they can bloat their games all they want, hire bad programmers with no concept of efficiency, and still come out ahead.
Yeah, because bloated code runs *so* well in a modern game engine. I mean, with a 3GHz chip, you could just as easily write Doom 3 using VB or Perl! It's not like collision detection, physics, AI, positional sound, sending data to the graphics card and such take any amount of CPU power...
This is just one of the dumbest and most often repeated memes I see on Slashdot. "better capacity = more bloat".
When you have models comprised of several thousand polygons and levels built out of several million, you have to store it *somewhere*. When you have hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes of textures, they have to go somewhere. When you have CD-quality-or-better audio along with tons of recorded voice-overs, they have to go somewhere. When you have prerendered video streams at DVD-quality-or-better it has to go somewhere.
The code to manipulate all of it is still probably only on the order of 10 megabytes or so after compilation, though. And that's on a project that (typically) has upwards of a million lines of code.
But, yeah, I suppose you're right. It's all just bloated and inefficient programmers/artists.
Oh -- and your sig is also one of the dumbest I've read. Fits well with your post.
Pokemon, Mario vs. Donkey Kong, the Golden Sun series, Advance Wars, Fire Emblem, Metroid Fusion/Zero Mission, Zelda: Four Swords... I'm sure I'm missing some.
There are plenty of original games out there. I'll agree that there are a lot of remakes (SMB 2/3, Mario World/Yoshi's Island, Kirby's Nightmare in Dreamland, Link to the past, Famicom Mini series), but when you consider that many of them are over 15 years old, and that many of Nintendo's customers weren't even *alive* when those games were first released, I think it makes perfect sense to re-release some of these old classics.
Personally, I think it's great that these games are being made available again. Most of them have stood the test of time very well. I think it's a good thing for new young players to see some of modern video gaming's roots.
Want to know when it changed in society, where this mindshare paradign to "humans are the inventory, too" shifted? Exactly when we stopped being called "personel" and got turned into "human resources"
That, and when we switched from "customers" to "consumers".
emulation layer... play Playstation/Playstation2 titles as well... they're moving to a RISC processor, so it shouldn't be all THAT hard
Obviously stated by someone who has no clue what either RISC means, or how emulation works.
Here's a hint: pretty much every processor made in the last 10-15 years has had a RISC core. Yes, that includes Intel and AMD's offerings that just provide a translation stage between the CISC instruction sets and the RISC core.
can bet they'd have had better luck if the N64 had been backwards compatible with the SNES.
Yeah, as opposed to the PlayStation, which was backwards compatible with what again? I love when people cite historical evidence that backward compatibility is so important, but then leave out systems that weren't backwards compatible -- which, incidentally, make up the vast majority of successful consoles. (PS1, NES, SNES, Genesis, Atari 2600, N64, original Gameboy, Gamecube, XBox)
The Atari 7800 was backwards compatible, how'd it do? The PS2 was backwards compatible, how'd it do? I'd say that backwards compatible consoles have a roughly 50% chance of success, based on historical evidence. (yes -- I'm ignoring the Gameboy. Up it to 75% if you insist on equating it to a home console.)
If the Bills vs. Oilers playoff game from about a decade ago, in which backup quarterback Frank Reich led the Bills to the greatest comeback in NFL history, were available to purcahse, I'd pick it up in a heartbeat.
And I'm really not much of a football fan. I'm sure that bigger fans have plenty of games that they'd be interested in seeing again. And if you don't think there's a large market of NFL fans, you're deluding yourself. Maybe you don't see them at LAN parties, but somebody has to pay for those multi million dollar contracts.
So you think that the support cost of the Macs is going to be $0?
And 26 part time techs? At my old job as a PC lab admin, we supported roughly 700 Windows NT 4 PCs. There were 7 of us. All part time. We also had 3 Mac guys that took care of about 100 Macs. Again, part time.
In all fairness, we did rely on Novell for network booting and application distribution, and the Novell systems were administered by 2 full time and 1 part time staff. So that ups the total to 10 admins for 700 Windows machines. We also relied on network availability (4 network guys), but on a campus with 7k nodes adding a few dozen switches for some lab machines isn't much of a chore.
But again, you think that the Mac support is $0? Please.
Investors will get scared if the government doesn't protect old copyrights as much as they do new copyrights
There is no place for investors (read: people looking to make a quick buck) in the creation of art.
Actually, in that light, I say set copyrights to 3 years. That way we can be sure that the only people involved in art are (gasp!) artists. Let the NEA do its job and get big business and wealthy middlemen out of the game.
Comparing the number of games in development vs. the number of games available at launch is meaningless.
So the GBA had 15 titles at launch -- does anyone honestly believe that there weren't already dozens more already in development? Or are we to believe that developers were taking a 'wait and see' approach, and only started new projects *after* the release of the GBA.
Sony loves to play these numbers games. 66 million polygons/second! (with no game simulation running)... (or any lighting)... (or textures)... (and they must be rendered as a single triangle strip). What amazes me is that anyone still listens to them.
Well, that's a great quote and all, but it completely misses the point.
Note: I personally see nothing morally wrong with taking a copy of, say, Photoshop for personal use. It costs too much to justify a purchase. And besides that, software companies who provide things that people want, for the most part, are doing well enough despite their claims of rampant piracy.
However, this quote has nothing to do with Photoshop. Photoshop isn't an idea. It's a product. People worked to create it, and need to be compensated somehow so that they can continue to work on it.
Now, if you were talking about *features* of Photoshop, and instead referenced the quote to gimp's copying of said 'features,' -- that'd be more appropriate. Those are ideas that can be copied and improved upon.
Similarly, a song is not an 'idea,' nor is a movie an 'idea.' The Matrix's bullet time effect was an idea. As before, I don't personally have a problem with making copies of these, but it's not for the reasons stated in that quote. This quote doesn't justify copying 'intellectual property' (I use that term loosely) in any way.
Except it doesn't place any limit on the number of guesses you get, and doesn't even count how many times you've guessed. So someone who guesses the number in one try gets the same 'reward' as someone who wins in 1 hojillion tries.
You could just as easily use a linear search to win this game. Furthermore, the most inefficient algorithm imaginable would still win the game every time, so long as the algorithm covers the entire search space.
Not only that, it accepts numbers 100.
I guess they don't want to alienate voters by making it too difficult or warning them that they tried invalid guesses.
(That's way too much analysis for such a pointless waste-of-time game...)
Because they have the money to. Yes, it's a form of socialism.
Third, the Death Tax is designed to drain away the fortunes of the inherited wealthy. (Generation after generation). Doesn't jive with the Republicans-help-the-rich mantra, does it?
Which is why Bush repealed the death tax. Sorta jives with the 'Republicans-help-the-rich' mantra, doesn't it?
As for the 'top 20%' of earners, I'd have to look around to see where the 20% cutoff is, but it's certainly not people who need the lion's share (> 70%) of the tax breaks. I'd guess that it's helping more people afford a second boat or summer home than create more jobs.
Me? I pay my taxes and still make enough to live quite comfortably. I have no problems with some of my taxes going to welfare recipients. I also have no problem with my taxes funding parks for me to visit, roads for me to drive on, schools and universities for myself and my kids, and on and on.
I do have a problem with the wealthy elite who see fit to attempt to try to deny these things from the unwashed masses -- regardless of the fact that the unwashed masses were the ones they ultimately made their fortunes from to begin with.
Yeah, like Clinton. That bastard lied about getting a BJ in the oval office. Now *that's* the kind of crook that deserves impeachment.
This small-potatoes stuff that Bush is responsible for -- simply acting on someone else's screw ups in intelligence or policy -- how can you fault a president for something like that? He's a very busy man -- the president of the US for chrissakes; he could never possibly be expected check things out for himself.
'without regard to facts' does not necessarily mean 'false.' So in that regard, you don't necessarily have to lie or even be incorrect to spread propaganda.
The statement: 'driving is unsafe! Thousands of people die in car crashes each year!' is clearly true, but also clearly propaganda when used in the context of, say, an anti-driving campaign. It doesn't take into account the millions of people who *don't* die. It doesn't take into account the people who would die anyway using an alternate form of transportation.
By the definition you just gave, you can build an entirely factual argument that's still propaganda, so long as it disregards important facts that would be the basis of a rebuttal or counter-argument. It's especially true when, upon convincing someone your propaganda is true, you also convince them that anything that disagrees with your propaganda is automatically wrong. ("you're either with us or against us!", "to question the administration is un-American!")
I'd expect/. to be one of few places that might harbor people that respect games like bridge, but apparently I'm overestimating the readership.
I've been playing for about 5 years. At this point I've learned that there's *so* much to learn about the game that I can never expect to know everything.
It's a very refreshing change from, say, computer games of the multiplayer RTS/FPS variety, because ultimately there are a very finite set of strategies that work well. After playing for a month or two, it's mostly a matter of refining your play.
I love video games, but bridge is the only game that's kept me playing continuously for the past 5 years. Not only for the mental challenge, but also for the social aspect. It's cool hanging around with some of my old college professors and beating them every once in a while.
Whatever happened to intellectual hobbies? I find it frustrating that I can't find anyone my age (mid 20s) interested in picking up a deck of cards unless it's some mindless drinking game. I work with a lot of intelligent people, but the closest any of their interests come to bridge is Warhammer 40k.
It's *so* much easier to deal a deck of cards (or 2, or 3, depending on how many people are playing) than setting up a LAN party. Why is it so much harder to find 3 people to play bridge than it is to find 10 to play Quake 3?
Console controllers are generally laid out so that every button is either mapped directly to a finger, or a very short movement from a 'resting' position.
How is this different than what you just described?
--Jeremy
Re:Replace it with a key labelled [help]
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
·
· Score: 1
I dunno. I think if your system is so loaded that it's having trouble responding to human-triggered interrupts, you're pretty much screwed whether the handler is 1000 cycles or 10000 cycles long.
Well, also keep in mind that the Gamecube has a relatively large and very fast video memory buffer, along with S3 texture compression, giving it roughly a 12:1 compression ratio. That frees up a ton of memory space and bandwidth for extra geometry. Of course, if they go the same route as many developers and "optimze for PS2, port to 'Cube," those capabilities will probably be ignored anyway.
Also, the 1T-SRAM doesn't have the burst bandwidth that the PS2's memory does, but it does have nearly non-existant latency.
If the anecdote about the ex-Rare employee is true, it sounds to me more like a case of sour grapes than anything else.
How would someone make money as a game developer if it were perfectly legal to download and distribute any game you wanted? And don't tell me "by drawing in web site hits for things that people would pay for," because then we'd end up with but "punch the monkey" and its variants.
And what if I'm a PC repair tech? Say someone needs me to install Windows on their box for them. I can download a free copy and install it, but then I need to pay Microsoft because I made money with their software? How do you explain that to a customer? "Umm, well, my 2 hours of time come to $80, and that'll be another $200 for the Windows license." "What? Why wasn't Windows free?"
As it is, it's already possible to get a "free" copy of any Microsoft or Adobe product off the 'net.
Slashdot Mirror
The fees that people pay for Xbox Live help pay for the development of new content.
No, they don't. They go towards maintainence of the XBox Live service itself. Tecmo probably didn't see a penny from XBox Live subscriptions.
While I probably won't boycott them outright, I will confess that I'll most definitely pause whenever I see one of their titles on the shelf.
:)
Ouch! That's gotta hurt their bottom line.
--Jeremy
they can bloat their games all they want, hire bad programmers with no concept of efficiency, and still come out ahead.
...
Yeah, because bloated code runs *so* well in a modern game engine. I mean, with a 3GHz chip, you could just as easily write Doom 3 using VB or Perl! It's not like collision detection, physics, AI, positional sound, sending data to the graphics card and such take any amount of CPU power
This is just one of the dumbest and most often repeated memes I see on Slashdot. "better capacity = more bloat".
When you have models comprised of several thousand polygons and levels built out of several million, you have to store it *somewhere*. When you have hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes of textures, they have to go somewhere. When you have CD-quality-or-better audio along with tons of recorded voice-overs, they have to go somewhere. When you have prerendered video streams at DVD-quality-or-better it has to go somewhere.
The code to manipulate all of it is still probably only on the order of 10 megabytes or so after compilation, though. And that's on a project that (typically) has upwards of a million lines of code.
But, yeah, I suppose you're right. It's all just bloated and inefficient programmers/artists.
Oh -- and your sig is also one of the dumbest I've read. Fits well with your post.
--Jeremy
Pokemon, Mario vs. Donkey Kong, the Golden Sun series, Advance Wars, Fire Emblem, Metroid Fusion/Zero Mission, Zelda: Four Swords... I'm sure I'm missing some.
There are plenty of original games out there. I'll agree that there are a lot of remakes (SMB 2/3, Mario World/Yoshi's Island, Kirby's Nightmare in Dreamland, Link to the past, Famicom Mini series), but when you consider that many of them are over 15 years old, and that many of Nintendo's customers weren't even *alive* when those games were first released, I think it makes perfect sense to re-release some of these old classics.
Personally, I think it's great that these games are being made available again. Most of them have stood the test of time very well. I think it's a good thing for new young players to see some of modern video gaming's roots.
--Jeremy
Want to know when it changed in society, where this mindshare paradign to "humans are the inventory, too" shifted? Exactly when we stopped being called "personel" and got turned into "human resources"
That, and when we switched from "customers" to "consumers".
--Jeremy
emulation layer ... play Playstation/Playstation2 titles as well... they're moving to a RISC processor, so it shouldn't be all THAT hard
Obviously stated by someone who has no clue what either RISC means, or how emulation works.
Here's a hint: pretty much every processor made in the last 10-15 years has had a RISC core. Yes, that includes Intel and AMD's offerings that just provide a translation stage between the CISC instruction sets and the RISC core.
can bet they'd have had better luck if the N64 had been backwards compatible with the SNES.
Yeah, as opposed to the PlayStation, which was backwards compatible with what again? I love when people cite historical evidence that backward compatibility is so important, but then leave out systems that weren't backwards compatible -- which, incidentally, make up the vast majority of successful consoles. (PS1, NES, SNES, Genesis, Atari 2600, N64, original Gameboy, Gamecube, XBox)
The Atari 7800 was backwards compatible, how'd it do? The PS2 was backwards compatible, how'd it do? I'd say that backwards compatible consoles have a roughly 50% chance of success, based on historical evidence. (yes -- I'm ignoring the Gameboy. Up it to 75% if you insist on equating it to a home console.)
--Jeremy
If the Bills vs. Oilers playoff game from about a decade ago, in which backup quarterback Frank Reich led the Bills to the greatest comeback in NFL history, were available to purcahse, I'd pick it up in a heartbeat.
And I'm really not much of a football fan. I'm sure that bigger fans have plenty of games that they'd be interested in seeing again. And if you don't think there's a large market of NFL fans, you're deluding yourself. Maybe you don't see them at LAN parties, but somebody has to pay for those multi million dollar contracts.
--Jeremy
So you think that the support cost of the Macs is going to be $0?
And 26 part time techs? At my old job as a PC lab admin, we supported roughly 700 Windows NT 4 PCs. There were 7 of us. All part time. We also had 3 Mac guys that took care of about 100 Macs. Again, part time.
In all fairness, we did rely on Novell for network booting and application distribution, and the Novell systems were administered by 2 full time and 1 part time staff. So that ups the total to 10 admins for 700 Windows machines. We also relied on network availability (4 network guys), but on a campus with 7k nodes adding a few dozen switches for some lab machines isn't much of a chore.
But again, you think that the Mac support is $0? Please.
--Jeremy
Investors will get scared if the government doesn't protect old copyrights as much as they do new copyrights
There is no place for investors (read: people looking to make a quick buck) in the creation of art.
Actually, in that light, I say set copyrights to 3 years. That way we can be sure that the only people involved in art are (gasp!) artists. Let the NEA do its job and get big business and wealthy middlemen out of the game.
--Jeremy
Comparing the number of games in development vs. the number of games available at launch is meaningless.
... (or any lighting) ... (or textures) ... (and they must be rendered as a single triangle strip). What amazes me is that anyone still listens to them.
So the GBA had 15 titles at launch -- does anyone honestly believe that there weren't already dozens more already in development? Or are we to believe that developers were taking a 'wait and see' approach, and only started new projects *after* the release of the GBA.
Sony loves to play these numbers games. 66 million polygons/second! (with no game simulation running)
--Jeremy
You are too stupid. I wish there was an exam to get access to the Internet. YOU WOULD FAIL, MORON!!!
You'd fail that test too.
The 'social skills' part, that is.
--Jeremy
Well, that's a great quote and all, but it completely misses the point.
Note: I personally see nothing morally wrong with taking a copy of, say, Photoshop for personal use. It costs too much to justify a purchase. And besides that, software companies who provide things that people want, for the most part, are doing well enough despite their claims of rampant piracy.
However, this quote has nothing to do with Photoshop. Photoshop isn't an idea. It's a product. People worked to create it, and need to be compensated somehow so that they can continue to work on it.
Now, if you were talking about *features* of Photoshop, and instead referenced the quote to gimp's copying of said 'features,' -- that'd be more appropriate. Those are ideas that can be copied and improved upon.
Similarly, a song is not an 'idea,' nor is a movie an 'idea.' The Matrix's bullet time effect was an idea. As before, I don't personally have a problem with making copies of these, but it's not for the reasons stated in that quote. This quote doesn't justify copying 'intellectual property' (I use that term loosely) in any way.
--Jeremy
Completely offtopic, but:
... why?
Not to mention the vast amount of screen real estate the VS steals for toolbars you'll use maybe twice a year.
You had me until this.
You can't figure out how to get rid of unused toolbars? I should be taking your advice on choosing a development environment
--Jeremy
When in reality, it's that they are waged by leaders with the reasoning capacity of 13 year olds...
--Jeremy
Except it doesn't place any limit on the number of guesses you get, and doesn't even count how many times you've guessed. So someone who guesses the number in one try gets the same 'reward' as someone who wins in 1 hojillion tries.
You could just as easily use a linear search to win this game. Furthermore, the most inefficient algorithm imaginable would still win the game every time, so long as the algorithm covers the entire search space.
Not only that, it accepts numbers 100.
I guess they don't want to alienate voters by making it too difficult or warning them that they tried invalid guesses.
(That's way too much analysis for such a pointless waste-of-time game...)
--Jeremy
They pay almost all the taxes, after all.
Because they have the money to. Yes, it's a form of socialism.
Third, the Death Tax is designed to drain away the fortunes of the inherited wealthy. (Generation after generation). Doesn't jive with the Republicans-help-the-rich mantra, does it?
Which is why Bush repealed the death tax. Sorta jives with the 'Republicans-help-the-rich' mantra, doesn't it?
As for the 'top 20%' of earners, I'd have to look around to see where the 20% cutoff is, but it's certainly not people who need the lion's share (> 70%) of the tax breaks. I'd guess that it's helping more people afford a second boat or summer home than create more jobs.
Me? I pay my taxes and still make enough to live quite comfortably. I have no problems with some of my taxes going to welfare recipients. I also have no problem with my taxes funding parks for me to visit, roads for me to drive on, schools and universities for myself and my kids, and on and on.
I do have a problem with the wealthy elite who see fit to attempt to try to deny these things from the unwashed masses -- regardless of the fact that the unwashed masses were the ones they ultimately made their fortunes from to begin with.
--Jeremy
Yeah, like Clinton. That bastard lied about getting a BJ in the oval office. Now *that's* the kind of crook that deserves impeachment.
This small-potatoes stuff that Bush is responsible for -- simply acting on someone else's screw ups in intelligence or policy -- how can you fault a president for something like that? He's a very busy man -- the president of the US for chrissakes; he could never possibly be expected check things out for himself.
--Jeremy
'without regard to facts' does not necessarily mean 'false.' So in that regard, you don't necessarily have to lie or even be incorrect to spread propaganda.
The statement: 'driving is unsafe! Thousands of people die in car crashes each year!' is clearly true, but also clearly propaganda when used in the context of, say, an anti-driving campaign. It doesn't take into account the millions of people who *don't* die. It doesn't take into account the people who would die anyway using an alternate form of transportation.
By the definition you just gave, you can build an entirely factual argument that's still propaganda, so long as it disregards important facts that would be the basis of a rebuttal or counter-argument. It's especially true when, upon convincing someone your propaganda is true, you also convince them that anything that disagrees with your propaganda is automatically wrong. ("you're either with us or against us!", "to question the administration is un-American!")
--Jeremy
I'd expect /. to be one of few places that might harbor people that respect games like bridge, but apparently I'm overestimating the readership.
I've been playing for about 5 years. At this point I've learned that there's *so* much to learn about the game that I can never expect to know everything.
It's a very refreshing change from, say, computer games of the multiplayer RTS/FPS variety, because ultimately there are a very finite set of strategies that work well. After playing for a month or two, it's mostly a matter of refining your play.
I love video games, but bridge is the only game that's kept me playing continuously for the past 5 years. Not only for the mental challenge, but also for the social aspect. It's cool hanging around with some of my old college professors and beating them every once in a while.
Whatever happened to intellectual hobbies? I find it frustrating that I can't find anyone my age (mid 20s) interested in picking up a deck of cards unless it's some mindless drinking game. I work with a lot of intelligent people, but the closest any of their interests come to bridge is Warhammer 40k.
It's *so* much easier to deal a deck of cards (or 2, or 3, depending on how many people are playing) than setting up a LAN party. Why is it so much harder to find 3 people to play bridge than it is to find 10 to play Quake 3?
--Jeremy
There's no reason they couldn't make the HTML rendering engine a separate component
Umm, they did.
--Jeremy
The signal would disappear if nobody paid for it.
If nobody's willing to pay for it, maybe it's not that much of a loss?
--Jeremy
Console controllers are generally laid out so that every button is either mapped directly to a finger, or a very short movement from a 'resting' position.
How is this different than what you just described?
--Jeremy
I dunno. I think if your system is so loaded that it's having trouble responding to human-triggered interrupts, you're pretty much screwed whether the handler is 1000 cycles or 10000 cycles long.
--Jeremy
Well, also keep in mind that the Gamecube has a relatively large and very fast video memory buffer, along with S3 texture compression, giving it roughly a 12:1 compression ratio. That frees up a ton of memory space and bandwidth for extra geometry. Of course, if they go the same route as many developers and "optimze for PS2, port to 'Cube," those capabilities will probably be ignored anyway.
Also, the 1T-SRAM doesn't have the burst bandwidth that the PS2's memory does, but it does have nearly non-existant latency.
If the anecdote about the ex-Rare employee is true, it sounds to me more like a case of sour grapes than anything else.
--Jeremy
Ok, you provide 2 decent, but naive examples.
How would someone make money as a game developer if it were perfectly legal to download and distribute any game you wanted? And don't tell me "by drawing in web site hits for things that people would pay for," because then we'd end up with but "punch the monkey" and its variants.
And what if I'm a PC repair tech? Say someone needs me to install Windows on their box for them. I can download a free copy and install it, but then I need to pay Microsoft because I made money with their software? How do you explain that to a customer? "Umm, well, my 2 hours of time come to $80, and that'll be another $200 for the Windows license." "What? Why wasn't Windows free?"
As it is, it's already possible to get a "free" copy of any Microsoft or Adobe product off the 'net.
So?
--Jeremy