My BS was in Physics, and I'm currently working on my MS in applied Mathematics. I'm still working my way through the paradim shift, but I can empatically state that your comment would raise issues with my professors. Math is most definitely neither about describing things, nor about being useful. To anyone doing abstract work, the suggestion that they are "applied" is considered an insult. They are better than that. They have generalized beyound the mere physical descriptions and are involved in the essence of mathematical logic. Now one can use math to model, yes. But then much work is done to remove from the proofs any hint of that real world model. The "scaffolding must be removed from the cathedral before its presented to the public". The concept that math works "Exactly the same way that a programming language describes the actions that a program performs" sounds alot like the Computational world view. While I lean towards applied and computational maths myself, this is *not* the world view of the majority of math people. There work is more than "purely recreational", they would say, but it isn't "useful" either.
What you're looking at here is really two different things, though. Math up to a certain point has a great deal of use as an applied science. As you get further into mathematics education you get into more abstract forms of math which are applicable in much more narrow fields, and therefore many of the people learning about them become more interested in the abstraction rather than the application. The majority of students have very little exposure to anything that approaches the more abstract mathematics, but also aren't taught proper application of the forms of math which they learn. I can understand that someone approaching a BS or MS in Math can often feel that the idea of 'applied mathematics' is an insult, but we're talking about grade school and high school here, where applied mathematics is really what's needed and taught.
The problem, of course, is convincing students that there's an application for math beyond what the average Windows Calculator program does in it's default mode, that applied math includes Algebra, Geometry, and low-level Calculus, which may not be inherently obvious in their day-to-day lives at the moment, or in the problems presented in most texts. Finding the way to make it apply to them is really the goal of teaching, and students that find themselves enjoying the intrinsic beauty of mathematics will take themselves beyond the simple 'applied' math to the more abstract forms. Hell, I crammed 5 math courses into my 4 years of high school, and there were at least 30 more students in that one class room that did the same thing. Not all of them truly enjoyed the math (most probably wanted to cut a semester or two out of their college math if possible), but those that did understood the difference between applied math and the abstract, and weren't offended at the thought of learning some application of mathematics while they were still at the relatively low level (of Calculus).
So, you're saying that governments build roads to protect the mobility rights of citizens, for example? I think governments' jobs go much broader than that.
The government builds roads in order to make other government services (police, fire, military, among others) more efficient, which should, in turn, help protect the rights of citizens.
I know I'm being lazy, but has this trend continued through the "Battle for Naboob" or whatever they released in concert with the Episode I/II prequel-sequels.
I'm not even sure what (if any) Episode 2 tie-in games they've done. I know that Jedi Knight 2 did very well for them (an expansion for The Sims eventually knocked it to #2 about 2 months after release), and that a couple of the Episode 1 games did as well (during the Xmas season mostly, I wonder how many of the people receiving those games actually wanted them). Unfortunately it's fairly expensive to actually receive the PC game sales data when it's put out, so you just get the most basic 'top 10' type lists from the game press and the occasional press release from the companies when their games do well.
Some 1999 sales data brought up from Google showed that in June EP1: Phantom Menace hit #2 and EP1:Racer hit #6, no doubt the other 2,000,031 EP1 games didn't do quite as well. They seem to do alright with console games as well, I found one article that mentioned that Rogue Squadron 2 for the GameCube was LucasArts' fastest selling title ever.
Hmmm... that's what you get from trusting second-hand information. Someone in another thread said that the next generation would be 100 MB/s, and I didn't know better so I just used that information here.
Basically, next-gen Firewire is looking at 800 megabits/sec, 1.6gigabits/sec, and 3.2gb/sec, whereas current Firewire is theoretically 400mb/sec. The question is of whether or not the spec will be implemented to the full 3.2G whenever people start making next-gen devices and connectors, or whether they'll just stick to 800mb (or close to it). Those limits are also based on copper, so in theory there's room for greater range and speed using optics, and the design allows for it. The biggest thing that they seem to be working on now, though, is a method of combining 802.11 (wireless) and 1394 (Firewire), presumably for wireless externals, though obviously at a lower data transfer rate for the time-being. Personally, I don't like sending data wireless, but with the recent popularity of 802.11 networks, I guess I'm one of a few, rather than the many.
I seem to remember a case where a mother sued MTV over Beavis and Butthead because of Beavis's constant infatuation with fire (more often the word than anything he himself did).
Even worse when it comes to this particular case is that MTV stripped the references to fire from older episodes and required them not to be included in episodes made from that point on.
So...how the hell can you say (yet another) Star Wars game is going to be bigger than something already universally known as EVERCRACK?
It's quite easy, really. Star Wars games routinely top the PC games sales charts on release. The question is really one of whether or not they can make a good MMORPG from Star Wars that will keep subscribers and get good word-of-mouth, rather than one of whether or not it will sell. Star Wars games have to be nearly as bad as a Star Trek game (Star Trek games probably make up some of the worst games in PC gaming history, though a couple of Star Wars games were pretty bad) before they don't bring in a lot of money.
yeah, the first hit is free, if you buy the $50 crack pipe. Of AC, EQ, and UO, EQ is the most expensive to start playing today. UO and AC you can get for almost nothing (or nothing after rebate iirc with AC), while EQ sits on the shelf in the trilogy edition (EQ + first 2 expansions) for $50-60. You basically just paid 5 months subscription fees to start paying again in 30 days, and the game and each of it's expansions is more than paid for by 1 month of their subscription earnings.
The only real bonus here is that the subscription guarantees that the servers will run until the amount of subscriptions coming in can't cover the service, or EQ2 picks up more subscriptions than EQ1, at which time you have to wonder whether or not they'll keep it up when they know shutting it down will bring the stragglers over to the sequel.
On the other hand, if I wanted to play CounterStrike (a loathsome game imo, but it's the most played FPS game online), I'd simply load up my 4-year old copy of Half-life, download the mega-patch-from-hell, and the CS mod itself, and there's going to be a server running as long as people are willing to play it. My experience so far with online FPS games has been that a particular mod that is as popular as Counterstrike is will outlive almost anything, except it's own sequel or a radically new and catchy mod that sucks up an even bigger fan base, and even then enough people will continue playing it to keep a few servers running.
Personally, I tried both UO and EQ (and hell I went all out and bought all of the EQ expansion shit). Neither of them offered something that made me want to pay the subscription fee after the first month expired. In fact, I don't think I even bothered playing either of them for the full first month.
Blizzard, of course, is lucky to be able to consistently sell that many copies of every game they release, and because of it they can currently afford to keep servers running for most of those games (going back to Diablo, which launched it, and WarCraft 2 which they retrofitted afterwards). Unfortunately, the amount of information stored on those servers is not likely to be anything near what's stored for an MMORPG (although Diablo 2's realms are close), and the service has the kind of down-time and problems that tend to sink any kind of service that people are paying for with a monthly fee.
oh, and let's not even talk about the weekend, which can really skew the daily average. Seriously, even if I go out and spend all day doing something in the outdoors, I can still pull a 12+ hour gaming session when I get home without much more than my normal caffeine intake.
But, holy shit, to repeatedly play any game, or any number of games for 8-10 hours a day, strikes me as dysfunctional. Is this typical for gamers? How do you get anything else done?
Let's see, on my average day I wake up between 6 and 7 AM, have a cigarette and a glass of juice while I scan CNN to make sure the world didn't blow up today (or that something isn't happening that would mean I don't have to go to work). I then drive to work where I stay until about 4PM. If I don't have to do any shopping I get home around 4:30 at the latest, open a beer and look around to see if anything needs to be done (dishes, trash, cleaning), all of which can usually be done by 5 or 5:30, which leaves 7-10 hours until I even have a chance of getting to sleep, regardless of whether or not I'm actually doing anything. Then again, this was the case when I didn't play any PC or console games (though, admittedly, that was all of maybe 3 months in high school). If I don't play games during that time, I read, watch TV/movies, write software, or just 'hang out' online in IRC/IM/etc while I surf the web and listen to music. Hell, the last woman I dated before leaving San Diego was someone I met online.
Realistically, my biggest issue is the fact that work takes up 10 hours of the day due to the commute and lunch hour (which I rarely even take for lunch, but I have to be there during business hours), and only pays for 8 of them, which is exactly why I prefer to work from home whenever I can (besides the fact that it's much easier for me to sleep during the day than at nite, and I work more efficiently in the evening/nite hours).
The article also points out that it's their highest and most reliable profit margin, and that raising subscription costs had almost no impact on the number of subscribers (and they're still gaining new subscribers every month). Meanwhile, their hardware is barely keeping 1% margins and every movie or album they make is a gamble.
Re:People need to read the FAQ...
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Where did they find a place with no high winds, hurricanes, tornados, or lightning? And, with ocean front property? I think I want to live there.
From the sound of it, about 400 miles from nowhere in the middle of the ocean...
200GB 7,200rpm IDE drive: $400 120GB 7,200rpm IDE drive: $200 40GB 7,200rpm IDE drive: $85 20GB 7,200rpm IDE drive: $78 (sorry, anyone know where to find a 10GB IDE drive besides pulling one out of the closet?)
The simple fact is that for the average consumer hard drives aren't about speed, they're about price per MB (or per GB). SCSI drives fail to hit that point because people that want SCSI are willing to pay for it.
Does anyone want to throw out their old drives and replace them all with new ones just because they exist?
That's precisely why the serial ATA standard has a better chance than most other proposals: your old (parallel ATA) drives will work fine with a serial ATA controller.
which is also why video cards can almost double in speed every 6-12 months without actually changing Moore's law, though it appears that as time goes they're not getting faster as quickly as they did a couple years ago (seems mostly due to memory bandwidth).
Speed. Even the next generation of Firewire will only be 2/3 as fast as Serial ATA (as many have said, it's 150MB/s, not Mb/s). Not that there are any drives that fast yet...
When you have 2+ drives running with over 50MB/s bursts, though, it's nice to know there's some room there. Current Firewire on most systems is running 50MB/sec max, and so can have some data loss (well, Im sure itll re-read until it gets everything, but you know the drill), assuming that the connection between firewire and the drive is efficient in the first place (since most firewire drives are just ATA drives with a conversion to firewire). For CD/DVD/-R/W drives firewire's going to work as well as any other connection, and if they started making these (internal) drives native to firewire, it'd certainly be a good reason for me to switch at least some of my system(s) over.
Of course, the next generation of firewire goes a bit further than you have stated (about 4x), though implementation of the next generation may be staged over 2 or 3 releases. What I really don't like, though, is the use of megabits/sec for the speed ratings, which really shows it's roots as a networking and external device standard more than anything else.
The current licensing fee for the patents is $0.25 per product (not per connector, so if you throw 20 connectors on a single product you're still selling 1 product). The trademark license is free, as of a few months ago, which includes use of the name Firewire and the new logo Apple released when they announced the change in licensing terms. Then there may be additional fees if you incorporate any Apple software in your product.
Thanks for the info, guess Ill keep my eye out for the release of the rule books and then wait and see if someone picks up on the need for a PC game;) I've considered picking up some of the old SSI games, it's just a matter of finding them and having the money and the interest at the same time;)
So, I'm pretty sure that I'll never get the story. But, it's definitely intriguing. I love these interviews, though. Makes me all misty eyed that I was too young to see the origins of RPGs. But then again, I'm young enough that I'll see a few generations more. (And I'm glad that I'm not so crusty that I'm unwilling to play the most excellent 3rd edition.) Here's over 20 years of gaming under my belt, and hopefully many many more to come.
Personally, I'm just happy that I'm still interested in computer gaming and now have a chance at all of the excellent D&D PC games that have been coming out in the last few years. Over the years it got harder and harder to find a good group to sit down and do the pen & paper versions, but now I can sit down in front of the computer at any time and have a couple hours of good fun. Unfortunately, I have yet to see any plans for a DragonLance game, and I really wasn't into Forgotten Realms as much when I was playing the pen & paper stuff.
lol, here I go way off-topic, not that it should matter much since this thread's fairly old:
hey Lint, I should be online from home sometime this week (I lost a motherboard in the move due to a screw coming loose without my knowledge; took the opurtunity to double the MHz of my CPU, but the new system's being problematic, hopefully a bios update will solve the problems), which means I'll be in most of the usual places in IRC within a few minutes of getting everything setup properly. Finally got myself on the east coast, but it'll be a while before I'm settled in completely (lost not only the motherboard, but also my CD changer and my car's throwing a new problem at me every other week since making the trip in a bit under 3 days). Anyway, see you around, say hi to everyone;)
Funny, but I always thought of Sony, et. al. as *CONSUMER* electronics companies, not slack-jawed Yes Men for the Hollywood Mafia.
Sony is the Tokyo branch of the Hollywood Mafia (MPAA's board of directors list on their 'about' page has Sony listed right after Disney). As an added bonus, the name Sony appears no less than 10 times on the RIAA membership list, without even counting the sub-labels that don't carry the Sony name, but are still wholly owned by Sony.
I think part of the reason you have such high numbers for Apple is because they have control over the entire machine. They make the hardware, they make the software, and they certify the parts that hook up to their hardware. PC manufactureres don't have that luxury. Since all of these manufacturers bundle Windows with their machines, they also become liable to answer every single Windows question, and support every Windows version (2000, XP, 98/Me, etc.) Of course Apple is going to score higher numbers than the PC manufacturers, they know the whole damn thing. If Microsoft didn't put the burden of OS support on the manufacturers, you'd probably see higher numbers for the hardware manufacturers, and some really funky numbers for Microsoft.
I think you're right and wrong here. For one, MS putting the support burden on the OEM means that the OEMs are basically in the same support position as Apple. After all, Apple's tech support doesn't know the software any better than Dell's tech support, though Apple may have a better pipeline to get support information back to the developers than Dell does.
Another thing, though, is that despite Apple having better control over the full system (hardware and software), Dell still outranked them on the portion of the study regarding the percentage of actual problems (though Apple was still #2 there), meaning that while Apple has better support, you're less likely to actually have to call Dell support in the first place.
Of course, this is all coming from someone that won't buy a desktop PC from an OEM (and won't buy an Apple desktop computer because they can only be bought from Apple pre-built in set configurations), and is currently looking at possibly spending a good couple of hours getting a new CPU/motherboard/RAM/power supply combo working properly tonite/this weekend because it is displaying some awfully strange behavior that I've never seen after putting together some 30-40 PCs in the last 6 years. There are trade-offs to building them yourself, and sometimes they're worse than expected.
I must say that just working with the people in A computer field are 10 times more rude, and pushy. I had a MCSE get on me beacause I am JUST a helpdesk tech. SOme of us LIKE and ENJOY helping people, NOT all Computer people are introverts. Some of just like the challange of helping people.
I'd have to agree. I've done quite a few rounds of volunteer support for a particular game (by rounds I mean months at a time stopped by having too much to do usually). It can get a little frustrating having questions asked that are answered on the faq they got my email address from, or having people flip out because you can't give them a satisfactory solution right away (remember voluntary 3rd party for free support here, not support from the vendor or for pay on either side), which usually only happens immediately after a patch anyway. The one thing that's very surprising, though, is the sheer diversity of problems (and the causes of those problems) that come from one game. I can honestly say that if the problem is hardware related (at least with this particular game), 90% of the time it's one of three things: 1) poor OpenGL drivers (primarily ATI cards at the time) 2) poor AGP drivers (primarily Via chipsets) 3) overclocking to just beyond tolerance (ie if they step it back just slightly they have no problems and almost everything they do other than gaming has no problems at all at the current state)
It's amazing, though, what people will do to their computers, and what people will install on their computers. People will complain that their computer is regularly 'crashing', and it turns out that the problem clears up when they remove Norton CrashGuard. A game won't work properly, and it turns out that shutting off anti-virus programs (McAfee virus shield and Norton auto-protect especially) clears it up. The majority of the problems are solved and can be found online, but most people don't have the experience or the exposure to the problems to have the fixes or know where to find them.
In the case of many games, there's an online community formed around them that helps solve these problems, and a member of that community can often act as a go-between for people that aren't familiar with the community and just need help with a simple problem. The sad part is that most computer manufacturers and software developers don't know how to (or can't) form these kinds of communities for more general-use items, so the consumers are left with the more traditional tech support which may or may not have full access to these types of things (you have no idea how many times I got questions that started with "I contacted XXXXXX tech support and they didn't know how to fix this, but maybe you can help", and they turned out to be simple enough to fix, but not on the company's knowledge base).
When Apple finally released Nvidia's Gforce 4TI for the 2002 PowerMac, I looked over the specs, thought about buying it, but ultimately left the video card sitting in my shopping cart on apple.com's website.
A few days later Apple Customer Service called me at work to "see if I had any questions about the Gforce." Sure they were looking for a sale & I wasn't too interested in buying it, but it was nice to see Apple putting forth the effort.
In my book, that's not good customer service, it's invasion of my time & space and going too far (calling me) to try to sell a $400 part. It's good customer service when the $400 part breaks because of a design problem and they don't give you any shit about the return or make you wait for an hour to get to the next level of support.
and yet the Consumer Reports results showed that Dell had the lowest number of actual problems and failures (Apple was 2nd in that portion, though 1st in support). Personally, I don't like store-bought computers, but the Dell they gave me here at work seems to be really easy to work on (they 'accidentally' shipped it with a CD-ROM instead of CD-RW, so we had to open it up and replace the drive once they shipped the new drive), which is more than I can say about most of the Compaqs and HPs I've opened up.
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My BS was in Physics, and I'm currently working on my MS in applied Mathematics. I'm still working my way through the paradim shift, but I can empatically state that your comment would raise issues with my professors. Math is most definitely neither about describing things, nor about being useful. To anyone doing abstract work, the suggestion that they are "applied" is considered an insult. They are better than that. They have generalized beyound the mere physical descriptions and are involved in the essence of mathematical logic. Now one can use math to model, yes. But then much work is done to remove from the proofs any hint of that real world model. The "scaffolding must be removed from the cathedral before its presented to the public". The concept that math works "Exactly the same way that a programming language describes the actions that a program performs" sounds alot like the Computational world view. While I lean towards applied and computational maths myself, this is *not* the world view of the majority of math people. There work is more than "purely recreational", they would say, but it isn't "useful" either.
What you're looking at here is really two different things, though. Math up to a certain point has a great deal of use as an applied science. As you get further into mathematics education you get into more abstract forms of math which are applicable in much more narrow fields, and therefore many of the people learning about them become more interested in the abstraction rather than the application. The majority of students have very little exposure to anything that approaches the more abstract mathematics, but also aren't taught proper application of the forms of math which they learn. I can understand that someone approaching a BS or MS in Math can often feel that the idea of 'applied mathematics' is an insult, but we're talking about grade school and high school here, where applied mathematics is really what's needed and taught.
The problem, of course, is convincing students that there's an application for math beyond what the average Windows Calculator program does in it's default mode, that applied math includes Algebra, Geometry, and low-level Calculus, which may not be inherently obvious in their day-to-day lives at the moment, or in the problems presented in most texts. Finding the way to make it apply to them is really the goal of teaching, and students that find themselves enjoying the intrinsic beauty of mathematics will take themselves beyond the simple 'applied' math to the more abstract forms. Hell, I crammed 5 math courses into my 4 years of high school, and there were at least 30 more students in that one class room that did the same thing. Not all of them truly enjoyed the math (most probably wanted to cut a semester or two out of their college math if possible), but those that did understood the difference between applied math and the abstract, and weren't offended at the thought of learning some application of mathematics while they were still at the relatively low level (of Calculus).
So, you're saying that governments build roads to protect the mobility rights of citizens, for example? I think governments' jobs go much broader than that.
The government builds roads in order to make other government services (police, fire, military, among others) more efficient, which should, in turn, help protect the rights of citizens.
I know I'm being lazy, but has this trend continued through the "Battle for Naboob" or whatever they released in concert with the Episode I/II prequel-sequels.
I'm not even sure what (if any) Episode 2 tie-in games they've done. I know that Jedi Knight 2 did very well for them (an expansion for The Sims eventually knocked it to #2 about 2 months after release), and that a couple of the Episode 1 games did as well (during the Xmas season mostly, I wonder how many of the people receiving those games actually wanted them). Unfortunately it's fairly expensive to actually receive the PC game sales data when it's put out, so you just get the most basic 'top 10' type lists from the game press and the occasional press release from the companies when their games do well.
Some 1999 sales data brought up from Google showed that in June EP1: Phantom Menace hit #2 and EP1:Racer hit #6, no doubt the other 2,000,031 EP1 games didn't do quite as well. They seem to do alright with console games as well, I found one article that mentioned that Rogue Squadron 2 for the GameCube was LucasArts' fastest selling title ever.
Hmmm... that's what you get from trusting second-hand information. Someone in another thread said that the next generation would be 100 MB/s, and I didn't know better so I just used that information here.
Basically, next-gen Firewire is looking at 800 megabits/sec, 1.6gigabits/sec, and 3.2gb/sec, whereas current Firewire is theoretically 400mb/sec. The question is of whether or not the spec will be implemented to the full 3.2G whenever people start making next-gen devices and connectors, or whether they'll just stick to 800mb (or close to it). Those limits are also based on copper, so in theory there's room for greater range and speed using optics, and the design allows for it. The biggest thing that they seem to be working on now, though, is a method of combining 802.11 (wireless) and 1394 (Firewire), presumably for wireless externals, though obviously at a lower data transfer rate for the time-being. Personally, I don't like sending data wireless, but with the recent popularity of 802.11 networks, I guess I'm one of a few, rather than the many.
I seem to remember a case where a mother sued MTV over Beavis and Butthead because of Beavis's constant infatuation with fire (more often the word than anything he himself did).
Even worse when it comes to this particular case is that MTV stripped the references to fire from older episodes and required them not to be included in episodes made from that point on.
So...how the hell can you say (yet another) Star Wars game is going to be bigger than something already universally known as EVERCRACK?
It's quite easy, really. Star Wars games routinely top the PC games sales charts on release. The question is really one of whether or not they can make a good MMORPG from Star Wars that will keep subscribers and get good word-of-mouth, rather than one of whether or not it will sell. Star Wars games have to be nearly as bad as a Star Trek game (Star Trek games probably make up some of the worst games in PC gaming history, though a couple of Star Wars games were pretty bad) before they don't bring in a lot of money.
yeah, the first hit is free, if you buy the $50 crack pipe. Of AC, EQ, and UO, EQ is the most expensive to start playing today. UO and AC you can get for almost nothing (or nothing after rebate iirc with AC), while EQ sits on the shelf in the trilogy edition (EQ + first 2 expansions) for $50-60. You basically just paid 5 months subscription fees to start paying again in 30 days, and the game and each of it's expansions is more than paid for by 1 month of their subscription earnings.
The only real bonus here is that the subscription guarantees that the servers will run until the amount of subscriptions coming in can't cover the service, or EQ2 picks up more subscriptions than EQ1, at which time you have to wonder whether or not they'll keep it up when they know shutting it down will bring the stragglers over to the sequel.
On the other hand, if I wanted to play CounterStrike (a loathsome game imo, but it's the most played FPS game online), I'd simply load up my 4-year old copy of Half-life, download the mega-patch-from-hell, and the CS mod itself, and there's going to be a server running as long as people are willing to play it. My experience so far with online FPS games has been that a particular mod that is as popular as Counterstrike is will outlive almost anything, except it's own sequel or a radically new and catchy mod that sucks up an even bigger fan base, and even then enough people will continue playing it to keep a few servers running.
Personally, I tried both UO and EQ (and hell I went all out and bought all of the EQ expansion shit). Neither of them offered something that made me want to pay the subscription fee after the first month expired. In fact, I don't think I even bothered playing either of them for the full first month.
Blizzard, of course, is lucky to be able to consistently sell that many copies of every game they release, and because of it they can currently afford to keep servers running for most of those games (going back to Diablo, which launched it, and WarCraft 2 which they retrofitted afterwards). Unfortunately, the amount of information stored on those servers is not likely to be anything near what's stored for an MMORPG (although Diablo 2's realms are close), and the service has the kind of down-time and problems that tend to sink any kind of service that people are paying for with a monthly fee.
oh, and let's not even talk about the weekend, which can really skew the daily average. Seriously, even if I go out and spend all day doing something in the outdoors, I can still pull a 12+ hour gaming session when I get home without much more than my normal caffeine intake.
But, holy shit, to repeatedly play any game, or any number of games for 8-10 hours a day, strikes me as dysfunctional. Is this typical for gamers? How do you get anything else done?
Let's see, on my average day I wake up between 6 and 7 AM, have a cigarette and a glass of juice while I scan CNN to make sure the world didn't blow up today (or that something isn't happening that would mean I don't have to go to work). I then drive to work where I stay until about 4PM. If I don't have to do any shopping I get home around 4:30 at the latest, open a beer and look around to see if anything needs to be done (dishes, trash, cleaning), all of which can usually be done by 5 or 5:30, which leaves 7-10 hours until I even have a chance of getting to sleep, regardless of whether or not I'm actually doing anything. Then again, this was the case when I didn't play any PC or console games (though, admittedly, that was all of maybe 3 months in high school). If I don't play games during that time, I read, watch TV/movies, write software, or just 'hang out' online in IRC/IM/etc while I surf the web and listen to music. Hell, the last woman I dated before leaving San Diego was someone I met online.
Realistically, my biggest issue is the fact that work takes up 10 hours of the day due to the commute and lunch hour (which I rarely even take for lunch, but I have to be there during business hours), and only pays for 8 of them, which is exactly why I prefer to work from home whenever I can (besides the fact that it's much easier for me to sleep during the day than at nite, and I work more efficiently in the evening/nite hours).
The article also points out that it's their highest and most reliable profit margin, and that raising subscription costs had almost no impact on the number of subscribers (and they're still gaining new subscribers every month). Meanwhile, their hardware is barely keeping 1% margins and every movie or album they make is a gamble.
Where did they find a place with no high winds, hurricanes, tornados, or lightning? And, with ocean front property? I think I want to live there.
From the sound of it, about 400 miles from nowhere in the middle of the ocean...
Sounds good right? BUT NOOO. Instead the vendors have decided to up the dosage of this fucking IDE dogshit again.
Because reality sets in on them when consumers look at the prices of the drives themselves:
36GB 10,000rpm SCSI drive: $650+
9GB 10,000rpm SCSI drive: $250
200GB 7,200rpm IDE drive: $400
120GB 7,200rpm IDE drive: $200
40GB 7,200rpm IDE drive: $85
20GB 7,200rpm IDE drive: $78 (sorry, anyone know where to find a 10GB IDE drive besides pulling one out of the closet?)
The simple fact is that for the average consumer hard drives aren't about speed, they're about price per MB (or per GB). SCSI drives fail to hit that point because people that want SCSI are willing to pay for it.
Does anyone want to throw out their old drives and replace them all with new ones just because they exist?
That's precisely why the serial ATA standard has a better chance than most other proposals: your old (parallel ATA) drives will work fine with a serial ATA controller.
which is also why video cards can almost double in speed every 6-12 months without actually changing Moore's law, though it appears that as time goes they're not getting faster as quickly as they did a couple years ago (seems mostly due to memory bandwidth).
Speed. Even the next generation of Firewire will only be 2/3 as fast as Serial ATA (as many have said, it's 150MB/s, not Mb/s). Not that there are any drives that fast yet...
When you have 2+ drives running with over 50MB/s bursts, though, it's nice to know there's some room there. Current Firewire on most systems is running 50MB/sec max, and so can have some data loss (well, Im sure itll re-read until it gets everything, but you know the drill), assuming that the connection between firewire and the drive is efficient in the first place (since most firewire drives are just ATA drives with a conversion to firewire). For CD/DVD/-R/W drives firewire's going to work as well as any other connection, and if they started making these (internal) drives native to firewire, it'd certainly be a good reason for me to switch at least some of my system(s) over.
Of course, the next generation of firewire goes a bit further than you have stated (about 4x), though implementation of the next generation may be staged over 2 or 3 releases. What I really don't like, though, is the use of megabits/sec for the speed ratings, which really shows it's roots as a networking and external device standard more than anything else.
The current licensing fee for the patents is $0.25 per product (not per connector, so if you throw 20 connectors on a single product you're still selling 1 product). The trademark license is free, as of a few months ago, which includes use of the name Firewire and the new logo Apple released when they announced the change in licensing terms. Then there may be additional fees if you incorporate any Apple software in your product.
Thanks for the info, guess Ill keep my eye out for the release of the rule books and then wait and see if someone picks up on the need for a PC game ;) I've considered picking up some of the old SSI games, it's just a matter of finding them and having the money and the interest at the same time ;)
So, I'm pretty sure that I'll never get the story. But, it's definitely intriguing. I love these interviews, though. Makes me all misty eyed that I was too young to see the origins of RPGs. But then again, I'm young enough that I'll see a few generations more. (And I'm glad that I'm not so crusty that I'm unwilling to play the most excellent 3rd edition.) Here's over 20 years of gaming under my belt, and hopefully many many more to come.
Personally, I'm just happy that I'm still interested in computer gaming and now have a chance at all of the excellent D&D PC games that have been coming out in the last few years. Over the years it got harder and harder to find a good group to sit down and do the pen & paper versions, but now I can sit down in front of the computer at any time and have a couple hours of good fun. Unfortunately, I have yet to see any plans for a DragonLance game, and I really wasn't into Forgotten Realms as much when I was playing the pen & paper stuff.
lol, here I go way off-topic, not that it should matter much since this thread's fairly old:
;)
hey Lint, I should be online from home sometime this week (I lost a motherboard in the move due to a screw coming loose without my knowledge; took the opurtunity to double the MHz of my CPU, but the new system's being problematic, hopefully a bios update will solve the problems), which means I'll be in most of the usual places in IRC within a few minutes of getting everything setup properly. Finally got myself on the east coast, but it'll be a while before I'm settled in completely (lost not only the motherboard, but also my CD changer and my car's throwing a new problem at me every other week since making the trip in a bit under 3 days). Anyway, see you around, say hi to everyone
Funny, but I always thought of Sony, et. al. as *CONSUMER* electronics companies, not slack-jawed Yes Men for the Hollywood Mafia.
Sony is the Tokyo branch of the Hollywood Mafia (MPAA's board of directors list on their 'about' page has Sony listed right after Disney). As an added bonus, the name Sony appears no less than 10 times on the RIAA membership list, without even counting the sub-labels that don't carry the Sony name, but are still wholly owned by Sony.
I think part of the reason you have such high numbers for Apple is because they have control over the entire machine. They make the hardware, they make the software, and they certify the parts that hook up to their hardware. PC manufactureres don't have that luxury. Since all of these manufacturers bundle Windows with their machines, they also become liable to answer every single Windows question, and support every Windows version (2000, XP, 98/Me, etc.) Of course Apple is going to score higher numbers than the PC manufacturers, they know the whole damn thing. If Microsoft didn't put the burden of OS support on the manufacturers, you'd probably see higher numbers for the hardware manufacturers, and some really funky numbers for Microsoft.
I think you're right and wrong here. For one, MS putting the support burden on the OEM means that the OEMs are basically in the same support position as Apple. After all, Apple's tech support doesn't know the software any better than Dell's tech support, though Apple may have a better pipeline to get support information back to the developers than Dell does.
Another thing, though, is that despite Apple having better control over the full system (hardware and software), Dell still outranked them on the portion of the study regarding the percentage of actual problems (though Apple was still #2 there), meaning that while Apple has better support, you're less likely to actually have to call Dell support in the first place.
Of course, this is all coming from someone that won't buy a desktop PC from an OEM (and won't buy an Apple desktop computer because they can only be bought from Apple pre-built in set configurations), and is currently looking at possibly spending a good couple of hours getting a new CPU/motherboard/RAM/power supply combo working properly tonite/this weekend because it is displaying some awfully strange behavior that I've never seen after putting together some 30-40 PCs in the last 6 years. There are trade-offs to building them yourself, and sometimes they're worse than expected.
I must say that just working with the people in A computer field are 10 times more rude, and pushy. I had a MCSE get on me beacause I am JUST a helpdesk tech. SOme of us LIKE and ENJOY helping people, NOT all Computer people are introverts. Some of just like the challange of helping people.
I'd have to agree. I've done quite a few rounds of volunteer support for a particular game (by rounds I mean months at a time stopped by having too much to do usually). It can get a little frustrating having questions asked that are answered on the faq they got my email address from, or having people flip out because you can't give them a satisfactory solution right away (remember voluntary 3rd party for free support here, not support from the vendor or for pay on either side), which usually only happens immediately after a patch anyway. The one thing that's very surprising, though, is the sheer diversity of problems (and the causes of those problems) that come from one game. I can honestly say that if the problem is hardware related (at least with this particular game), 90% of the time it's one of three things:
1) poor OpenGL drivers (primarily ATI cards at the time)
2) poor AGP drivers (primarily Via chipsets)
3) overclocking to just beyond tolerance (ie if they step it back just slightly they have no problems and almost everything they do other than gaming has no problems at all at the current state)
It's amazing, though, what people will do to their computers, and what people will install on their computers. People will complain that their computer is regularly 'crashing', and it turns out that the problem clears up when they remove Norton CrashGuard. A game won't work properly, and it turns out that shutting off anti-virus programs (McAfee virus shield and Norton auto-protect especially) clears it up. The majority of the problems are solved and can be found online, but most people don't have the experience or the exposure to the problems to have the fixes or know where to find them.
In the case of many games, there's an online community formed around them that helps solve these problems, and a member of that community can often act as a go-between for people that aren't familiar with the community and just need help with a simple problem. The sad part is that most computer manufacturers and software developers don't know how to (or can't) form these kinds of communities for more general-use items, so the consumers are left with the more traditional tech support which may or may not have full access to these types of things (you have no idea how many times I got questions that started with "I contacted XXXXXX tech support and they didn't know how to fix this, but maybe you can help", and they turned out to be simple enough to fix, but not on the company's knowledge base).
When Apple finally released Nvidia's Gforce 4TI for the 2002 PowerMac, I looked over the specs, thought about buying it, but ultimately left the video card sitting in my shopping cart on apple.com's website.
A few days later Apple Customer Service called me at work to "see if I had any questions about the Gforce." Sure they were looking for a sale & I wasn't too interested in buying it, but it was nice to see Apple putting forth the effort.
In my book, that's not good customer service, it's invasion of my time & space and going too far (calling me) to try to sell a $400 part. It's good customer service when the $400 part breaks because of a design problem and they don't give you any shit about the return or make you wait for an hour to get to the next level of support.
and yet the Consumer Reports results showed that Dell had the lowest number of actual problems and failures (Apple was 2nd in that portion, though 1st in support). Personally, I don't like store-bought computers, but the Dell they gave me here at work seems to be really easy to work on (they 'accidentally' shipped it with a CD-ROM instead of CD-RW, so we had to open it up and replace the drive once they shipped the new drive), which is more than I can say about most of the Compaqs and HPs I've opened up.