"The graphics are not that good. They are slightly better than PS1 - more specifically the DS uses per-pixel perspective correction, where the PS1 only corrects every 8th texel."
Actually, the PS1 didn't have perspective correction of any sort. That's why all the developers kept having to subdivide everything. It also didn't have near clipping, which meant you had to do it in software. Overall, the DS can render about the same # of polygons that the PS1 can (which is about the same number that the N64 could), but it can make the triangles look a lot better (although at a lower resolution). Its quite a nice piece of hardware.
In California at least, where EA is based out of, the noncompete part of it is generally illegal and unenforcable for any period of time. It basically protects the company to the extent of, I could probably get nailed on it if I left EA while working on Need for Speed to go to Activision to make a functionally identical racing game. Other than that, they are not enforcable.
The reason BlockBuster pays more for the DVDs is to because they rent them out. A copy of a DVD you buy at $20 isn't a rental copy, and its prohibited for you to rent that out (I'm not sure what the consequences would be if you did, but anyway). Blockbuster pays something along the lines of $100+ per copy of the DVD, but they get the additional benefit of that being a license, so they can get extra copies of the actual movie in case the old one is scratched without having to pay the $100. They are allowed to sell their rental copies, but they sell it without the rental license, and at therefore at a regular price.
I'm glad they finally moved this up to the city proper rather than in San Jose. The San Jose convention center was boring. Now it will only be short cab ride to the Mitchell Bros!
Part of the reason for this is that the laws in the US have changed. Soda used to come in glass bottles. Glass bottles are one of the best ways to package liquids because they can easily be washed out/sterilized and re-used. The law used to state that they could re-use glass bottles 40 to 50 times before having to recycle the glass into something else. At some point, they changed the law so that this was no longer allowed, which had the immediate effect of making glass more expensive to bottle liquids in than plastic or metal. Thus the lack of drinks in glass bottles. I don't know why the laws were changed, but I do know that they were changed sometime during the Reagan era.
I was under the impression that straight LCD contrast ratios are really good. Even a low end LCD monitor will pull 700:1. LCD *projectors* on the other hand don't have nearly the contrast ratio that a CRT projector will have. Projectors in general will tend to have washed out and grey blacks compared to any non-projection monitor.
One of the major reasons why people buy SUVs is the tax benefits of doing so. Any vehicle over 4000lbs qualifies as a "commercial" vehicle, and depreciates MUCH faster. This is the SUV tax loophole that has been in the news lately. They are talking about bumping up this weight quite a bit (I think it was up to 8000lbs).
Another poster suggested some books that are good, but for a quick, easy to understand list of things that you can do, try "The 48 Laws of Power". Not all of them will always apply, but it does list 48 good rules to follow, with examples from history on someone being succesfull following the rule, as well as someone failing not following it (or using it at the wrong time/place). Psychology in general is a pretty good field to study. Unfortunately, filtering the wheat from the chaff is difficult, so to be more specific, there is a field called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) that studies the effects of mannerisms, tonality, and what things you say and their psychological effects. It is a fairly interesting field, although it has become a little popular lately, so there are quite a few terrible books on it (NLP for Dummies type stuff). Try starting with books by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. Much of it is how to treat people therapeutically, but if you can apply and/or observe the things you read in those books to real life, you'll do fairly well.
Actually, there is a different story behind this from what I heard. The stores couldn't care less if you copy it and return it, assuming most of the people don't do it, assuming they can still sell the software as new. What happened is some guy sued the software stores for re-shrinkwrapping software and selling it as new, and actually won. Once that happened, they stopped taking returns on new software. Most of them however, will take returns on used software (at least GameStop and EB both do). So in the end, it wasn't greed on the store's part that made them stop taking returns...
I recently purchased one of the Targus bags (the TXL617), and I have been really happy with it. After years of owning a laptop, I tend to Targus because I have always been extremely satisfied with their bags, and recently started taking the train to work. The old laptop case I had became somewhat unwieldy, as I often needed to carry other things so I had a laptop bag AND a regular backpack. Then I found the Targus backpack, and its like a godsend. Plenty of pockets to store all my stuff without getting it mixed up, and I have used it for travel without my laptop with great results.
That is less the issue than the privacy concerns. I was in negotiations with the different cellular providers, and there is a 3rd party company that has an agreement with most of the different carriers to provide just that information. They have their own API and service that you use to access the information. It has been stuck in a legal limbo for quite a while, as I started looking at it a year and half ago, and the last time I checked, which was about 6 months ago, they still hadn't come up with a solution that the carriers were happy with as far as users opting in to allow other people to retrieve that information. Its unfortunate that the service exists, you can get the information, through a standardized interface at that, but its just not available yet.
There is a reason to use premium gas on the WRX, or on any car that requires it. Higher octane slows the burning of the gas (while at the same time, it also burns hotter). This is important with a car that is tuned to run lean, or does run lean, especially on a turbo. What happens if you use a lower octane is the gas burns faster and ignites sooner, before you are at full compression, and tends to result in pinging or detonation. On turbos, which tend to run VERY lean, this can be a really bad thing. Both the last 2 cars I had could detect if you put in regular gas over high octane, since they required it, and would modify the engine performance accordingly. My current car will retard the ignition to avoid pinging, which is fairly noticeable, but my last car would keep you from running over 4k RPM if you used regular gas, which is quite annoying on a car that redlines at 7.5k. Either way, I would suggest he use the recommended gas, there is a reason for it if they require it, and if the Subaru ECU isn't compensating for the lower octane gas, then you are shortening the lifetime of the car.
There are 2 wireless modes on the DS. One is a sort of Ad-Hoc mode, where no WAP is needed (and its not the same as a regular 802.11 AdHoc, its proprietary), where up to 16 DS's can be linked. The other mode is regular 802.11 that connects to a WAP
This is off-topic, but I have to agree with your statement. In addition to what you said, during the buildup before the war, it was the French that were screaming bloody hell about Germany, and how Germany was not to be trusted. The British and the US (although primarily Britian, the US had little to nothing to do with the war at this point) kept letting Germany slide on violations of the rules imposed on them after WWI. Unfortunately, the French were unwilling at the beginning to go at Germany alone, partly due to faulty intelligence and effective propaganda by the Germans on the state of their army. By the time the French were ready to fight the Germans on their own, Germany was far too powerful. It wasn't until Churchill was elected in Britian that they stopped conceeding to Germany.
I made it all the way through that one up until the airport. It was the airport I never figured out until years later looking at a hintbook. The really frustrating part was that I guessed the signs pointed in the opposite direction, just didn't follow them for long enough.
I believe it required some sort of permits to get them before. The issue is that now they are considered munitions, and therefore its not just a matter of getting the permits, but there are additional licenses you need to get to ship, handle, buy, launch, and store them. This puts it out of the range of most of the amatuer rocketeers who were doing this stuff before, as well as effectively shutting down quite a few of the companies that made the things in the first place.
"To put it more concretely, couldn't I just write a program in C that does EXACTLY what the Perl program does, down to the last data structure? And if I did, wouldn't that mean that Perl can't ever (theoretically) be faster than C?"
Not exactly. If I was able to write an assembler in BASIC, it doesn't mean that BASIC runs as fast as assembly language.
People stopping on the onramps may be a bad habit from the East Coast. When I was out in NY and NJ, the first thing I noticed was the fact that merge onto the highway is about 10 feet long (no kidding), so you have to stop because if there is no gap in traffic while you are merging you are going to end up slamming into someone. Some of the highways don't even really have a merge, you come off the onramp directly into a lane.
Looking at his costs for the publisher, and having some experience with this myself, his costs seem WAY too high. How can the unit cost be $27.95? I understand the high price if you include the cost of development, but he's not including that. The publisher cost should be MUCH lower. I just finished a title on a cartridge myself, and even counting the higher material costs of the cartridge, packaging, licensing fees, and royalties, our unit cost is about $9, nothing close to $27.95. I've never heard of a game having a $27.95 unit cost.
Being in the games industry myself, and having worked on quite a few titles, your end figures aren't too far off, but by my estimates, you're coming in a bit high. I would say on your average small to medium dev team, halve the staff and double the salary. Generally you're looking at 4-5 programmers, 4-5 artists, and a designer/project manager. The audio guy will usually be shared amongst multiple projects. Generally speaking, your staff will probably have an average salary of about $50k. For equipment costs, on a console game at least, you're looking at about $25k per development kit, so at least 1 for each programmer, plus possible 1 more. Then add in high end art machines at about $3-5k, plus art software at about $5-7k per seat, and you're looking at probably $1.2mil for an 18 month project (rounded up).
Ummm, I have to disagree with you here. Having lived in California in the past and having lived in New Jersey for the last 6 months, there's not much that will make New Jersey look good. New Jersey had "Green Rabbits" for Christ's sake.
I DJ as well as tend to work in noisy cubicle environments during the day, and I swear by the Sony MDR-7506 and MDR-7509 headphones. The MDR-7506 is a bit cheaper price-wise and more compact than the 7509s, but both do an excellent job of blocking out noise as well as having excellent audio quality. You won't find these headphones at a regular Best Buy, etc., I always have to go to Guitar Center to buy them, and even then they are stored in back and aren't usually out on display. They'll run you about $100 for a pair of 7506s, a bit more for the 7509s.
What's happening there, where your signal strength is max and then drops to 0 when you're making a call, is the overcrowding of the cellular frequencies. Each of the towers can handle a specific number of active calls. So you are on a tower that is close to you, but is overloaded, but you show full signal strength. When you try and place a call, your call is handed off to the closest tower (or what the system thinks is the closest tower) that has available capacity. Therefore your signal strength goes to 0. I've had this happen consistently with every major carrier I've used (Sprint, AT&T, Cingular, AND Verizon) at my house, since I live near one of the busiest freeway intersections in the United States.
Being a game developer, I can tell you exactly why we can't generally take advantage of the newest hardware. For one, the hardware on consoles is a static target. One user's Playstation 2 is the same as any other user's Playstation 2. Making a game take advantage of the hardware is much easier on consoles because of that. Even on consoles, you'll notice from one generation of software to the next, running on the same hardware, you'll notice an improvement in graphics. This is basically the developers learning new tricks and creating new tools, etc. to take advantage of the consoles. On a PC, you are trying to support a wide variety of machines, which means that the game itself can't depend on things like vertex and pixel shaders, or, if it does, I have to potentially cut out all the people without shader support on their graphics hardware. In addition, the PC hardware is a moving target. A game takes anywhere from 1-3 years to finish on average. That means that I have to guess what the hardware is going to look like in 1-3 years, then code my game in such a way that it can be easily updated to take advantage of those features once the new hardware is available. This way, at the end of my development cycle I can go in and make it work with the latest and bestest hardware. Quite a difficult task.
From how I understand it, there are different varieties of coca plants with different amounts of cocaine. A very high yield coca plant will have 1.5% of its weight as coca, with a normal coca plant at less than.5%. I think Coca-Cola used/uses coca plants that have very little coca in them, so there is less to remove. What is removed isn't actually cocaine, but a precursor to cocaine base (which isn't coke yet either). I was under the impression however that the Coca-Cola company STILL uses the coca plant for flavoring, and they are the only company in the US that can legally import the coca plant. The process is kept quite secret, primarily to prevent threat and/or scandal. From what I understand, they tried to create a version of coca-cola without the coca plant, but we all know that as "New Coke", and we know how that story turned out.
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"The graphics are not that good. They are slightly better than PS1 - more specifically the DS uses per-pixel perspective correction, where the PS1 only corrects every 8th texel."
Actually, the PS1 didn't have perspective correction of any sort. That's why all the developers kept having to subdivide everything. It also didn't have near clipping, which meant you had to do it in software. Overall, the DS can render about the same # of polygons that the PS1 can (which is about the same number that the N64 could), but it can make the triangles look a lot better (although at a lower resolution). Its quite a nice piece of hardware.
In California at least, where EA is based out of, the noncompete part of it is generally illegal and unenforcable for any period of time. It basically protects the company to the extent of, I could probably get nailed on it if I left EA while working on Need for Speed to go to Activision to make a functionally identical racing game. Other than that, they are not enforcable.
The reason BlockBuster pays more for the DVDs is to because they rent them out. A copy of a DVD you buy at $20 isn't a rental copy, and its prohibited for you to rent that out (I'm not sure what the consequences would be if you did, but anyway). Blockbuster pays something along the lines of $100+ per copy of the DVD, but they get the additional benefit of that being a license, so they can get extra copies of the actual movie in case the old one is scratched without having to pay the $100. They are allowed to sell their rental copies, but they sell it without the rental license, and at therefore at a regular price.
I'm glad they finally moved this up to the city proper rather than in San Jose. The San Jose convention center was boring. Now it will only be short cab ride to the Mitchell Bros!
Part of the reason for this is that the laws in the US have changed. Soda used to come in glass bottles. Glass bottles are one of the best ways to package liquids because they can easily be washed out/sterilized and re-used. The law used to state that they could re-use glass bottles 40 to 50 times before having to recycle the glass into something else. At some point, they changed the law so that this was no longer allowed, which had the immediate effect of making glass more expensive to bottle liquids in than plastic or metal. Thus the lack of drinks in glass bottles. I don't know why the laws were changed, but I do know that they were changed sometime during the Reagan era.
I was under the impression that straight LCD contrast ratios are really good. Even a low end LCD monitor will pull 700:1. LCD *projectors* on the other hand don't have nearly the contrast ratio that a CRT projector will have. Projectors in general will tend to have washed out and grey blacks compared to any non-projection monitor.
"Why do you think SUVs are so prevalent?"
One of the major reasons why people buy SUVs is the tax benefits of doing so. Any vehicle over 4000lbs qualifies as a "commercial" vehicle, and depreciates MUCH faster. This is the SUV tax loophole that has been in the news lately. They are talking about bumping up this weight quite a bit (I think it was up to 8000lbs).
Another poster suggested some books that are good, but for a quick, easy to understand list of things that you can do, try "The 48 Laws of Power". Not all of them will always apply, but it does list 48 good rules to follow, with examples from history on someone being succesfull following the rule, as well as someone failing not following it (or using it at the wrong time/place).
Psychology in general is a pretty good field to study. Unfortunately, filtering the wheat from the chaff is difficult, so to be more specific, there is a field called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) that studies the effects of mannerisms, tonality, and what things you say and their psychological effects. It is a fairly interesting field, although it has become a little popular lately, so there are quite a few terrible books on it (NLP for Dummies type stuff). Try starting with books by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. Much of it is how to treat people therapeutically, but if you can apply and/or observe the things you read in those books to real life, you'll do fairly well.
Actually, there is a different story behind this from what I heard. The stores couldn't care less if you copy it and return it, assuming most of the people don't do it, assuming they can still sell the software as new. What happened is some guy sued the software stores for re-shrinkwrapping software and selling it as new, and actually won. Once that happened, they stopped taking returns on new software. Most of them however, will take returns on used software (at least GameStop and EB both do). So in the end, it wasn't greed on the store's part that made them stop taking returns...
I recently purchased one of the Targus bags (the TXL617), and I have been really happy with it. After years of owning a laptop, I tend to Targus because I have always been extremely satisfied with their bags, and recently started taking the train to work. The old laptop case I had became somewhat unwieldy, as I often needed to carry other things so I had a laptop bag AND a regular backpack. Then I found the Targus backpack, and its like a godsend. Plenty of pockets to store all my stuff without getting it mixed up, and I have used it for travel without my laptop with great results.
That is less the issue than the privacy concerns. I was in negotiations with the different cellular providers, and there is a 3rd party company that has an agreement with most of the different carriers to provide just that information. They have their own API and service that you use to access the information. It has been stuck in a legal limbo for quite a while, as I started looking at it a year and half ago, and the last time I checked, which was about 6 months ago, they still hadn't come up with a solution that the carriers were happy with as far as users opting in to allow other people to retrieve that information. Its unfortunate that the service exists, you can get the information, through a standardized interface at that, but its just not available yet.
There is a reason to use premium gas on the WRX, or on any car that requires it. Higher octane slows the burning of the gas (while at the same time, it also burns hotter). This is important with a car that is tuned to run lean, or does run lean, especially on a turbo. What happens if you use a lower octane is the gas burns faster and ignites sooner, before you are at full compression, and tends to result in pinging or detonation. On turbos, which tend to run VERY lean, this can be a really bad thing. Both the last 2 cars I had could detect if you put in regular gas over high octane, since they required it, and would modify the engine performance accordingly. My current car will retard the ignition to avoid pinging, which is fairly noticeable, but my last car would keep you from running over 4k RPM if you used regular gas, which is quite annoying on a car that redlines at 7.5k. Either way, I would suggest he use the recommended gas, there is a reason for it if they require it, and if the Subaru ECU isn't compensating for the lower octane gas, then you are shortening the lifetime of the car.
There are 2 wireless modes on the DS. One is a sort of Ad-Hoc mode, where no WAP is needed (and its not the same as a regular 802.11 AdHoc, its proprietary), where up to 16 DS's can be linked. The other mode is regular 802.11 that connects to a WAP
This is off-topic, but I have to agree with your statement. In addition to what you said, during the buildup before the war, it was the French that were screaming bloody hell about Germany, and how Germany was not to be trusted. The British and the US (although primarily Britian, the US had little to nothing to do with the war at this point) kept letting Germany slide on violations of the rules imposed on them after WWI. Unfortunately, the French were unwilling at the beginning to go at Germany alone, partly due to faulty intelligence and effective propaganda by the Germans on the state of their army. By the time the French were ready to fight the Germans on their own, Germany was far too powerful. It wasn't until Churchill was elected in Britian that they stopped conceeding to Germany.
I made it all the way through that one up until the airport. It was the airport I never figured out until years later looking at a hintbook. The really frustrating part was that I guessed the signs pointed in the opposite direction, just didn't follow them for long enough.
I believe it required some sort of permits to get them before. The issue is that now they are considered munitions, and therefore its not just a matter of getting the permits, but there are additional licenses you need to get to ship, handle, buy, launch, and store them. This puts it out of the range of most of the amatuer rocketeers who were doing this stuff before, as well as effectively shutting down quite a few of the companies that made the things in the first place.
"To put it more concretely, couldn't I just write a program in C that does EXACTLY what the Perl program does, down to the last data structure? And if I did, wouldn't that mean that Perl can't ever (theoretically) be faster than C?"
Not exactly. If I was able to write an assembler in BASIC, it doesn't mean that BASIC runs as fast as assembly language.
People stopping on the onramps may be a bad habit from the East Coast. When I was out in NY and NJ, the first thing I noticed was the fact that merge onto the highway is about 10 feet long (no kidding), so you have to stop because if there is no gap in traffic while you are merging you are going to end up slamming into someone. Some of the highways don't even really have a merge, you come off the onramp directly into a lane.
Looking at his costs for the publisher, and having some experience with this myself, his costs seem WAY too high. How can the unit cost be $27.95? I understand the high price if you include the cost of development, but he's not including that. The publisher cost should be MUCH lower. I just finished a title on a cartridge myself, and even counting the higher material costs of the cartridge, packaging, licensing fees, and royalties, our unit cost is about $9, nothing close to $27.95. I've never heard of a game having a $27.95 unit cost.
Being in the games industry myself, and having worked on quite a few titles, your end figures aren't too far off, but by my estimates, you're coming in a bit high. I would say on your average small to medium dev team, halve the staff and double the salary. Generally you're looking at 4-5 programmers, 4-5 artists, and a designer/project manager. The audio guy will usually be shared amongst multiple projects. Generally speaking, your staff will probably have an average salary of about $50k. For equipment costs, on a console game at least, you're looking at about $25k per development kit, so at least 1 for each programmer, plus possible 1 more. Then add in high end art machines at about $3-5k, plus art software at about $5-7k per seat, and you're looking at probably $1.2mil for an 18 month project (rounded up).
Ummm, I have to disagree with you here. Having lived in California in the past and having lived in New Jersey for the last 6 months, there's not much that will make New Jersey look good. New Jersey had "Green Rabbits" for Christ's sake.
I DJ as well as tend to work in noisy cubicle environments during the day, and I swear by the Sony MDR-7506 and MDR-7509 headphones. The MDR-7506 is a bit cheaper price-wise and more compact than the 7509s, but both do an excellent job of blocking out noise as well as having excellent audio quality. You won't find these headphones at a regular Best Buy, etc., I always have to go to Guitar Center to buy them, and even then they are stored in back and aren't usually out on display. They'll run you about $100 for a pair of 7506s, a bit more for the 7509s.
What's happening there, where your signal strength is max and then drops to 0 when you're making a call, is the overcrowding of the cellular frequencies. Each of the towers can handle a specific number of active calls. So you are on a tower that is close to you, but is overloaded, but you show full signal strength. When you try and place a call, your call is handed off to the closest tower (or what the system thinks is the closest tower) that has available capacity. Therefore your signal strength goes to 0. I've had this happen consistently with every major carrier I've used (Sprint, AT&T, Cingular, AND Verizon) at my house, since I live near one of the busiest freeway intersections in the United States.
Being a game developer, I can tell you exactly why we can't generally take advantage of the newest hardware. For one, the hardware on consoles is a static target. One user's Playstation 2 is the same as any other user's Playstation 2. Making a game take advantage of the hardware is much easier on consoles because of that. Even on consoles, you'll notice from one generation of software to the next, running on the same hardware, you'll notice an improvement in graphics. This is basically the developers learning new tricks and creating new tools, etc. to take advantage of the consoles. On a PC, you are trying to support a wide variety of machines, which means that the game itself can't depend on things like vertex and pixel shaders, or, if it does, I have to potentially cut out all the people without shader support on their graphics hardware. In addition, the PC hardware is a moving target. A game takes anywhere from 1-3 years to finish on average. That means that I have to guess what the hardware is going to look like in 1-3 years, then code my game in such a way that it can be easily updated to take advantage of those features once the new hardware is available. This way, at the end of my development cycle I can go in and make it work with the latest and bestest hardware. Quite a difficult task.
From how I understand it, there are different varieties of coca plants with different amounts of cocaine. A very high yield coca plant will have 1.5% of its weight as coca, with a normal coca plant at less than .5%. I think Coca-Cola used/uses coca plants that have very little coca in them, so there is less to remove. What is removed isn't actually cocaine, but a precursor to cocaine base (which isn't coke yet either). I was under the impression however that the Coca-Cola company STILL uses the coca plant for flavoring, and they are the only company in the US that can legally import the coca plant. The process is kept quite secret, primarily to prevent threat and/or scandal. From what I understand, they tried to create a version of coca-cola without the coca plant, but we all know that as "New Coke", and we know how that story turned out.