While many artists are paid less than programmers, you typically have to hire a lot more of them. And they require more expensive tools than your average developer, like Maya, 3dsmax, Photoshop (sounds cheap, but the master collection can cost $2500), not to mention expensive plugins for the aforementioned products. Where I used to work, each artist would have an up-to-date license for each of the above (I think the figure was about $12,000 of software, not including the PC itself). Software engineers are happy with Visual Studio Pro (or comparable IDE) and the occasional profiling tool. Plus modeling, texturing, and animating highly-detailed models takes a lot of time (= even more money).
Trust me, art is expensive.
A good procedural system has tweakable values and seeds, and near-instant results (great for prototyping) so an artist won't spend several days or weeks developing a snazzy model only to see their hard work on the cutting room floor.
For professional games, art is much more expensive than code.
Outsourcing hasn't affected the comp sci field much. The biggest hurdle over the past 7 years was finding a job among the glut of unemployed software engineers and programmers that were either laid-off after the dot-coms busted or recent CS grads who were promised wealth and fortune while they were in school only to find the landscape barren and fruitless once they graduated. Since then, comp sci enrollment has dwindled for both sexes, and demand has shot back up (and to a lesser extent, salaries too).
The outrage is that Health & Human Develoment majors typically don't receive comparable salaries to comp sci graduates, hence completely throwing balance of higher-paying jobs into the men's favor. To less-rational people, this can be twisted to illustrate that sexism is more rampant in the workplace than it really is. As ridiculous as it sounds, some feminists still tout these slanted statistics.
If comp sci and engineering majors typically made less than 30k out of college with no benefits, no one would give a shit about the lack of women in that field.
He's unfortunately right. He wouldn't say that unless there was a strong business case for a PC release not being very profitable to them.
His argument is flawed because he assumes that 360 and PC players are mutually exclusive. They're not.
Unfortunately, GoW was engineered to have the worst possible PC sales. The game came out on the 360, then a year later on the PC. By then, many PC gamers (like myself) would have already had the game on the 360, and saw no reason to buy the game over again. If Epic had released the PC and 360 versions simultaneously, he might see PC gaming more favorably.
Other developers have used engineered PC releases to prove their "theories" that PC gaming is unprofitable. Halo2 was only released for Vista. Crytek had ridiculously high system requirements for a mediocre FPS (Crysis) and then complained about piracy (despite being very profitable for having a PC-only title).
Piracy seems like a stupid cop-out excuse. Piracy is rampant on the 360 (and now beginning to run up on the Wii).
They just prefer the fact that they can shovel recycled shit (GoW2, Halo3, etc) onto console gamers and walk away with higher profits.
Conversely, this can be turned into an argument for PC gaming.
When a PC game crashes on my system, 9 times out of 10 there's some driver inconsistency or hardware I can disable to get it working. Forums are great for this reason- I fixed my Fallout3 freezing issues yesterday, hours after the game came out.
At least on the PS3/360/Wii, you're at the developer's/Sony's/MS's/Nintendo's mercy until they can provide a fix. I remember being really pissed that I couldn't play GTA IV for the first week or so because it always locked up at the opening credits.
Also, I'm on my third 360 (RROD) and second PS3 (firmware update bricked my system), and I had to wait nearly a month before receiving a replacement system. When my PSU on my PC went kaput a couple weeks ago, I only had to wait a couple days before I received a new one.
The clause only covers applications distributed through the Android Market, but the whole point of Android is that anyone can distribute any applications they like.
Not quite as locked down as you think. The "App store" has the right to uninstall only the apps that it installed. I would imagine that Google is covering its ass in case someone releases malware or other potentially dangerous app into the Android store and gets downloaded by some unsuspecting users before anyone finds out. I doubt they'll remove legitimately useful apps "just because it competes with us". The resulting fallout would be enough to kill Android.
And unlike Apple, you don't need to use the Android Market to install software.
Funny, the battery life on my GP2x is about 3-4 hours on 2 NiMH AA batteries. And that uses an ARM CPU.
Yes, let's attribute the longer battery life to a subset of the OMAP chip rather than the fact that it uses a 4000 mAh Li-ion battery and smaller chip dies!
... and steal millions of investors cash in quite the same way as the Gizmondo managed......
Fixed it for you. Gizmondo was a scam. Yes, it was a real device and the hardware itself had potential, but the management were crooks (quite literally, they had ties to the mob and everything) relying on a talented engineering team to con venture capitalists out of millions of dollars.
The Pandora is very real- I've seen the dev kit in person. The team isn't really looking to replace the PSP or DS- they're just former GP32/GP2x devs who are doing this out of a labor of love. That being said, I hope this turns out to be a successful venture for the OpenPandora group, as it pave the way for more promising open-source hardware projects in the future.
Prove it. Find 5 patents that are owned by "Big Oil". Also, define "Big Oil".
Okay, Big Oil should be pretty easy. From this wikipedia page, you'll get ExxonMobile, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Total S.A. And they don't register these patents under their own names- they use subsidiaries. For example, Chevron owns Cobasys, a NiMH battery maker.
Typically, the accounting news only covers a specific period of time (for public companies like MS, they're posted every quarter). It's not uncommon to operate at a loss for several quarters only to receive a few quarters of profitability in the future. There's a reason why publicly-traded tech companies don't pay out dividends to shareholders- they're expected to save and reinvest their profits later to finance new projects.
The original article started that the Xbox360 just started posting a profit for the quarter, which leaves several previous quarters in the red (since Fall '05, anyway). So it may still be a while before Microsoft's investment (or losses) are paid back in full. Or in the original Xbox's case, it might just remain a total loss this generation. Similarly, Sony has posted nothing but losses on PS3 and recently announced they may start seeing gains within the year.
As it stands, Nintendo is the only console maker in the black for this generation.
You're right. I think Sony et al were trying to avoid the BR abbreviation, since "BR" means bankruptcy in legal shorthand. Maybe they should've called it "Blu-Medium" instead.;)
I think the reason why we haven't been seeing an increase in hd media sales is that the BD releases lately have been rather lackluster lately. Most of the movies I'd like to see in HD are not yet available on BD.
And retailers are having a difficult time selling dedicated BD players during a time when the PS3 is the only cost-effective, future-proof BD player on the market. Until dedicated players with BD 2.0 support drop below $300, it will be a difficult sale.
You're exactly right. Icahn is nothing more than a corporate raider- he buys just enough shares of a company to get a controlling state so that he could suck the company dry. He pretty much single-handedly destroyed TWA (IIRC, the biggest airline in the 80s) in the late 80s/early 90s by selling off its most profitable ventures. By the time TWA could oust him, the damage had already be done, and they went bankrupt.
He recently tried to do the same thing to Motorola (disclaimer- I'm a current shareholder of MOT, and despise him) before the shareholder vote kept him out of the board- he still sued the company to force Motorola to sell its mobile business so he can cash out quickly.
Interestingly, he owns a hefty stake of Take Two. He may try the same shit if EA comes back with a bigger offer.
He has no other vision than seeing dollar signs as quick as possible (at any cost) and doesn't care any about the long-term health of the companies he plunders. Thousands have lost their jobs and even more small-time retail investors have been trampled on by him.
He's the worst kind of trader. In fact, I welcome short hedges more than seeing him scoop up shares of companies that I have positions in.
If you hit someone in a 2+ ton vehicle (the Veyron has a curb weight of 4162 lbs) at 253 mph, there's absolutely zero chance of survival. It's more than twice the speed that you'd be at if you fell from a plane and hit the ground at terminal velocity. That kind of impact would likely disintegrate the human body into little chunks. And I'm not so sure if the occupants of the car would survive either.
You're probably referring to hyperthreading, not dual-core, as AMD was the first x86 chip manufacturer with a dual core CPU. Whether hyperthreading itself was purely a marketing gimmick is debatable, but MMX certainly wasn't a gimmick. MMX evolved into SSE/SSE2/SSE3 as well as 3DNow! (AMD), which are still in use today, and they certainly make a difference in apps requiring heavy matrix math. While its usefulness in games was made irrelevant by the advent of 3D graphics cards, it certainly found its usefulness in video/audio encoding.
If MMX was such a gimmick, why would it (and its derivatives I mentioned above) be carried over several generations of CPUs produced by intel and its competitors?
For starters, gasoline doesn't produce ammonia gas when burned (CO and CO2 are not quite as toxic). Gasoline also will not kill you if you inhale small quantities or come into contact with it.
Hydrazine is not explosive. It is very reactive, but not explosive. People watch to many movies. Hydrazine is combustible, and it has a low flash point (~38 C, or 100 F). Given a highly exothermic reaction inside a sealed container with a near-vacuum pressure outside will result in an explosion.
During reentry the temperature would get so high that the hydrazine would boil, and rupture the hoses and piping system, not to mention rupture the tank it's stored in. Once that happens, since it's so reactive, it would burn up in a matter of seconds.
Why would you simply assume this would happen? For all we know, the hydrazine could be insulated well enough that it would survive reentry only to break open on impact. Keep in mind that they need to design the tanks to be more than adequate enough to hold together during launch as well as any possibility of aborted launches- it's more than likely that said tank would stay together upon reentry, right? After all, if we can make containers that can keep worms alive during a shuttle breakup, what makes you think we can't make tanks storing a reactive chemical that would stay intact upon reentry?
Either you have classified info about the satellite, or you're simply talking out your ass. I'm willing to put money on the latter.
I'm just giving you a hard time. Actually, I've recently started using SAGE and I admit that it's very impressive for its age. I've been using Mathematica for nearly a decade and used Matlab extensively for my graduate research, but SAGE may end up replacing both for my projects.
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While many artists are paid less than programmers, you typically have to hire a lot more of them. And they require more expensive tools than your average developer, like Maya, 3dsmax, Photoshop (sounds cheap, but the master collection can cost $2500), not to mention expensive plugins for the aforementioned products. Where I used to work, each artist would have an up-to-date license for each of the above (I think the figure was about $12,000 of software, not including the PC itself). Software engineers are happy with Visual Studio Pro (or comparable IDE) and the occasional profiling tool. Plus modeling, texturing, and animating highly-detailed models takes a lot of time (= even more money).
/ex-game developer
Trust me, art is expensive.
A good procedural system has tweakable values and seeds, and near-instant results (great for prototyping) so an artist won't spend several days or weeks developing a snazzy model only to see their hard work on the cutting room floor.
For professional games, art is much more expensive than code.
Yes, that's what I was saying. Thanks for clarifying.
What year are we in, 2002?
Outsourcing hasn't affected the comp sci field much. The biggest hurdle over the past 7 years was finding a job among the glut of unemployed software engineers and programmers that were either laid-off after the dot-coms busted or recent CS grads who were promised wealth and fortune while they were in school only to find the landscape barren and fruitless once they graduated. Since then, comp sci enrollment has dwindled for both sexes, and demand has shot back up (and to a lesser extent, salaries too).
The outrage is that Health & Human Develoment majors typically don't receive comparable salaries to comp sci graduates, hence completely throwing balance of higher-paying jobs into the men's favor. To less-rational people, this can be twisted to illustrate that sexism is more rampant in the workplace than it really is. As ridiculous as it sounds, some feminists still tout these slanted statistics.
If comp sci and engineering majors typically made less than 30k out of college with no benefits, no one would give a shit about the lack of women in that field.
He's unfortunately right. He wouldn't say that unless there was a strong business case for a PC release not being very profitable to them.
His argument is flawed because he assumes that 360 and PC players are mutually exclusive. They're not.
Unfortunately, GoW was engineered to have the worst possible PC sales. The game came out on the 360, then a year later on the PC. By then, many PC gamers (like myself) would have already had the game on the 360, and saw no reason to buy the game over again. If Epic had released the PC and 360 versions simultaneously, he might see PC gaming more favorably.
Other developers have used engineered PC releases to prove their "theories" that PC gaming is unprofitable. Halo2 was only released for Vista. Crytek had ridiculously high system requirements for a mediocre FPS (Crysis) and then complained about piracy (despite being very profitable for having a PC-only title).
Piracy seems like a stupid cop-out excuse. Piracy is rampant on the 360 (and now beginning to run up on the Wii).
They just prefer the fact that they can shovel recycled shit (GoW2, Halo3, etc) onto console gamers and walk away with higher profits.
Conversely, this can be turned into an argument for PC gaming.
When a PC game crashes on my system, 9 times out of 10 there's some driver inconsistency or hardware I can disable to get it working. Forums are great for this reason- I fixed my Fallout3 freezing issues yesterday, hours after the game came out.
At least on the PS3/360/Wii, you're at the developer's/Sony's/MS's/Nintendo's mercy until they can provide a fix. I remember being really pissed that I couldn't play GTA IV for the first week or so because it always locked up at the opening credits.
Also, I'm on my third 360 (RROD) and second PS3 (firmware update bricked my system), and I had to wait nearly a month before receiving a replacement system. When my PSU on my PC went kaput a couple weeks ago, I only had to wait a couple days before I received a new one.
The clause only covers applications distributed through the Android Market, but the whole point of Android is that anyone can distribute any applications they like.
Not quite as locked down as you think. The "App store" has the right to uninstall only the apps that it installed. I would imagine that Google is covering its ass in case someone releases malware or other potentially dangerous app into the Android store and gets downloaded by some unsuspecting users before anyone finds out. I doubt they'll remove legitimately useful apps "just because it competes with us". The resulting fallout would be enough to kill Android.
And unlike Apple, you don't need to use the Android Market to install software.
And he also meant Valve. Steam is the content delivery platform, not the company.
GP must have a shitty memory.
Funny, the battery life on my GP2x is about 3-4 hours on 2 NiMH AA batteries. And that uses an ARM CPU.
Yes, let's attribute the longer battery life to a subset of the OMAP chip rather than the fact that it uses a 4000 mAh Li-ion battery and smaller chip dies!
... and steal millions of investors cash in quite the same way as the Gizmondo managed......
Fixed it for you. Gizmondo was a scam. Yes, it was a real device and the hardware itself had potential, but the management were crooks (quite literally, they had ties to the mob and everything) relying on a talented engineering team to con venture capitalists out of millions of dollars.
The Pandora is very real- I've seen the dev kit in person. The team isn't really looking to replace the PSP or DS- they're just former GP32/GP2x devs who are doing this out of a labor of love. That being said, I hope this turns out to be a successful venture for the OpenPandora group, as it pave the way for more promising open-source hardware projects in the future.
Why? She doesn't play golf.
Prove it. Find 5 patents that are owned by "Big Oil". Also, define "Big Oil".
Okay, Big Oil should be pretty easy. From this wikipedia page, you'll get ExxonMobile, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Total S.A. And they don't register these patents under their own names- they use subsidiaries. For example, Chevron owns Cobasys, a NiMH battery maker.
5 Patents? Hell, I can find you at least 40.
Do I get a cookie?
Typically, the accounting news only covers a specific period of time (for public companies like MS, they're posted every quarter). It's not uncommon to operate at a loss for several quarters only to receive a few quarters of profitability in the future. There's a reason why publicly-traded tech companies don't pay out dividends to shareholders- they're expected to save and reinvest their profits later to finance new projects.
The original article started that the Xbox360 just started posting a profit for the quarter, which leaves several previous quarters in the red (since Fall '05, anyway). So it may still be a while before Microsoft's investment (or losses) are paid back in full. Or in the original Xbox's case, it might just remain a total loss this generation. Similarly, Sony has posted nothing but losses on PS3 and recently announced they may start seeing gains within the year.
As it stands, Nintendo is the only console maker in the black for this generation.
You're right. I think Sony et al were trying to avoid the BR abbreviation, since "BR" means bankruptcy in legal shorthand. Maybe they should've called it "Blu-Medium" instead. ;)
I think the reason why we haven't been seeing an increase in hd media sales is that the BD releases lately have been rather lackluster lately. Most of the movies I'd like to see in HD are not yet available on BD.
And retailers are having a difficult time selling dedicated BD players during a time when the PS3 is the only cost-effective, future-proof BD player on the market. Until dedicated players with BD 2.0 support drop below $300, it will be a difficult sale.
You're exactly right. Icahn is nothing more than a corporate raider- he buys just enough shares of a company to get a controlling state so that he could suck the company dry. He pretty much single-handedly destroyed TWA (IIRC, the biggest airline in the 80s) in the late 80s/early 90s by selling off its most profitable ventures. By the time TWA could oust him, the damage had already be done, and they went bankrupt.
He recently tried to do the same thing to Motorola (disclaimer- I'm a current shareholder of MOT, and despise him) before the shareholder vote kept him out of the board- he still sued the company to force Motorola to sell its mobile business so he can cash out quickly.
Interestingly, he owns a hefty stake of Take Two. He may try the same shit if EA comes back with a bigger offer.
He has no other vision than seeing dollar signs as quick as possible (at any cost) and doesn't care any about the long-term health of the companies he plunders. Thousands have lost their jobs and even more small-time retail investors have been trampled on by him.
He's the worst kind of trader. In fact, I welcome short hedges more than seeing him scoop up shares of companies that I have positions in.
It's actually "Aardvark" (the plugin name). I suspect the gp just misspelled it in his post.
Just to nitpick...
If you hit someone in a 2+ ton vehicle (the Veyron has a curb weight of 4162 lbs) at 253 mph, there's absolutely zero chance of survival. It's more than twice the speed that you'd be at if you fell from a plane and hit the ground at terminal velocity. That kind of impact would likely disintegrate the human body into little chunks. And I'm not so sure if the occupants of the car would survive either.
You're probably referring to hyperthreading, not dual-core, as AMD was the first x86 chip manufacturer with a dual core CPU. Whether hyperthreading itself was purely a marketing gimmick is debatable, but MMX certainly wasn't a gimmick. MMX evolved into SSE/SSE2/SSE3 as well as 3DNow! (AMD), which are still in use today, and they certainly make a difference in apps requiring heavy matrix math. While its usefulness in games was made irrelevant by the advent of 3D graphics cards, it certainly found its usefulness in video/audio encoding.
If MMX was such a gimmick, why would it (and its derivatives I mentioned above) be carried over several generations of CPUs produced by intel and its competitors?
2.4 million jobs would include more domain squatters, spyware/adware authors, Nigerian scam artists, and V!4gr4 spammers.
For starters, gasoline doesn't produce ammonia gas when burned (CO and CO2 are not quite as toxic). Gasoline also will not kill you if you inhale small quantities or come into contact with it.
Hydrazine is some pretty nasty stuff.
Why would you simply assume this would happen? For all we know, the hydrazine could be insulated well enough that it would survive reentry only to break open on impact. Keep in mind that they need to design the tanks to be more than adequate enough to hold together during launch as well as any possibility of aborted launches- it's more than likely that said tank would stay together upon reentry, right? After all, if we can make containers that can keep worms alive during a shuttle breakup, what makes you think we can't make tanks storing a reactive chemical that would stay intact upon reentry?
Either you have classified info about the satellite, or you're simply talking out your ass. I'm willing to put money on the latter.
Shameless plug much?
I'm just giving you a hard time. Actually, I've recently started using SAGE and I admit that it's very impressive for its age. I've been using Mathematica for nearly a decade and used Matlab extensively for my graduate research, but SAGE may end up replacing both for my projects.
Keep up the good work!
Well, there's already Open Dynamics Engine.