomb out of college. To get in, I moved halfway across the country, took a 25% paycut and worked as a contractor for 6 months with an option to be hired full time if I worked out. It did, and here I am, making more than I would with similar experience in a non-gaming company. Why? Because having gaming experience is what game companies want. Why?
Because we do the same thing 100 times over. If game companies built a car, it would have four really cool looking wheels that went around in four different directions.:) What large scale project do you know that throws out most of its code every two years? As a programmer with gaming experience, they can tell me to "write a UI system" and I can whip one out because I've done it already. Or "develop an AI engine that can script with python" and I have lots of lessons learned from previous projects on what and what NOT to do. Unless you've gone through production, gone through crunch, worked with artists, worked with designers, dealt with producers, publsihers, and QA, you really don't have a good grasp on how it works. Yes, its that different. Should it be? Probably not.
The games industry would benefit a lot from an injection of real software engineers, and a lot of us press for it where we can, but there's a long way to go. And unfortunately, the type of people willing to work the hours and deal with the crap for their "art" aren't 20 year veteran old codgers with families and houses. They're guys with something to prove, and willing to give it up to "break in to the industry"
Sipping my first coffee of the day, I almost spit it out when I saw "Breaking News" on CNN's site, and a picture of a man staring over a flying saucer.
Then trust the fact that not all problems are easily attacked from a parallel perspective. This means problems where working on one section of the dataset affects large amounts of data in other sections. There's a lot of locking and waiting for tasks in other parts of the system to be completed; and a lot of data transfer/need for shared memory, which if you're bussing between cluster components, its going to be slow.
This doesn't mean that clusters don't have some use in these regards, it just means that for these types of problems no one has figured out an efficient parallel algorithm to use on them.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't normally write cheerleading testimonials, but its also rare I find something this cool that I want to gush about it.
The first tutorial (I saw it right here on Slashdot!) got me curious about RoR. I went home and installed it that night. A couple weeks later (total of maybe 10 hours invested) I had completely converted my community website over to rails (from a servlets site), and am launching it fairly soon. The funny thing is, the actual code to drive this thing is really small. No boring, repetative database code, automatic validation, lots of helpful classes (authentication is downloading a new package and running a make script). Things in the tutorial make it look like you're limited to standard naming conventions, but I assure you that you can override everything if you've got an existing database that doesn't match the RoR naming scheme.
I've found the community very helpful. Hosting is a bit limited now, but I'm getting a textdrive.com account soon to get my new site up and running.
This is definately worth an install and the 20 minutes it takes to do the tutorial, check it out!
And right now every TV sold in the US has a V-Chip. FX plays a commercial for it before every adult themed show they have (Nip/Tuck, The Shield, etc). They tell you exactly how to make your TV turn off TV-M rated content. Most TV's let you lock out entire channels, so if you only wanted your kid watching Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network (pre-Adult Swim of course), you could easily have it do that AND put the V-Chip on to make sure Adult Swim isn't shown.
So as a parent I could control what little Billy is watching if I took the time to learn about the available technology. There are of course problems with mis-rating program content and the Janet Jackson gaffe. Has there been any proof that some kid was seriously scarred because of a boob?
I think one main issue is that most houses have tons of TVs now. In my house there was one TV (and later another one in my parent's room). I did not have my own TV with cable, so if I was watching something it was in the living room. At the ages where I could see psychological damage (say under 12 or something) I really wasn't alone with the TV. Parents aren't parenting I guess.
And to make a final point, how come government institutions are so all powerful and can seriously crush major corporate interests when it comes to broadcast media? Why doesn't the EPA have the same bite on chemical companies as the FCC does on the media? Are the checks being cut by the broadcasters not big enough? What's going on here? What kind of priorities are these?
I don't think being forced to stay home on Friday is a top concern here. :)
Get a Tivo if you're worried about missing it! Plus there's 0 work involved with downloading it.
Everquest doesn't count dude! j/k :)
Its sad when I thought that first thing...
Unless Sony delivers an online experience on par or exceeding XBox Live, they're going to get a drumming come XBox2. Halo2 is one of the nicest and easiest to use online expereinces I've had on any game platform, and unless Sony can match it they're going to fall behind in that arena.
I saw that, and the philosophy of giving half their income back to the project is _awesome_. What a way to fund an OSS project, and especially cool in this case because they can convert people (like me) with websites for small clubs or groups that would like to try Rails but don't have an ISP that can do it. One question about all this though, how long has the company been around? Are they kind of fly by night? I could see a real nightmere if they collapsed and you were left swinging without any place to run your webapp.
Gets rid of all the software you _did_ want? It is after all malicious! ...
I tried....
Seeing as you're an anime fan, its amazing that you can't accept a derivative work based on an original. Isn't half of all manga unlicensed derivatives off a common theme (sorry, I don't know much about it, but someone explained that to me one time and it seemed really cool that the publishers don't crack down on that and instead allow it to flourish, thus making their works even more popular)?
Anyways, its an _adaptation_, i.e. someone else's interpretation of the work. No one said they were making LotR: The Book: The Movie. Just like how the Superman movies and new books are retellings of a common story. This is not J.R.R. Tolkien's LotR. This is Peter Jackson's LotR. Its not WRONG because that's how he decided to tell it. With a story as powerful and as epic as the trilogy, it can stand to have multiple points of view.
Did you really want to see 50 characters that have two lines and never come back? Did you really want a musical? Did you really want them to chill out for a whole movie at the council of Rivendell?
Also, as a final point, you should think about how many people were exposed to the work through the movies, and then decided to read the books afterwards. If anything, the books delve into a much richer setting, and the reader gets a lot more out of the books after seeing the movie. If they were the exact same, there would be no reason to read the books, and THAT would be a true tradgedy.
If you're buying a computer from Wal-Mart odds are you do not know how to install windows. You probably don't even know how to turn the thing on. You probabably do know how to skin a deer, and you probably own a t-shirt that says "Who Farted?"
I actually thought that was more of a "cut n' paste" manuever. I've often wanted a way to quickly move something from one setup to another without having to go though some clumbsy file transfer or such. I suppose those are USB drives in 50 years. Although, I think with those fancy gloves he could have made a "cut" gesture on one screen and a paste on the next and have the network transparently move it for him.
No, you have it dead on. Its distributed processing on the PS3. I.E., its a dual/quad processor machine. The big advantage is that IBM has promised to provide support and tools for easily scaling these things, so that the nastiness that is writing code to ship to the VU and RPC from EE->IOP on the PS2, and all the wonderful synchronization problems are largely handled by some nice API. This is a huge step forward, and deserves some good conversation.
What sucks is that a bunch of people think "OMG, my Sony TV and Receiver are going to make playing the PS3 that much better, I better go buy one!", when in fact they aren't going to be networking and building a cluster in your home out of Sony components. The distributed "network" is a bunch of linked cell processors on your PS3. Having 8 PS3's doesn't make your game any better, it just makes you poorer.
Where is the V-Chip in all this? I thought the V-Chip was supposed to handle a rating (TV-MA, etc), and block the show if the parents had the TV configured to do that. Are people not using it? How are kids watching these shows?
I'm not being a luddite, I'm offering you a view from the marketing and technical standpoint of consoles. The console market is MUCH different from the PC market. While the PC is a very "open" platform, consoles are closed and done so by the manufactuers, who impose a very strict guideline on the content produced by publishers and developers for their systems. This means establishing a system of technical certifications every game must pass. These are things like loading times, stability, user interface, etc. All these guide games made for a platform towards a standard that the manufactuer wishes everyone to follow. And since they actually make the discs, you have no choice in the matter. So yes, I see that technically you COULD offload AI to enhance graphic performance, but like another poster replying to this message said, you have to do the game anyways at the same level without the extra help. Not doing so would risk fragmenting your market. Console players do not want to have to worry about having installed two extra CPU units, they just want to play the game on the back of the box. They aren't used to not getting a uniform experience. The dynamic LOD point was a case for "some platforms use lower poly models, some can perform with the full poly versions" Nothing to do with a console using dynamic LOD, and many games do. I was saying that because you have a standard platform, you can optomize all your data once for a specific set of hardware and be done with it. Even user created content can be preprocessed exactly as the memory and hardware would expect it to be by the creating console or publisher. The console is NOT a PC. The hardware remains consistant because that's one of its strong selling points - award winning and excellent games still come out 5 years after you've plopped down $300 for the system, unlike PCs where 3 years later you can't play any new games. Adding an upgrade curve back into the equation will only serve to fragment your market, and that means less dollars, and THAT my friend is why you won't see it happen....the bottom line, and that's it.
These are console games, not PC. Players of console games have much bigger expectations than PC gamers as far as QC. If I play HalfLife 2, I might expect that there are some driver issues I would have to deal with, or problems if I don't have enough memory or hard disk space.
And you're completely wrong about level loading and the such. Console games run off disks. That means you cache the data in a preprocessed state in the exact order it will be read off the disk. When you game MUST load in 15 seconds (no exceptions or Sony refuses to publish your game), level loading is as completely optomized as it can be.
Where is the win with more than one processor? The bottleneck in level loading is not the processing time, its reading the data off the DVD, which on modern consoles is an asycnh process given to an IO processor with DMA. Generally the format read off the disc matches pretty closely whats in memory, because there isn't any type of LOD considerations, or considerations for how powerful the player's machine is. You can't increase texture levels because everyone displayes the same textures.
Usermods (mainly just maps), are fairly new in the cosole world. Right now I can only think of a few instances, and those are made with ingame editors and submitted to a common clearing house for approval by the publisher.
And like I stated, yes, you could offload AI, but what would be the poitn. Not graphics. The deadlines are too hard, and the bandwidth too intensive.
Do people actually believe this (tr)hype? Were you the same people actually getting giddy about the awfully named "Emotion Engine" allowing realistic hair or somehow providing better human reactions to characters in 1999?
Console games work and develop well because of one thing: standardization of platform. If you put your game in any console of the same type, it will run the same (besides various regional differences (PAL, NTSC) and maybe some hardware changes later on in a production run, ala XBox's two DVD drives)
You do not design for "potential extra processing" from someone's TV, toaster, aibo, or whatever. You design for the LCD, which is the unit that everyone buys. You might be able to take advantage of extra hardware like voice headsets or harddrives, but even then your game has to work well without it. (Example: Xbox allows you to precache data from the DVD on the harddrive, but you still need to be able to meet loading time standards without it. i.e. you can do better than 15 seconds with the harddrive, but no worse than without).
Can you imagine the testing nightmare of "better AI" if someone has a Sony DVD player nearby? Do you test every level with every combination of chip configuration out there?
This of course has been written with the thought that this is at all possible. Well, sorry, it isn't, and the super IBM cell processor isn't going to make it so. Console games work off extremely hard deadlines, and that's the refresh rate on your TV. Every 16 or 32 ms you need to have a new frame rendered and ready to go. You can't schedule a few frames for processing on the microwave and ask for them back whenever. What your drawing depends on the real state of user input, ai, physics, lighting, scripted events, etc. The state of the game at any point in the future is unknown, and thus in those 16 ms you have to figure out what needs to be updated, how the world should change, and finally render that to the screen. The actual rendering time might not even be half of the time you have for a frame. Do you have the bandwidth to send that data out and expect it back in the same frame? If so let me know so I can get some of that!
I could see remote AI processing, MAYBE, but that still has to be able to be done on the console anyways for the LCD case. AI is one of the worst things to debug in game development as a lot of times it can be non-deterministic. You do not want to throw another variable into the testing, especially not when its hardware.
Sony has a very good marketing department for continuing to push this crap. They've said "we will use this cell technology in other products besides the PS2" and "In the future the PS platform will interact with other Sony brand components", thus meaning that maybe your PS2 can start popping popcorn or something, but that has nothing to do with processing, its just networking. But somehow the two get combined on fan sites to mean "OMG, buy 28 PS3s and Jaxter and Dax runs at 6000FPS!!!"
What you will see with cell processing is a continuation of the mulitprocessor platform the PS2 had, but in a more generic sense. This should allow very interesting stuff to be done, and while games will be initially harder to develop, there's going to be some really cool stuff coming out of this. But don't believe you're going to suddenly see a sentient household that's drawing a few extra pixels in GTA VI: The Quest for More Money.
Can you imagine how long that guys beard will be in 900 years!
Protip: Rip Van Winkle was not the most stylish of guys, so emulating him might not be a good idea.
"A FLAC5.1 CD might weigh in at close to a GB" What I was really getting at is that you called it a "CD", which implied the information you were encoding at some point fit on a CD. Where did the 5.1 information come from in the first place? DVDAudio? i.e. How can you encode something in 5.1 that wasn't originally in that format, and if it was delivered on a single CD, where did the extra information come from?
If its 1 GB, how did it ever fit on a CD? And where are you getting the extra information from when you reencode? I'm only being semi-serious.
I think you hit it right on the head there. We actually live in a great age for film. The sheer number of giant multiplexes has lead to theaters with tons and tons of extra screens that they can put films on that a smaller audience might enjoy along side the giant blockbusters. Film isn't going anywhere, and I doubt the summer popcorn films are either. Saying the failure of "Alexander" predicts a trend discounts every other giant hit this year (Spiderman 2, Incredibles, etc)
XBL only provides matchmaking services, friends lists, stats, messaging, etc. It does no actual game hosting unless publishers pay extra, and so far I don't think any have. Its bandwidth costs would probably be comparable to Gamespy's or AIM (though with far less users but in a more secure environment). You average MMOG provides continuous bandwidth during gameplay, patching, user interaction, and huge database services tracking monster, players, levels, etc. I doubt it costs that much to play, but the fact is that people are willing to pay the price, and they seem fine with the user base that the costs provide. If they don't get enough people they'll surely lower the costs, and if demand is high enough they'll probably raise them.
Well, I was giving a more slashdot slanted POV from a programmer, but for designers, most definately there's no where to start but from the bottom. And by that, I mean pretty much from QA. Programming there's plenty of opportunity to make a parallel move from a related field (graphics, database work, networking, etc), and its not completely from the bottom, but you _will_ not be hired as a level designer without having some industry experience. Hell, even designers I know who have worked two or three projects have trouble getting jobs.
Not true at all. There are plenty of back doors, and for all its derision EA provides a lot of them. A small 15-20 person company can't take on the risk of hiring someone without game experience. I was pretty lucky getting into one after a year of working at a dotbomb out of college. To get in, I moved halfway across the country, took a 25% paycut and worked as a contractor for 6 months with an option to be hired full time if I worked out. It did, and here I am, making more than I would with similar experience in a non-gaming company. Why? Because having gaming experience is what game companies want. Why?
:) What large scale project do you know that throws out most of its code every two years? As a programmer with gaming experience, they can tell me to "write a UI system" and I can whip one out because I've done it already. Or "develop an AI engine that can script with python" and I have lots of lessons learned from previous projects on what and what NOT to do. Unless you've gone through production, gone through crunch, worked with artists, worked with designers, dealt with producers, publsihers, and QA, you really don't have a good grasp on how it works. Yes, its that different. Should it be? Probably not.
Because we do the same thing 100 times over. If game companies built a car, it would have four really cool looking wheels that went around in four different directions.
The games industry would benefit a lot from an injection of real software engineers, and a lot of us press for it where we can, but there's a long way to go. And unfortunately, the type of people willing to work the hours and deal with the crap for their "art" aren't 20 year veteran old codgers with families and houses. They're guys with something to prove, and willing to give it up to "break in to the industry"
Sipping my first coffee of the day, I almost spit it out when I saw "Breaking News" on CNN's site, and a picture of a man staring over a flying saucer.
:)
Ok, maybe it was. I definately need more sleep
Then trust the fact that not all problems are easily attacked from a parallel perspective. This means problems where working on one section of the dataset affects large amounts of data in other sections. There's a lot of locking and waiting for tasks in other parts of the system to be completed; and a lot of data transfer/need for shared memory, which if you're bussing between cluster components, its going to be slow.
This doesn't mean that clusters don't have some use in these regards, it just means that for these types of problems no one has figured out an efficient parallel algorithm to use on them.
Yeah, but so is eating hotdogs and chasing monkeys while covered in tar. I'd say take anything from Japan with a grain of salt. :)