I don't know about you, but I ended up picking up the Silver package right when HL2 was first released. Valve threw in HL2, their entire back catalog, and everything they've made since(except HL2:EP1); I'd call a heck of deal on its own.
Unfortunately, they're a lot more stingy now, none of the packages offered are nearly as good.
For that reason, I'm not shocked that they also only annouced a cap on the price, and not the actual price. The USD/Yen conversion ratio has been a bit unstable lately, and while I get the impression Nintendo really wants to launch at $200, it's probably going to boil down to how strong the dollar is when the Wii launches. If it's strong, $199, otherwise if it's weak, we get it at $249.
Re:Creative is an evil company
on
Creative Sues Apple
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· Score: 5, Informative
In more recent history, they patented (John) Carmack's Reverse rendering technique, and then used it against id to force them to include EAX functionality in the Doom3 engine.
Microsoft didn't give complete details on Live Anywhere, but if I understand Live right, don't many of the most useful features require a subscription? I'm really not understanding what Microsoft is ultimately trying to do in the first place, but why would PC gamers pay to play on Live when they can play on free servers elsewhere? It doesn't seem like they would shell out $50/year just to play with their console friends.
This issue is resolved in Mac OS X 10.1 and later.
It's the same deal with the problem with Classic. All 3 items you link to are for OSX 10.0 and have been fixed since then. The number of UFS problems now is minute compared to then.
You know, it's funny when you think about it. For years we've had tools for people to build any webpage they want, from pure HTML up to respectable WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver, and the "general public" never really accepted them. It's only when you take away all their powers to create something unique and individual, and instead give them all the same boring template systems of MySpace and blogs in general, that they actually use it.
Was this the problem the whole time? We gave users the tools to create their own individual sites, when really they just all wanted to conform to the same one?
It's most certainly enforceable against entities operating within the law in the first place. Broadcasters like DI.fm who are licensed would have to drop MP3 and unencrypted WMA streams for DRM/encrypted WMA streams, which would no doubt drive up their operating costs immensely due to the computational power of encrypting streams(encrypting each user's stream with a different key, anyone?). This isn't just an attempt to limit freedoms, but it could very well put legal broadcasters out of business.
Seriously, a little timely information goes a long way. Yes, I agree that the downtime they have is absurd; consider that *every Tuesday* the game goes offline for *six hours* of maintenance. That's *planned, scheduled* downtime, folks, so that *alone* means they aren't even attempting to have greater than 96.4% uptime, and I can't think of another commercial service for which you pay a monthly fee where that would be even remotely acceptable; if your cable or your phone just plain didn't work for 6 hours every Tuesday, heads would roll. Then things just get asinine when you factor in all the spontaneous, freewheeling, unplanned downtime as well.
I disagree and agree with you on this point. I agree in that having a 6hour+ scheduled window for maintenance is not acceptable, but I disagree that all maintenance is unacceptable. Rather, it's how they go about it that's the problem.
With a large window 1 day a week, Blizzard interrupts practically everyone no matter the time zone to do the work, and when they run over it's after the service has already been offline for 1/4 of a day. The problem here is that a large irregular window tends to cause problems because the player base only has to put up with it one day a week, and are already irate when it runs over.
The solution is that Blizzard needs to move to more regular maintenance windows broken up over smaller chunks of time, like other MMOs do. The first thing that pops in to my mind with this kind of system is EVE Online, which has 1 hour window every day of the week, where it often doesn't even take the full hour.
By using such a schedule, the EVE player base is accustomed to the server going down at the same time every day, and naturally plan their daily schedules around it, so that they don't have to do anything any different on any given day. Along the same lines, when the server does take a little longer to come up, while additional minutes are as a percentage much higher against a 1 hour window than a 6 hour window(a 1 hour delay is 100% of the former, 16% of the latter), it also means that when an operation goes terribly wrong and takes twice as long as planned it has only consumed another hour, and not an entire extended gaming session for the player base.
Of course, this means that the overall uptime of the system is lower(95.8%), but a daily schedule still reaps more benefits in the end both through social engineering of the player base, and through the technical benefits of getting to do maintenance every single day of the week instead of holding it off.
That sounds about right. From the looks of it, nothing Burst is doing is any different than what Apple has done via Quicktime(caching/buffering) & Akamai(load balancing) for years now.
The sad part is that Burst has already one once against Microsoft, that'll weigh heavily on Apple going in to this.
They're not being lazy, Linus himself has made it clear that he doesn't want to do a stable ABI for kernel modules. No doubt it could be done, and no doubt many of the devs would be willing to do it, but as long as Linus says no, it's sadly not going to happen.
Before everyone gets too excited, has anyone taken a look at the drivers included with Boot Camp? If Apple is using customized drivers that have to be modified for the Mac hardware, then that means gamers will be reliant on Apple to release new drivers. As we all know how important drivers can be in getting new games to work, if we have to wait on Apple to release modified drivers, will Apple be releasing new drivers every single time ATI/Nvidia release drivers, or are we only going to get a couple of updates a year? If so, gaming on a Mac could be harder than it first looks.
Of course, this is assuming we can't use normal video drivers, which I've yet to see a definitive answer on.
Granted the results indicate that there's a downward trend, and I fully believe that's a good thing, but am I the only one concerned here that the results are still so high? 42% is great, it's much better than 69%, but why can't it be 20%? Or 10%?
I'm glad to see that progress is being made, but it seems like there's still something else that needs to be done to bring the results more in line with other purchases such as movie theaters(anyone have numbers for those, BTW?).
Something I've always wondered about the PSP is why Grand Theft Auto, the game you'd assume would be the killer app of the console(ala MKDS on the DS) hasn't been very successful itself or moved very many PSPs. The series as a whole is simply a blockbuster, especially with San Andreas 2 years ago, but I've never seen even a fraction of the buzz for the PSP game as for any of the console games. I would have assumed that everyone would be jumping at the chance to play a portable GTA game, but obviously this hasn't been happening.
So, why is it that GTA has done so poorly on/for the PSP?
In late 2004, John Carmack made a good post about why award shows like this simply do not fit for video games. I'd like to repost that comment(again), because it's still as true today as it was then.
I did the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences awards show a few years ago -- I was inducted into the hall of fame one year, then the next year I inducted Will Wright.
I hated it, but it is a big industry, and there is a broad range of people involved. Honestly, I'm almost certainly in the minority. One developer that I was talking to backstage was very bullish about how important it was to legitimize the industry with events like this, but I just don't have any empathy for what I perceive as "Hollywood envy".
Some award show issues are just a result of stupidity -- I felt so bad watching Hironobu Sakaguchi of Squaresoft, a non-native english speaker, being forced to read a long speech written by some PR type about me. I threw out what they gave me to say about Will, and wrote something more to the point myself.
I do feel that there is a rather fundamental mismatch with big awards shows for game development, because game development isn't a performing art. You expect actors and musicians to show well, because that is what they do. Why aren't awards for authors the same glamorous events that the movie / TV / music ones are? Game developers are much closer to authors than actors.
John Carmack
Game devs are not performing artists, a glitzy show does not make any sense here.
Unfortunately, the GIF/JPEG thing has already been done for regular textures via DirectX Texture Compression(aka S3TC, introduced in 1998 with the Savage 3D), and 3Dc for normal maps(introduced 2004 with the ATI X800). To my knowledge there has not been any further effort on these fronts, and I'm sure Microsoft has been using DXTC on the Xbox(the NV2A GPU supports it), so the only further compression they can use for the 360 versus what they've done on the Xbox is 3Dc, and that's a more limited scenario.
Note that this also isn't taking in to account textures that are using color schemes other than 16/32bit integer, DXTC doesn't work on FP16 textures, for example.
Ya, they're actually replacing Firefly with it, not anything from the core SciFi Friday lineup. They will however be moving things around apparently when Doctor Who hits SciFi in March.
Hopefully the SciFi network won't wreck the show by inserting endless commercial breaks.
Hopefully the SciFi network won't wreck the show by cutting it. Stargate/BSG runs for around 2-3 minutes less than Doctor Who, as a random BSG episode was 41:30 from the start to the finish with the title sequence but not the credits, while a random Doctor Who was 43:30, and this is not including the teaser for the next week's episode which fits so well that it would be a shame to separate it from the episode's ending.
SciFi has shown it will make significant cuts to maximize revenue(such as the shortened Stargate title sequences, which they only finally put back last week), so I'd hate to see them butcher Who to make it fit their advertising blocks. They'll also be in a pickle if they pick up season(er, series) 2, with the 7 minute mini-episode and the hour-long Christmas episode.
Frankly it sounds like they've reinvented the WarioWare process, as that's exactly the kind of thing I'd assume Nintendo did for a game all about numerous short mini-games.
If you guys actually bothered to fully read the article, it's the X1800XL AIW that's going for $380. The AIW 2006(aka the X1300 AIW) has a MSRP of $199 and will likely go for less.
I think just about every country in Europe handles this perfectly fine, there's no reason the US shouldn't too.
Keep in mind many of us are distrustful of letting the government decide what should and shouldn't be sold, because of past efforts. Whereas we already have a sensible ESRB ratings system, some of the proposed bills have been to ban all "violent" games from minors(who gets to decide violent? The Christian Coalition? The NRA?), and others have attempted to do absurd things like ban any game that shows violence against police officers.
We've had a poor history with the government trying to appropriately rate things(see: The Comic Code), so the ideal solution we find is to keep the government out, and form a voluntary system of not selling items to minors, like what we do with movies and other adult goods, which seems to work well enough. I'll admit however banning sales wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't the government setting the ratings.
Slashdot Mirror
PAX's space isn't nearly big enough; just trying to turn it in to such would kill it too.
Unfortunately, they're a lot more stingy now, none of the packages offered are nearly as good.
For that reason, I'm not shocked that they also only annouced a cap on the price, and not the actual price. The USD/Yen conversion ratio has been a bit unstable lately, and while I get the impression Nintendo really wants to launch at $200, it's probably going to boil down to how strong the dollar is when the Wii launches. If it's strong, $199, otherwise if it's weak, we get it at $249.
In more recent history, they patented (John) Carmack's Reverse rendering technique, and then used it against id to force them to include EAX functionality in the Doom3 engine.
Microsoft didn't give complete details on Live Anywhere, but if I understand Live right, don't many of the most useful features require a subscription? I'm really not understanding what Microsoft is ultimately trying to do in the first place, but why would PC gamers pay to play on Live when they can play on free servers elsewhere? It doesn't seem like they would shell out $50/year just to play with their console friends.
It was the Virtual Reality Graphics Engine.
It's the same deal with the problem with Classic. All 3 items you link to are for OSX 10.0 and have been fixed since then. The number of UFS problems now is minute compared to then.
Speaking of hot flicks, I think that's a pretty good description of their server right about now.
Was this the problem the whole time? We gave users the tools to create their own individual sites, when really they just all wanted to conform to the same one?
It's most certainly enforceable against entities operating within the law in the first place. Broadcasters like DI.fm who are licensed would have to drop MP3 and unencrypted WMA streams for DRM/encrypted WMA streams, which would no doubt drive up their operating costs immensely due to the computational power of encrypting streams(encrypting each user's stream with a different key, anyone?). This isn't just an attempt to limit freedoms, but it could very well put legal broadcasters out of business.
I disagree and agree with you on this point. I agree in that having a 6hour+ scheduled window for maintenance is not acceptable, but I disagree that all maintenance is unacceptable. Rather, it's how they go about it that's the problem.
With a large window 1 day a week, Blizzard interrupts practically everyone no matter the time zone to do the work, and when they run over it's after the service has already been offline for 1/4 of a day. The problem here is that a large irregular window tends to cause problems because the player base only has to put up with it one day a week, and are already irate when it runs over.
The solution is that Blizzard needs to move to more regular maintenance windows broken up over smaller chunks of time, like other MMOs do. The first thing that pops in to my mind with this kind of system is EVE Online, which has 1 hour window every day of the week, where it often doesn't even take the full hour.
By using such a schedule, the EVE player base is accustomed to the server going down at the same time every day, and naturally plan their daily schedules around it, so that they don't have to do anything any different on any given day. Along the same lines, when the server does take a little longer to come up, while additional minutes are as a percentage much higher against a 1 hour window than a 6 hour window(a 1 hour delay is 100% of the former, 16% of the latter), it also means that when an operation goes terribly wrong and takes twice as long as planned it has only consumed another hour, and not an entire extended gaming session for the player base.
Of course, this means that the overall uptime of the system is lower(95.8%), but a daily schedule still reaps more benefits in the end both through social engineering of the player base, and through the technical benefits of getting to do maintenance every single day of the week instead of holding it off.
The sad part is that Burst has already one once against Microsoft, that'll weigh heavily on Apple going in to this.
They're not being lazy, Linus himself has made it clear that he doesn't want to do a stable ABI for kernel modules. No doubt it could be done, and no doubt many of the devs would be willing to do it, but as long as Linus says no, it's sadly not going to happen.
Of course, this is assuming we can't use normal video drivers, which I've yet to see a definitive answer on.
I'm glad to see that progress is being made, but it seems like there's still something else that needs to be done to bring the results more in line with other purchases such as movie theaters(anyone have numbers for those, BTW?).
So, why is it that GTA has done so poorly on/for the PSP?
Game devs are not performing artists, a glitzy show does not make any sense here.
This is the point where you start apologizing profusely, because as the Sony incident showed us, everyone just loves hidden DRM.
Note that this also isn't taking in to account textures that are using color schemes other than 16/32bit integer, DXTC doesn't work on FP16 textures, for example.
Ya, they're actually replacing Firefly with it, not anything from the core SciFi Friday lineup. They will however be moving things around apparently when Doctor Who hits SciFi in March.
Hopefully the SciFi network won't wreck the show by cutting it. Stargate/BSG runs for around 2-3 minutes less than Doctor Who, as a random BSG episode was 41:30 from the start to the finish with the title sequence but not the credits, while a random Doctor Who was 43:30, and this is not including the teaser for the next week's episode which fits so well that it would be a shame to separate it from the episode's ending.
SciFi has shown it will make significant cuts to maximize revenue(such as the shortened Stargate title sequences, which they only finally put back last week), so I'd hate to see them butcher Who to make it fit their advertising blocks. They'll also be in a pickle if they pick up season(er, series) 2, with the 7 minute mini-episode and the hour-long Christmas episode.
Frankly it sounds like they've reinvented the WarioWare process, as that's exactly the kind of thing I'd assume Nintendo did for a game all about numerous short mini-games.
If you guys actually bothered to fully read the article, it's the X1800XL AIW that's going for $380. The AIW 2006(aka the X1300 AIW) has a MSRP of $199 and will likely go for less.
Great, it's the Carmack's Reverse situation all over again...
Keep in mind many of us are distrustful of letting the government decide what should and shouldn't be sold, because of past efforts. Whereas we already have a sensible ESRB ratings system, some of the proposed bills have been to ban all "violent" games from minors(who gets to decide violent? The Christian Coalition? The NRA?), and others have attempted to do absurd things like ban any game that shows violence against police officers.
We've had a poor history with the government trying to appropriately rate things(see: The Comic Code), so the ideal solution we find is to keep the government out, and form a voluntary system of not selling items to minors, like what we do with movies and other adult goods, which seems to work well enough. I'll admit however banning sales wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't the government setting the ratings.