When the 'dreaded' live tv appears (ok, we have IPTV, but it has a live tv buffer all the same), we just pause the tv for about 10 minutes and read/browse until we've cached up enough to skip the rest of the ads. If its a movie (= more ads), we might fix a meal, do some chores, or play video games for half an hour so we can skip them later.
Me and my girlfriend are aggressive "Always skip the Ads" people. Mainly because we are impatient and want to watch more TV in less time. When we go other places that have TV's (and at some point play ads), we're constantly like "What the hell is that?" because we watch so few ads now, and some of them are freakishly weird the first few times you see them.
And then people we know will say 'you know that ad where [insert ad description here]?' and we always say 'we don't watch ads...' they always stare at us like we have a second head or something (as if ad skipping DVR's weren't 5+ years old).
Ok, this guy calls me, and asks me if I've got a minute. I respectfully tell him 'no', because I'm busy at the moment. He then proceeds to tell me that he's got a job opportunity. I tell him I just started a new position, and that I'm not looking for a new position. He then asks me if he can describe it to me. I respectfully decline, telling him 'no, I'm not interested.' Then he asks if he can email me a description of the job. I tell him, please not to email me with anything.
Two minutes later, my email pings and its Andy, not having listened to a word I've said. Now, how is this jerk supposed to represent me and my interests to a potential recruiter if he doesn't care one spit what I say or think?
This was unsolicited, and rude. As a service provider, I see this as a critical issue, because recruiter's role is to work with you to a mutually beneficial result for all parties. It also demonstrated a level of incompetents that I was personally offended by.
Andy Kyle
Internal Recruiting Specialist Sai People Solutions, Inc. "20 Years of Consultant Satisfaction" Toll Free: 866 313 6849 x 740 Phone: 281 358 9411 x 740 Fax: 1-(801)-795-3026 Email: akyle@saipeople.com Web: www.saipeople.com
Hey it's not a new idea, but it is a market space where a good mobile device could make a place for itself, if it were designed and implemented really, really well. Yes, it's basically a notebook. But its cheaper than a small notebook, and smaller than a cheap notebook.
I've been shopping for a mobile net appliance, like the Nokia N800, or maybe this thing (can't say until I know more about it.), and I think its about time we started seeing smaller, less powerful, cheaper mobile computing devices. Smart phones are limited by their size, and too cumbersome to do actual document editing on, etc. etc.
Now, do I think palm will succeed with this strategy? Honestly, I don't. I don't think they have the talent to pull this off, given their recent offerings and business decisions. And, at $600 with MIR, its just too expensive for what would be a toy to me. Plus, I have no idea what hardware is in it. Like what's the screen resolution?
Richard Stallman, as important as he is, is not responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars worth of market capitalization, nor does he have hundreds of millions of installed products with commercial licenses abound. I assure you his legal concerns are far, far less cumbersome than those of microsoft or apple.
"Gee, Ogg is ok for this one guy.. it must be fine for a multinational corporation to use"
Personally, I don't even see that as the issue. To me, its that adding Ogg wouldn't do anything for the product. It wouldn't appreciably raise their sales numbers, or give them an edge against the competition. Linux users/OSS fans can always find a reason not to go mainstream.
One more supported audio format? There's a lot of audio formats that they could slap on there but don't. More features don't make an awesome product. Or an awesome product any better.
Your equations make no sense. You're saying the number of people a given person is acquainted with is proportionate to the number of zunes sold in that country.
What you mean to say is that if they sold a million units in the UK, you'd have a 1/54 chance of selecting someone who ones one, if you were selecting people from the country at random.
But I see probably one Zune per week on the subway going to and from San Francisco on my commute. It might just be the same couple people, since its the same commute. Their large screen, and garish design makes them stick out like sore thumbs to a sharp eyed technologist.
The people using them always have the backlight on, 24-7, which is the cause of many premature battery deaths among ipods and cell phones as well.. In 3 months they're going to be writing to M$ because their battery life is crap, and wondering why no one can "fix" their defective batteries.
1) TV uses up part of your total bandwidth. We have a 6Mb connection, and an HD stream probably uses about half of it. SD probably uses a quarter of that (or @ 1/6 the original).
2) The DVR records 4 shows in real time. Everything has a sense of real time, but the box constantly buffers up 90 minutes or so of whatever channel you're on. You can only record one HD stream at a time, although you can watch another.
3) If multicast means the data for all the channels is transmit at once, this is clearly impossible. We've got about 25 HD channels, and 300+ other channels. I'm assuming there's some packet sharing peer-to-peer scheme for distributing content, but I'm not sure how it would work without losing the concept of scheduling.
4) They're laying fiber for the bandwidth. Does that help? I mean, I don't know. If they alot a certain amount of bandwidth per customer, it seems feasable.
5) Nope. First, the question itself is silly to begin with, given the nature of networking (since its a consumer product). HD definitely has a frame drop every now and then, but its generally very good. HDFoodTV seems to be worse about it. What's much more noticeable is the compression during fast action sequences, if you're familiar with HD and H.264. SD is really good, much better than actual NTSC SD.
Our house signed up for U-Verse a few weeks ago. We've got about 350 channels. It's actually delivered by fiber to a node down the block, then a specialized DSL connection that's 6 Mb/s connection. The service is extremely location specific. Our next door neighbors can't get it, so we're right on the edge.
The TV is H.264 encoded and streamed over IP to the DVR box. You can record up to 4 standard definition channels, or a single HD channel, while watching another. The standard def television looks better than regular standard def. More like 480p. The 'Hi def' channels look similar to 720p but with noticeable compression, and the occasional dropped frame. If someone were really looking for full 1080i HD, highest possible quality, I'd have some reservations recommending it. But the SD looks good enough that we're pretty happy with it. A lot of what we watch is still only on the SD channels.
Since everything is streaming, it always buffers about 90 minutes worth of footage of whatever you're watching (a la tivo). It also has some neat features like being able to show thumbnail previews of channels while you're surfing around, along with a representation of how far into the show it is.
Overall, the DVR functions are quite primitive. Its can be difficult to make the recordings you want. There doesn't seem to be any way to make only recordings of new episodes of Stargate SG1 (This is slighly less of a problem since there's only like 4 episodes left in the series. This was the only show we record that had problems.
For TV + broadband for under $100, its well worth it for us.
It may interest you to know that McDonald's is the largest fast food (and therefore restaurant) purchaser and server of chicken. This has been true since they started serving chicken nuggets in the 70's.
Blizzard has said on multiple occasions that one of the primary reasons they release on both Mac and PC is quality. After farming out [I think it was] Starcraft's port to a 3rd party company, and having numerous problems and delays, they developed their own in-house port team for [maybe it was] diablo II. Working on both platforms allows them to find/fix more bugs and make a more solid product on both platforms.
Some bugs will exist on both platforms, but reproduce easier on a particular one, so developing on PC (which is what I assume they do) while doing a concurrent port for Mac improves the end quality of both products.
I'm a bit blurry on which game's porting they were miffed about, leading to performing the next major project in-house, so replace the two game titles above with ones that make sense to you.
At any rate, I'm looking forward to the big collector's edition box, and playing Starcraft II on my mac.
If you're working in the QA department at EA, get a job as a Development Tester. Its easier to get into Devtest if you have some testing experience, CS background, or hardware background. You also need to know a lot about games, bugs, QA, and general game quality. Whereas they might have 30-50 core QA testers, a project might have 3-10 DevTest. During my two projects (Tiger Woods '07, Spore) at EA, my work experience was nothing like the standard QA stories you hear. It was the most fun I've ever had at any job.
Benefits to working in DevTest:
1) You work in development, next to engineers, not in the QA annex. You talk with engineers, producers, and directors every day. 2) You get the same equipment the developers do. Last summer, my work machine was a dual Xeon with 3 GB of RAM, 3 HDDs with dual LCD displays. I also had a backup machine. I hear in QA they sometimes share machines. 3) You attend development meetings and functions. I had the option of attending QA events (which I did), but I got to go to all the official functions QA can't get into. 4) You get to do a lot more than regular QA. Since we compiled builds and worked with raw assets, we might do audio checks, work with 3D models, test code branches, and work with all the real development tools. 5) Your testing is much less repetitive. You hardly ever work with the same build twice.
Its funny you mention moving 2 miles down the road...
I live in an area north of Oakland, where the houses around me are in one school district, and the houses down the street (about 50 yards) are in the Oakland district. This, and other county line delineations leads to houses in my vicinity being ~15-20% more expensive. So right where I am, you can save quite a bit by moving just down the block. And if you have kids, maybe the premium is worth it for the schools. Of course, these 'cheaper' houses still start around $900,000+ for a small 2 br.
I can't even imagine what it costs to own across the bay in San Francisco.
The preview movies and demos are scripted and designed to look good. You can take a pre-alpha build, polish up one part of it, implement everything 1/100 as well as it needs to be to actually ship, and give a demo that looks like a complete game. Then, you go back, actually write the engines for all the effects you were faking, and it takes months/years/whatever to actually make the game.
Maybe they used scripted events instead of actual AI. Maybe the objects only interact correctly on that particular level. Maybe they use different assets than the final version to make the 3D engine perform 1000x as fast.
They could have been 10% done when that demo was made, then rewritten every major game component since then. Its not unusual, its just software development.
The friendliest people I would ever hope to meet would not under any circumstances pull a gun on me. I'd much rather hang out with unfriendly pacifists who do not threaten my immediate safety.
Kung fu is one of the least practical fighting styles in existence, so its not too surprising the muy thai guy put the kungfu'er in the hospital. They also have a lot of emphasis on crippling head blows, whereas other martial arts styles are not designed to kill people (which is definitely bringing a knife to a gun fight). I'd imagine going up against a professional fighter who's martial art is designed to be deadly, while yours is not, is a good way to end up in the hospital.
Otherwise, very interesting post. I must be getting old. I used to adore traveling, but some of the places in the world, the more I hear about them, the less I want to go.
This is not a compact flash drive, its a 1.8" solid state drive. It basically looks the same as the drives you find in an iPod, and about the size as a PCMCIA card.
That being said, compact format laptops have been using these for a while, and they didn't get that much smaller, just a millimeter thinner or so.
I don't really see how this makes drives easier or harder to remove. The big jump in that respect was SATA connectors which have fewer pins and less insertion force. Making a removable drive architecture still introduces the same problems (more points of failure, structural weakness) that make them more expensive than internal ones.
His entire argument went down the crapper when he brought up the cost of digital distribution. The costs of digital distribution are pennies on the dollar compared to physical medium.
Lets see: Physical Medium: 1. Build engineer makes iso 2. Mastering lab creates discs 3. Engineers and testers test media 3. First party verifies test media 4. Artists create high resolution box art, disc art. 5. Mastering facility creates final discs and packaging 6. Game is assembled and shipped to warehouse 7. Game sits in warehouse. 8. Game is sold to retail distributor 9. Game is shipped to retail stores 10. Game sits in store, taking up inventory and shelf space
Digital Distribution: 1. Engineer creates downloadable content 2. QA tests downloadable content 3. First party QA tests downloadable content 4. [negligeable] Artist creates graphics for download patch based on existing content. 5. [negligeable] Content is delivered to MS XBLA servers
Maxis was only involved with the original Sims game. Soon after, a 'Sims Business Unit' was spun off at EA which has been responsible for churning out expansion after expansion, along with the development of The Sims 2, the console titles, and the current development of The Sims 3. Maxis hasn't touched The Sims in a very, very long time.
People have always assumed this arrangement, even though it has never existed:
-Quality of original assets | | -Quality of Next gen in-game assets | | | -Quality of Current gen in-game assets.
So that next gen and current gen assets come from the same [magical] place somehow. this ignores a lot of things like lighting, physics, and the fact that current and next gen games will use different models.
The statement that assets are 'downscaled' for consoles is of course true. But this statement is irrelavent in terms of comparing current gen to next gen development costs.
Having about 3-4 years of CS experience, I can't really imagine how this guy got to be a manager of anything. I've dealt with lots of customers who've experienced data loss. They cry, they yell, they threaten to sue you. At no point is there any reason to become as hostile and belligerent as this michael guy became (not to mention petty). He lost his composure and phrased his emails poorly. There's no justification for his lack of professionalism.
Gee, because drag and drop is such a great way to handle 2000+ songs you'd put on an ipod. Sure, drag and drop is simple and not tied to a software app (besides your OS I suppose), but its also horribly limited and inept at keeping track of music, and a terrible consumer experience. Tying ipod syncing to itunes and utilizing a metadata db allows for a much more feature rich experience. You can sync your files based on times played, star ratings, purchase date, artists, (pseudo)random, genres.
Your specific demands for a music player are impractical for my needs. At the cost of said features, the ipod+itunes brings tons more functionality to the table. I'm just glad more people don't agree with your poor sense of design.
The built-in 512MB memory can currently store something like EVERY VC game available, and about 2000 blocks of save game memory (the typical game so far using about 4). since a formatted 512 SD card shows up as a little less than 4000 blocks, I'm assuming its 'blocks' are counted in megabits.
Newton's LAW of gravity! Sir Newton was a very important man (Lucasian professor of Caimbridge), and did not trifle with theories. He made laws.
Seriously, theory vs. law was very much a political game in science's history. Science is fraught with discontinuities such as laws which have been disproven, and theories that are regarded as fact. Creationists have latched on the a semantic arguement (that evolution is a theory) that holds no meaning to the scientific world.
Slashdot Mirror
When the 'dreaded' live tv appears (ok, we have IPTV, but it has a live tv buffer all the same), we just pause the tv for about 10 minutes and read/browse until we've cached up enough to skip the rest of the ads. If its a movie (= more ads), we might fix a meal, do some chores, or play video games for half an hour so we can skip them later.
Me and my girlfriend are aggressive "Always skip the Ads" people. Mainly because we are impatient and want to watch more TV in less time. When we go other places that have TV's (and at some point play ads), we're constantly like "What the hell is that?" because we watch so few ads now, and some of them are freakishly weird the first few times you see them.
And then people we know will say 'you know that ad where [insert ad description here]?' and we always say 'we don't watch ads...' they always stare at us like we have a second head or something (as if ad skipping DVR's weren't 5+ years old).
Ok, this guy calls me, and asks me if I've got a minute. I respectfully tell him 'no', because I'm busy at the moment. He then proceeds to tell me that he's got a job opportunity. I tell him I just started a new position, and that I'm not looking for a new position. He then asks me if he can describe it to me. I respectfully decline, telling him 'no, I'm not interested.' Then he asks if he can email me a description of the job. I tell him, please not to email me with anything.
Two minutes later, my email pings and its Andy, not having listened to a word I've said. Now, how is this jerk supposed to represent me and my interests to a potential recruiter if he doesn't care one spit what I say or think?
This was unsolicited, and rude. As a service provider, I see this as a critical issue, because recruiter's role is to work with you to a mutually beneficial result for all parties. It also demonstrated a level of incompetents that I was personally offended by.
Andy Kyle
Internal Recruiting Specialist
Sai People Solutions, Inc.
"20 Years of Consultant Satisfaction"
Toll Free: 866 313 6849 x 740
Phone: 281 358 9411 x 740
Fax: 1-(801)-795-3026
Email: akyle@saipeople.com
Web: www.saipeople.com
Hey it's not a new idea, but it is a market space where a good mobile device could make a place for itself, if it were designed and implemented really, really well. Yes, it's basically a notebook. But its cheaper than a small notebook, and smaller than a cheap notebook.
I've been shopping for a mobile net appliance, like the Nokia N800, or maybe this thing (can't say until I know more about it.), and I think its about time we started seeing smaller, less powerful, cheaper mobile computing devices. Smart phones are limited by their size, and too cumbersome to do actual document editing on, etc. etc.
Now, do I think palm will succeed with this strategy? Honestly, I don't. I don't think they have the talent to pull this off, given their recent offerings and business decisions. And, at $600 with MIR, its just too expensive for what would be a toy to me. Plus, I have no idea what hardware is in it. Like what's the screen resolution?
Richard Stallman, as important as he is, is not responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars worth of market capitalization, nor does he have hundreds of millions of installed products with commercial licenses abound. I assure you his legal concerns are far, far less cumbersome than those of microsoft or apple.
"Gee, Ogg is ok for this one guy.. it must be fine for a multinational corporation to use"
Personally, I don't even see that as the issue. To me, its that adding Ogg wouldn't do anything for the product. It wouldn't appreciably raise their sales numbers, or give them an edge against the competition. Linux users/OSS fans can always find a reason not to go mainstream.
One more supported audio format? There's a lot of audio formats that they could slap on there but don't. More features don't make an awesome product. Or an awesome product any better.
Your equations make no sense. You're saying the number of people a given person is acquainted with is proportionate to the number of zunes sold in that country.
What you mean to say is that if they sold a million units in the UK, you'd have a 1/54 chance of selecting someone who ones one, if you were selecting people from the country at random.
But I see probably one Zune per week on the subway going to and from San Francisco on my commute. It might just be the same couple people, since its the same commute. Their large screen, and garish design makes them stick out like sore thumbs to a sharp eyed technologist.
The people using them always have the backlight on, 24-7, which is the cause of many premature battery deaths among ipods and cell phones as well.. In 3 months they're going to be writing to M$ because their battery life is crap, and wondering why no one can "fix" their defective batteries.
I stand corrected on that multicast question. That's interesting to know. I suppose the simplest answer is the best.
It's faster than digital TV. maybe 1/3 to 1/2 a second.
(I have this service)
1) TV uses up part of your total bandwidth. We have a 6Mb connection, and an HD stream probably uses about half of it. SD probably uses a quarter of that (or @ 1/6 the original).
2) The DVR records 4 shows in real time. Everything has a sense of real time, but the box constantly buffers up 90 minutes or so of whatever channel you're on. You can only record one HD stream at a time, although you can watch another.
3) If multicast means the data for all the channels is transmit at once, this is clearly impossible. We've got about 25 HD channels, and 300+ other channels. I'm assuming there's some packet sharing peer-to-peer scheme for distributing content, but I'm not sure how it would work without losing the concept of scheduling.
4) They're laying fiber for the bandwidth. Does that help? I mean, I don't know. If they alot a certain amount of bandwidth per customer, it seems feasable.
5) Nope. First, the question itself is silly to begin with, given the nature of networking (since its a consumer product). HD definitely has a frame drop every now and then, but its generally very good. HDFoodTV seems to be worse about it. What's much more noticeable is the compression during fast action sequences, if you're familiar with HD and H.264. SD is really good, much better than actual NTSC SD.
Our house signed up for U-Verse a few weeks ago. We've got about 350 channels. It's actually delivered by fiber to a node down the block, then a specialized DSL connection that's 6 Mb/s connection. The service is extremely location specific. Our next door neighbors can't get it, so we're right on the edge.
The TV is H.264 encoded and streamed over IP to the DVR box. You can record up to 4 standard definition channels, or a single HD channel, while watching another. The standard def television looks better than regular standard def. More like 480p. The 'Hi def' channels look similar to 720p but with noticeable compression, and the occasional dropped frame. If someone were really looking for full 1080i HD, highest possible quality, I'd have some reservations recommending it. But the SD looks good enough that we're pretty happy with it. A lot of what we watch is still only on the SD channels.
Since everything is streaming, it always buffers about 90 minutes worth of footage of whatever you're watching (a la tivo). It also has some neat features like being able to show thumbnail previews of channels while you're surfing around, along with a representation of how far into the show it is.
Overall, the DVR functions are quite primitive. Its can be difficult to make the recordings you want. There doesn't seem to be any way to make only recordings of new episodes of Stargate SG1 (This is slighly less of a problem since there's only like 4 episodes left in the series. This was the only show we record that had problems.
For TV + broadband for under $100, its well worth it for us.
It may interest you to know that McDonald's is the largest fast food (and therefore restaurant) purchaser and server of chicken. This has been true since they started serving chicken nuggets in the 70's.
Hrm. Maybe it's not that interesting after all...
Blizzard has said on multiple occasions that one of the primary reasons they release on both Mac and PC is quality. After farming out [I think it was] Starcraft's port to a 3rd party company, and having numerous problems and delays, they developed their own in-house port team for [maybe it was] diablo II. Working on both platforms allows them to find/fix more bugs and make a more solid product on both platforms.
Some bugs will exist on both platforms, but reproduce easier on a particular one, so developing on PC (which is what I assume they do) while doing a concurrent port for Mac improves the end quality of both products.
I'm a bit blurry on which game's porting they were miffed about, leading to performing the next major project in-house, so replace the two game titles above with ones that make sense to you.
At any rate, I'm looking forward to the big collector's edition box, and playing Starcraft II on my mac.
If you're working in the QA department at EA, get a job as a Development Tester. Its easier to get into Devtest if you have some testing experience, CS background, or hardware background. You also need to know a lot about games, bugs, QA, and general game quality. Whereas they might have 30-50 core QA testers, a project might have 3-10 DevTest. During my two projects (Tiger Woods '07, Spore) at EA, my work experience was nothing like the standard QA stories you hear. It was the most fun I've ever had at any job.
Benefits to working in DevTest:
1) You work in development, next to engineers, not in the QA annex. You talk with engineers, producers, and directors every day.
2) You get the same equipment the developers do. Last summer, my work machine was a dual Xeon with 3 GB of RAM, 3 HDDs with dual LCD displays. I also had a backup machine. I hear in QA they sometimes share machines.
3) You attend development meetings and functions. I had the option of attending QA events (which I did), but I got to go to all the official functions QA can't get into.
4) You get to do a lot more than regular QA. Since we compiled builds and worked with raw assets, we might do audio checks, work with 3D models, test code branches, and work with all the real development tools.
5) Your testing is much less repetitive. You hardly ever work with the same build twice.
Its funny you mention moving 2 miles down the road...
I live in an area north of Oakland, where the houses around me are in one school district, and the houses down the street (about 50 yards) are in the Oakland district. This, and other county line delineations leads to houses in my vicinity being ~15-20% more expensive. So right where I am, you can save quite a bit by moving just down the block. And if you have kids, maybe the premium is worth it for the schools. Of course, these 'cheaper' houses still start around $900,000+ for a small 2 br.
I can't even imagine what it costs to own across the bay in San Francisco.
The preview movies and demos are scripted and designed to look good. You can take a pre-alpha build, polish up one part of it, implement everything 1/100 as well as it needs to be to actually ship, and give a demo that looks like a complete game. Then, you go back, actually write the engines for all the effects you were faking, and it takes months/years/whatever to actually make the game.
Maybe they used scripted events instead of actual AI. Maybe the objects only interact correctly on that particular level. Maybe they use different assets than the final version to make the 3D engine perform 1000x as fast.
They could have been 10% done when that demo was made, then rewritten every major game component since then. Its not unusual, its just software development.
The friendliest people I would ever hope to meet would not under any circumstances pull a gun on me. I'd much rather hang out with unfriendly pacifists who do not threaten my immediate safety.
Kung fu is one of the least practical fighting styles in existence, so its not too surprising the muy thai guy put the kungfu'er in the hospital. They also have a lot of emphasis on crippling head blows, whereas other martial arts styles are not designed to kill people (which is definitely bringing a knife to a gun fight). I'd imagine going up against a professional fighter who's martial art is designed to be deadly, while yours is not, is a good way to end up in the hospital.
Otherwise, very interesting post. I must be getting old. I used to adore traveling, but some of the places in the world, the more I hear about them, the less I want to go.
This is not a compact flash drive, its a 1.8" solid state drive. It basically looks the same as the drives you find in an iPod, and about the size as a PCMCIA card.
That being said, compact format laptops have been using these for a while, and they didn't get that much smaller, just a millimeter thinner or so.
I don't really see how this makes drives easier or harder to remove. The big jump in that respect was SATA connectors which have fewer pins and less insertion force. Making a removable drive architecture still introduces the same problems (more points of failure, structural weakness) that make them more expensive than internal ones.
His entire argument went down the crapper when he brought up the cost of digital distribution. The costs of digital distribution are pennies on the dollar compared to physical medium.
Lets see:
Physical Medium:
1. Build engineer makes iso
2. Mastering lab creates discs
3. Engineers and testers test media
3. First party verifies test media
4. Artists create high resolution box art, disc art.
5. Mastering facility creates final discs and packaging
6. Game is assembled and shipped to warehouse
7. Game sits in warehouse.
8. Game is sold to retail distributor
9. Game is shipped to retail stores
10. Game sits in store, taking up inventory and shelf space
Digital Distribution:
1. Engineer creates downloadable content
2. QA tests downloadable content
3. First party QA tests downloadable content
4. [negligeable] Artist creates graphics for download patch based on existing content.
5. [negligeable] Content is delivered to MS XBLA servers
Spore was already announced for Nintendo systems a while back. Sooo.. I wouldn't be too surprised if it came out for the Wii either...
Maxis was only involved with the original Sims game. Soon after, a 'Sims Business Unit' was spun off at EA which has been responsible for churning out expansion after expansion, along with the development of The Sims 2, the console titles, and the current development of The Sims 3. Maxis hasn't touched The Sims in a very, very long time.
People have always assumed this arrangement, even though it has never existed:
-Quality of original assets
|
|
-Quality of Next gen in-game assets
|
|
|
-Quality of Current gen in-game assets.
So that next gen and current gen assets come from the same [magical] place somehow. this ignores a lot of things like lighting, physics, and the fact that current and next gen games will use different models.
The statement that assets are 'downscaled' for consoles is of course true. But this statement is irrelavent in terms of comparing current gen to next gen development costs.
Having about 3-4 years of CS experience, I can't really imagine how this guy got to be a manager of anything. I've dealt with lots of customers who've experienced data loss. They cry, they yell, they threaten to sue you. At no point is there any reason to become as hostile and belligerent as this michael guy became (not to mention petty). He lost his composure and phrased his emails poorly. There's no justification for his lack of professionalism.
Gee, because drag and drop is such a great way to handle 2000+ songs you'd put on an ipod. Sure, drag and drop is simple and not tied to a software app (besides your OS I suppose), but its also horribly limited and inept at keeping track of music, and a terrible consumer experience. Tying ipod syncing to itunes and utilizing a metadata db allows for a much more feature rich experience. You can sync your files based on times played, star ratings, purchase date, artists, (pseudo)random, genres.
Your specific demands for a music player are impractical for my needs. At the cost of said features, the ipod+itunes brings tons more functionality to the table. I'm just glad more people don't agree with your poor sense of design.
The built-in 512MB memory can currently store something like EVERY VC game available, and about 2000 blocks of save game memory (the typical game so far using about 4). since a formatted 512 SD card shows up as a little less than 4000 blocks, I'm assuming its 'blocks' are counted in megabits.
Newton's LAW of gravity! Sir Newton was a very important man (Lucasian professor of Caimbridge), and did not trifle with theories. He made laws.
Seriously, theory vs. law was very much a political game in science's history. Science is fraught with discontinuities such as laws which have been disproven, and theories that are regarded as fact. Creationists have latched on the a semantic arguement (that evolution is a theory) that holds no meaning to the scientific world.