Under $200? Guess what else is under $200? An ENTIRE FUCKING CONSOLE AND SEVERAL GAMES. Come out of your 'rich, single, FPS-fanatic' bubble and see that in the real world, it's not reasonable to spend a week's wages to give your grimy corridors a few more frames per second.
In two years, most people won't have upgraded their PCs. The dot-com era's over. These new consoles will be better than most PCs, and the PCs will probably get upgraded even less often than the consoles.
PC gaming doesn't seem to innovate much. For all their crowing about superior graphics and playability, PC gamers generally just play first-person shooters with nothing to do but walk around shooting monsters. And the graphics aren't much either. £300 for a graphics card and all you get is a mouldy basement or a dark corridor. I can get that at home thanks. Good graphics are not about pixels or frame rates or fancy lighting, no more than painting is about expensive paints. I'd rather play a console game with colourful vibrant graphics, even if they're not 1600x1200 and 80 fps.
It could be used for any game, not just FPS games. It definitely has the possibility to make games more immersive and much more open-ended, giving you millions of more possible things to do.
Although in reailty, it'll probably just get used to make more impressive explosions in otherwise shallow games. And it will be very slow if you want very accurate physics.
Fast cars and cookers are useful, without them we couldn't do much at all. What benefit is there to not wearing a helmet? It doesn't look good? Bikes are hardly a safe form of transport. Coming off a bike head-first onto the pavement at 15mph will put you in a coma. Helmets are sensible. Grow up, you're not a badass rebel because you don't like safety equipment, you're just an idiot. Do you hate seatbelts with the same passion? Or fuses?
Seriously though, the problem with space simulators is that space isn't actually very interesting. The distances are huge, the speeds have very high variance, no friction so it takes ages to slow down, especially as you can reach stupidly high speeds meaning you miss your destination by a mile. Unless you put a million cities on each planet, flying around them isn't going to be much fun because they're so damn big.
You can't feasibly go inter-steller without some sort of 'warp' type system, it's 3D so navigation is exponentially harder, not to mention combat being incredibly hard to get your head around. Then you have the relative speeds to think about. You're flying from A to B, you know your speed relative to C, which way are you actually going? And which way should you be pointing? And is your momentum going to keep you in this direction for another ten million miles even if you turn round?
A good space simulator would decrease the distances between the stars/planets, so you could cruise around without needing autopilots or hyper-drives. And combat would consist mainly of guided-missiles or auto-aiming lasers (not pointing your ship directly at your opponent with the keyboard like in Elite). Yeah it wouldn't be too realistic, but a fully realistic space game would be like 2001: A Space Oddysey, except all you can do is sit there watching it float along for several years.
Although if pulled off, it could be spectacular. For all its faults, I like playing Elite II, shooting the ship at the space port then chasing it through the upper atmosphere. The curving planet below, the vastness of space above, the pale atmosphere in between, with two spaceships fighting each other at tens of thousands of times the speed of sound.
Although today everyone just wants to make first-person shooters, driving games and adrenaline-free MMORPGs.
Then they will get into all those features that the new architecture gives them, and be excited to be the first to make a game that has realistic crumbling concrete when the tank slams into a wall, or whatever else they decide to do.
What's the point in all these new processors etc. when the games are going to be as boring as before, but with better graphics and more realism? The game industry is stagnant thanks to all those geeks buying first-person shooters even when they're just like the game before it but with different lighting.
I'm afraid you're incorrect. Sweat cools you because the sweat molecules carry heat and leave the body. It is only endothermic if the vapour goes away. If it goes back, it brings the heat back.
I'm in the UK, getting constantly bombarded with propaganda from the BBC to buy a digital set-top box for 'only' £100. So I did. And I'm not impressed.
You have a little box next to the TV. It takes up yet another power socket, and it plugs into the TV via a scart lead. The aerial plugs into the box. Then you turn on the TV, and the digital box replaces your TV with a digital version. It's like normal TV, only slower.
Instead of channel changes being instant, they take quite a few seconds. If the channel comes up at all. It's a bit like Sky, as in you get a little box at the bottom telling you what's on, and what channel it is etc. Except it's nowhere near as good. It's like a dodgy Sky box off the market. The interface is slow and crap, it's rarely accurate, rather than the fast pace of Sky, this makes browsing through the channels feel like crawling through cement. It's ugly as well, like using a ZX Spectrum to watch TV.
The TV guide features is slower and less featureful than Sky, and full of gaps. Most of the schedule is blank. The picture is often shaky or blurry. If you accidently go onto a channel which doesn't exist (which is a lot, half the channels are blank), it tries to load it, which takes a while, and getting off takes about 5-10 seconds.
And on top of all that, it comes with another remote control. Which of course doesn't offer all the features of your TV, so you have two remote controls. Even with all the faults, you only get a few more channels. There's E4 which seems to show American sitcoms in perpetuation. There are a couple of extra BBC channels which show nothing because they only run for a few hours per evening.
Although the other night I got a couple of episodes of Phoenix Nights, albeit on a blurry picture. Which goes to show you don't really need digital TV, quality shines through whether it's on a crisp digital picture or a shitty analogue one.
If you want digital, get Sky digital, it's like terrestrial digital, but done right. By people who actually know what they're doing. The interface done is properly, and you get all the proper channels, like Sky 1, the Sports and the film channels.
When this vapourised mass evaporates into space in a vacuum, where does it go? Nowhere, so gravity drags it back, applying its heat back to the mass. Therefore there is no overall temperature change.
Also you're assuming there is no heat source in the centre of the body. This would keep it at a liquid state, with a thin vapour atmosphere. Imagine if a liquid methane planet crashed into a liquid oxygen planet. And someone lit a match!
Well, if that makes you more successful, then yes. Let's consider the following situation:
I sell 1000 cookies a week. I have the capacity to sell 2,000 cookies a week. The market will buy 20,000 cookies a week. The remaining 19,000 are bought from my competitors. One of my rivals sells 1,000 a week. Through good marketing and salesmanship, and what not, I manage to take 500 sales from my rival. My rival's budget won't survive selling just 500, so he goes bust. I then take over his whole market share, now I'm selling at my maximum capacity of 2,000 a week. I use the increased profits to buy more equipment and increase my capacity to 4,000 a week, and start looking at my next rival. The process repeats until I have a large share, or all, of the market. Now I'm selling 20,000 cookies a week, 20 times more than before, and my profits are much higher.
Without wanting to defeat my rivals, I'd still be selling a thousand a week. What's wrong with that, you ask? Surely I was making a nice bit of money, and enjoyed the work. Well, yes, I might enjoy making cookies. A few dozen a week for my family and friends. But a thousand? For complete strangers? 18 hours a day? That's not fun, that's work, the only reason I was doing it was to make money. If I'm making money doing something, I may as well make as much as possible. That's the difference between success and medeocrity.
It's called 'ambition'. All successful companies got that way due to ambition and growth.
The opposite of ambition is resting on your laurels. If Microsoft had done that, it'd still be just Gates and Ballmer writing BASIC compilers with no money. Instead they have tens of billions.
How do you know Longhorn doesn't have a bunch of cool, unannounced features?
Because if they had any, Microsoft would have marketed the shit out of them. You don't increase your sales by releasing disappointing screenshots and announcing to the world your new operating system won't have anything special. Microsoft are clued in when it comes to marketing, if they had anything to crow about you wouldn't be able to hear yourself think for the noise.
Microsoft are only dominant on desktop computers, not really anywhere else. This last bit is the most vulnerable to Apple, and maybe Linux if it gets its act together.
In the server world Microsoft is just another player. Google has the search engine market wrapped up. IE is on the downfall thanks to Firefox, and doesn't really bring Microsoft any revenue anyway. Exchange servers? Maybe, but that's small fry to Microsoft, and will disappear when Windows crashes out of the server market.
Re:Then how is the production funded? (Corrected)
on
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This is the key point. Refer to Star Wreck, The new voyages of Star Trek, and other shows referenced by others in this thread.
What the hell are those? Never heard of them. Are they like that kid with the light sabre?
Once the cost of production drops enough- you do NOT NEED a production company to make a show.
Whoever's making it ARE the production company. Whoever's making it will have costs, and will want to get something out of it.
The original which was created on a tiny budget (and probably wouldn't be made with that small a budget - even adjusted for inflation-
I think you're underestimating how much it cost. I bet that relative to the amount spent on films when Star Wars was made, it was astronomically expensive.
0$ to develop on Windows? Well, Mac costs $149 for the OS license to develop for. Windows costs 299 plus the price of ms visual.. that is pretty expensive.
As far as I'm aware, with QT you still need to have an operating system to run it on. Once you've got Windows it's free to program for it. With QT, you're paying $5,000.
I don't really agree with that. Last time I looked, you don't need to pay anything to program for Windows, or with GTK. If I was writing a Windows app, I wouldn't use QT, I'd use native widgets. It'd run on more systems and would look less 'out of place'. On Linux, unless I was writing really expensive software, and QT was so much better than GTK that it'd save me even more money than I spent on it, I'd use GTK.
For $5,000 I'd rather have some flat-screen monitors or more powerful computers.
No because the Panda would be out of action because the tyres are a bit suspect. Schumacher would still go and complete the race just by himself anyway.
- transmitting morse code is done using the equipment the guy used, transmitting text messages is done using the equipment the boy used.
Except, a morse code machine is of no real use in a real world situation. "Hang on, I'll just get the mobile morse machine out of my pocket and send a text message to someone on other end of this cable which I've draped along the floor everywhere I go." I can't see that working out.
It would probably be more effecient even than morse code to use a computer keyboard, but it's completely irrelevent as in a text-messaging situation a keyboard is rarely available. The same goes for a morse code machine.
So what you are saying is, when someone has sold the rights to something, they should still have the rights to it?
Re:Then how is the production funded? (Corrected)
on
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· Score: 1
The results are surprising, as at least six boxed sets have topped one million copies sold:
Bear in mind, those are HUGE successful programmes, not some obscure thing sent over the Internet. Something that's seen over the Internet would probably barely make 10,000.
Okay- consider the article and read my post again. There IS NO STUDIO. There is NO $6 going to a studio.
So like I said, the programme just appears out of thin air? Presumably, someone will be MAKING the programmes.
Because they have astronomical profits. The costs have grown to match the profits.
You're a fucking conspiracy theorist. Costs don't go down just because you're not making much money. It just means you're bankrupted.
Let's get this straight. If 50,000 people download my show that were not going to/able to buy my show anyway- I lost nothing. If 500 of them decide- "hey this rocks" and they come and buy a copy from me - I gained 500 customers at zero cost.
And you've just lost 50,000 because they've all decided that you don't care whether they download it, so you've legitimised piracy. 500 customers don't keep your programme afloat.
I really don't think so. Most of the costs are on people or their time.
So you're going to make programmes with no people which take no time to make? People will still want a cut of the profits. Or if they're more clued-in, a cut of the gross revenue.
A lot of acting consists of standing in front of a green screen and everything else is laid in later. You don't actually GO to a mountain to act any more.
And when you do that, you end up with star wars. But without the marketing and huge special effects budget, it would crash and burn. Horribly.
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Under $200? Guess what else is under $200? An ENTIRE FUCKING CONSOLE AND SEVERAL GAMES. Come out of your 'rich, single, FPS-fanatic' bubble and see that in the real world, it's not reasonable to spend a week's wages to give your grimy corridors a few more frames per second.
In two years, most people won't have upgraded their PCs. The dot-com era's over. These new consoles will be better than most PCs, and the PCs will probably get upgraded even less often than the consoles.
PC gaming doesn't seem to innovate much. For all their crowing about superior graphics and playability, PC gamers generally just play first-person shooters with nothing to do but walk around shooting monsters. And the graphics aren't much either. £300 for a graphics card and all you get is a mouldy basement or a dark corridor. I can get that at home thanks. Good graphics are not about pixels or frame rates or fancy lighting, no more than painting is about expensive paints. I'd rather play a console game with colourful vibrant graphics, even if they're not 1600x1200 and 80 fps.
It could be used for any game, not just FPS games. It definitely has the possibility to make games more immersive and much more open-ended, giving you millions of more possible things to do.
Although in reailty, it'll probably just get used to make more impressive explosions in otherwise shallow games. And it will be very slow if you want very accurate physics.
Fast cars and cookers are useful, without them we couldn't do much at all. What benefit is there to not wearing a helmet? It doesn't look good? Bikes are hardly a safe form of transport. Coming off a bike head-first onto the pavement at 15mph will put you in a coma. Helmets are sensible. Grow up, you're not a badass rebel because you don't like safety equipment, you're just an idiot. Do you hate seatbelts with the same passion? Or fuses?
I'm all for making money, but $20 for a DOS programme which lets you launch commands from a menu rather than typing them? Is that a typo?
I'd sooner make a directory and fill it with simple-named batch files which launch my favourite programmes.
Unfortuanately it's Star Wars...
Seriously though, the problem with space simulators is that space isn't actually very interesting. The distances are huge, the speeds have very high variance, no friction so it takes ages to slow down, especially as you can reach stupidly high speeds meaning you miss your destination by a mile. Unless you put a million cities on each planet, flying around them isn't going to be much fun because they're so damn big.
You can't feasibly go inter-steller without some sort of 'warp' type system, it's 3D so navigation is exponentially harder, not to mention combat being incredibly hard to get your head around. Then you have the relative speeds to think about. You're flying from A to B, you know your speed relative to C, which way are you actually going? And which way should you be pointing? And is your momentum going to keep you in this direction for another ten million miles even if you turn round?
A good space simulator would decrease the distances between the stars/planets, so you could cruise around without needing autopilots or hyper-drives. And combat would consist mainly of guided-missiles or auto-aiming lasers (not pointing your ship directly at your opponent with the keyboard like in Elite). Yeah it wouldn't be too realistic, but a fully realistic space game would be like 2001: A Space Oddysey, except all you can do is sit there watching it float along for several years.
Although if pulled off, it could be spectacular. For all its faults, I like playing Elite II, shooting the ship at the space port then chasing it through the upper atmosphere. The curving planet below, the vastness of space above, the pale atmosphere in between, with two spaceships fighting each other at tens of thousands of times the speed of sound.
Although today everyone just wants to make first-person shooters, driving games and adrenaline-free MMORPGs.
Then they will get into all those features that the new architecture gives them, and be excited to be the first to make a game that has realistic crumbling concrete when the tank slams into a wall, or whatever else they decide to do.
What's the point in all these new processors etc. when the games are going to be as boring as before, but with better graphics and more realism? The game industry is stagnant thanks to all those geeks buying first-person shooters even when they're just like the game before it but with different lighting.
I'm afraid you're incorrect. Sweat cools you because the sweat molecules carry heat and leave the body. It is only endothermic if the vapour goes away. If it goes back, it brings the heat back.
No, these are famous last words: "It's ok, I'm on the pill."
No, didn't get a word of that.
I'm in the UK, getting constantly bombarded with propaganda from the BBC to buy a digital set-top box for 'only' £100. So I did. And I'm not impressed.
You have a little box next to the TV. It takes up yet another power socket, and it plugs into the TV via a scart lead. The aerial plugs into the box. Then you turn on the TV, and the digital box replaces your TV with a digital version. It's like normal TV, only slower.
Instead of channel changes being instant, they take quite a few seconds. If the channel comes up at all. It's a bit like Sky, as in you get a little box at the bottom telling you what's on, and what channel it is etc. Except it's nowhere near as good. It's like a dodgy Sky box off the market. The interface is slow and crap, it's rarely accurate, rather than the fast pace of Sky, this makes browsing through the channels feel like crawling through cement. It's ugly as well, like using a ZX Spectrum to watch TV.
The TV guide features is slower and less featureful than Sky, and full of gaps. Most of the schedule is blank. The picture is often shaky or blurry. If you accidently go onto a channel which doesn't exist (which is a lot, half the channels are blank), it tries to load it, which takes a while, and getting off takes about 5-10 seconds.
And on top of all that, it comes with another remote control. Which of course doesn't offer all the features of your TV, so you have two remote controls. Even with all the faults, you only get a few more channels. There's E4 which seems to show American sitcoms in perpetuation. There are a couple of extra BBC channels which show nothing because they only run for a few hours per evening.
Although the other night I got a couple of episodes of Phoenix Nights, albeit on a blurry picture. Which goes to show you don't really need digital TV, quality shines through whether it's on a crisp digital picture or a shitty analogue one.
If you want digital, get Sky digital, it's like terrestrial digital, but done right. By people who actually know what they're doing. The interface done is properly, and you get all the proper channels, like Sky 1, the Sports and the film channels.
When this vapourised mass evaporates into space in a vacuum, where does it go? Nowhere, so gravity drags it back, applying its heat back to the mass. Therefore there is no overall temperature change.
Also you're assuming there is no heat source in the centre of the body. This would keep it at a liquid state, with a thin vapour atmosphere. Imagine if a liquid methane planet crashed into a liquid oxygen planet. And someone lit a match!
Well, if that makes you more successful, then yes. Let's consider the following situation:
I sell 1000 cookies a week.
I have the capacity to sell 2,000 cookies a week.
The market will buy 20,000 cookies a week.
The remaining 19,000 are bought from my competitors.
One of my rivals sells 1,000 a week.
Through good marketing and salesmanship, and what not, I manage to take 500 sales from my rival.
My rival's budget won't survive selling just 500, so he goes bust.
I then take over his whole market share, now I'm selling at my maximum capacity of 2,000 a week.
I use the increased profits to buy more equipment and increase my capacity to 4,000 a week, and start looking at my next rival.
The process repeats until I have a large share, or all, of the market.
Now I'm selling 20,000 cookies a week, 20 times more than before, and my profits are much higher.
Without wanting to defeat my rivals, I'd still be selling a thousand a week. What's wrong with that, you ask? Surely I was making a nice bit of money, and enjoyed the work. Well, yes, I might enjoy making cookies. A few dozen a week for my family and friends. But a thousand? For complete strangers? 18 hours a day? That's not fun, that's work, the only reason I was doing it was to make money. If I'm making money doing something, I may as well make as much as possible. That's the difference between success and medeocrity.
It's called 'ambition'. All successful companies got that way due to ambition and growth.
The opposite of ambition is resting on your laurels. If Microsoft had done that, it'd still be just Gates and Ballmer writing BASIC compilers with no money. Instead they have tens of billions.
How do you know Longhorn doesn't have a bunch of cool, unannounced features?
Because if they had any, Microsoft would have marketed the shit out of them. You don't increase your sales by releasing disappointing screenshots and announcing to the world your new operating system won't have anything special. Microsoft are clued in when it comes to marketing, if they had anything to crow about you wouldn't be able to hear yourself think for the noise.
Microsoft are only dominant on desktop computers, not really anywhere else. This last bit is the most vulnerable to Apple, and maybe Linux if it gets its act together.
In the server world Microsoft is just another player. Google has the search engine market wrapped up. IE is on the downfall thanks to Firefox, and doesn't really bring Microsoft any revenue anyway. Exchange servers? Maybe, but that's small fry to Microsoft, and will disappear when Windows crashes out of the server market.
This is the key point. Refer to Star Wreck, The new voyages of Star Trek, and other shows referenced by others in this thread.
What the hell are those? Never heard of them. Are they like that kid with the light sabre?
Once the cost of production drops enough- you do NOT NEED a production company to make a show.
Whoever's making it ARE the production company. Whoever's making it will have costs, and will want to get something out of it.
The original which was created on a tiny budget (and probably wouldn't be made with that small a budget - even adjusted for inflation-
I think you're underestimating how much it cost. I bet that relative to the amount spent on films when Star Wars was made, it was astronomically expensive.
0$ to develop on Windows? Well, Mac costs $149 for the OS license to develop for. Windows costs 299 plus the price of ms visual.. that is pretty expensive.
As far as I'm aware, with QT you still need to have an operating system to run it on. Once you've got Windows it's free to program for it. With QT, you're paying $5,000.
I don't really agree with that. Last time I looked, you don't need to pay anything to program for Windows, or with GTK. If I was writing a Windows app, I wouldn't use QT, I'd use native widgets. It'd run on more systems and would look less 'out of place'. On Linux, unless I was writing really expensive software, and QT was so much better than GTK that it'd save me even more money than I spent on it, I'd use GTK.
For $5,000 I'd rather have some flat-screen monitors or more powerful computers.
Right, because you did it in how long??
I did a similar thing to this, but I used different code. I did it in seven minutes, and that includes the time it took to drink the tea.
No because the Panda would be out of action because the tyres are a bit suspect. Schumacher would still go and complete the race just by himself anyway.
- transmitting morse code is done using the equipment the guy used, transmitting text messages is done using the equipment the boy used.
Except, a morse code machine is of no real use in a real world situation. "Hang on, I'll just get the mobile morse machine out of my pocket and send a text message to someone on other end of this cable which I've draped along the floor everywhere I go." I can't see that working out.
It would probably be more effecient even than morse code to use a computer keyboard, but it's completely irrelevent as in a text-messaging situation a keyboard is rarely available. The same goes for a morse code machine.
What do standards matter on code that makes no difference to the resulting program, and that no-one needs to read?
So what you are saying is, when someone has sold the rights to something, they should still have the rights to it?
The results are surprising, as at least six boxed sets have topped one million copies sold:
Bear in mind, those are HUGE successful programmes, not some obscure thing sent over the Internet. Something that's seen over the Internet would probably barely make 10,000.
Okay- consider the article and read my post again. There IS NO STUDIO. There is NO $6 going to a studio.
So like I said, the programme just appears out of thin air? Presumably, someone will be MAKING the programmes.
Because they have astronomical profits. The costs have grown to match the profits.
You're a fucking conspiracy theorist. Costs don't go down just because you're not making much money. It just means you're bankrupted.
Let's get this straight. If 50,000 people download my show that were not going to/able to buy my show anyway- I lost nothing. If 500 of them decide- "hey this rocks" and they come and buy a copy from me - I gained 500 customers at zero cost.
And you've just lost 50,000 because they've all decided that you don't care whether they download it, so you've legitimised piracy. 500 customers don't keep your programme afloat.
I really don't think so. Most of the costs are on people or their time.
So you're going to make programmes with no people which take no time to make? People will still want a cut of the profits. Or if they're more clued-in, a cut of the gross revenue.
A lot of acting consists of standing in front of a green screen and everything else is laid in later. You don't actually GO to a mountain to act any more.
And when you do that, you end up with star wars. But without the marketing and huge special effects budget, it would crash and burn. Horribly.