Will books become much better? Negative. Will Internet become bigger and Google (or its successor) more efficient? Sure thing. Does the younger generation need to learn skills that will likely be outdated in 5 years? You tell me.
Well, it might look that way from the US, but the reality is different. Estonia gets a lot of money from tranist of oil and other goods from Russia to Europe. And not because they add a lot of value, they are just located properly. Expect this to stop as soon as Russia finishes its own terminals on the Baltic sea. Second huge source of money in Estonia was Swedish and Finnish capital. These countries were very eager to invest in this little friendly country when it because independent, but it's not like they got huge profits from that. And the boom is certainly over. So there is really nothing radically great about Estonian economy and, while things like e-voting and better than average wifi coverage are good, they do not make it a high-tech heaven or something.
First things first. There is nothing I like more than a Troll moderation for saying something that contradicts the whole thread. Beats +5 Insightful for repeating some bland boring shit any day.
Now to your reply. What's wrong with biases if they are (as I believe mine are) founded in fact? By humankind I mean everyone. Everyone benefits from faster computers, some directly, some indirectly. Faster computers help progress in pretty much every area. Of course, other things are just as (and sometimes more) imporant as well, but without faster computers we can't get smart robots, human-level AI, virtual reality, mind uploading, advanced nanotech, immortality and other neat things. Another aspect is that R&D is generally underfunded in most countries - it's only a few percent of GDP, which is way less than the optimal share. So every research-intensive product deserves to be rammed down everyone's throats, just because it supports applied and fundamental research.
Second, I am not saying MS deserves to be the captain of our computer progress - I agree it would be much better if we had a healthy competitive marketplace. But things are what they are and we should be happy MS is improving their software at all. And they even manage to get some things right.
Third, you may not trust your machine (or your MS machine specifically), but ignoring the obvious trend is extremely silly of you. Your life will be tracked by computers, like it or not. And however serious are security issues, they will be worked out. They always do. There are simply so many ways to approach the monitoring, recording and analysing that some of them are bound to prove fruitful. And this isn't techno-lust at all, I just state an obvious fact (or rather a speculation, which I try to masquerade as fact, but that's beside the point).
I am not naive. I don't have "faith" in Microsoft. But I am pretty sure they understand personal computing market slightly better than me and you. Especially in regards to market research, user surveys, etc. The opinions described in the article are not official MS strategy yet, but they probably come from someone who has at least some solid data on upgrade trends, on production forecasts, etc. And if Microsoft thinks people will have 4-6GHz PCs when Longhorn is out, I don't see many reasons not to trust them on this one.
Finally, I don't see how my political preferences are relevant. First, I don't vote, because it's a waste of time. Second, if I did vote, I would not vote for Bush. And third, I don't live in the USA.
That's an entirely different issue - bundling and lack of customization. We should blame MS for that and not for adding MIDI support to the OS in the first place. Since they sell an operating system to pretty much the whole world population, they need to add support for every potential feature some odd 0.01% of the users would want. Just like Linux or any other OS does. Yes, it should have been possible to separate the operating system and operating environment layers, but because of MS monopoly these layers were combined into one.
Most people want everything to be available on their machine - that's why given the choice most users would install Windows Professional over Windows Home Edition, even though they may not need it. And even though I would applaud more customization possible for Windows installations, your situation is atypical. If it wasn't, Transmeta (or Cyrix) would be much more successful and network computers would be widely used. Turns out people want powerful PCs with support for every modern feature. These people are just not as loud about their preferences as those whose needs would be better served by a programmable TI calculator... I mean, seriously, are you proud that automation in your company is on 1994 level? Are you proud that you don't have voice recognition phone system, that you don't have automatic issue management, statistical analysis of issues and real time predictions, integration with hundreds of other offices around the world doing the same, AI assistants to improve the quality and speed of service, wireless connectivity with field teams/techs, etc.?
And why exactly should computer industry (including Intel and MS) care about the minority of tech-averse companies if you don't want to buy what they have to offer? You don't want latest Windows on a fast modern PC? Fine, whatever, go buy one if you want, but nobody of the big guys is interested in your business. Intel doesn't make much profits on 486 processors today... Ditto for MS and Win 3.11. It makes perfect business sense for them to ignore you. Don't like it? Find a niche provider who will happily charge you 500$ for a 486 with Windows 3.11 OEM preinstalled. People these days...
I expected much better from the audience here. It seems so far that almost every +4 or +5 comment at this moment is blaming MS and arguing that nobody needs that kinds of performance for a desktop PC, so would MS please stop selling bloated OSes. Shit, and I thought slashdotters were NOT a bunch of mindless drones.
I am personally quite anti-MS, but in this I am 100% on their side. First, the humankind does benefit enormously from faster processors and if you are forced to buy a new Intel or AMD every 4 or 5 years, so be it. Second, there is a huge potential for further software (OS in particular) development and if MS is going to catch up, so much the better. We need dynamically indexed database filesystem that keep every version of your work. We need your computer to keep track of everything you see, say, hear, write or do (for you). We need better voice synthesis, voice recognition and image recognition. We need at least some rudimentary AI in everyday applications. We need hi-definition video and surround music on desktop. We need dynamic real-time evolving networks, uniting smart devices to better serve you. We need home automation, media centres and robotic control centres. There is plenty of stuff to do and the iron MS is aiming for is only adequate for the tasks. Third, hard disks still tend to be filled up and CPU still have something to do (even though most of the time they are relatively idle, we still need better peak performance). I've got 480Gb of disk space for a desktop PC and it gets used up pretty quickly. And I don't even have a fast Net connection (256K only). And I can't really delete anything. Fourth, your individual upgrade history doesn't mean shit. Fifth, games ARE important. With average American 40+ y.o. woman playing 6 hours of online games, you can't get some sort of idea of how computer games are important to our society today. The fact that you run Linux doesn't mean everyone else should suddenly stop playing games. And games will use any power you can give them, even though at the moment ATi and nVidia just made a huge leap in productivity and appear to oversaturate existing games with raw power. Sixth, don't you ever thing that MS is stupid. Yes, Bill himself is no genius and they ignored Internet and Linux for too long, but they are still the number one software company in the world. Trust them at least a little bit, won't you?
I fully expect to meat the HDD space requirement as soon as I can fit that into a standard computer and CPU and RAM when I do my next major upgrade (2006?). As for graphics processing power, my card (Radeon 9600 Pro) is already 3-4 times slower than the recently released monsters and in 2-3 years I will definitely upgrade to X800 or probably something better.
First, coffee is supposed to be 60 degrees - that's the way it is served in coffee shops, that's they way it is drinken by people. 85 degree hot coffee that was served to that poor woman is unfit for consumption, McDonalds specialists admitted it. I suggest you try drinking 85 degree hot coffee. Just don't do it alone, or you would not even be able to call 911 with a burned throat and stuff.
And just for your reference, the car was not moving and the woman was 70+ years old. And McDonalds already knew about the danger because there have been a few hundreds accidents already, but refused to do anything, because it is cheaper to serve hot coffee.
This wasn't a Darwin award waiting to happen, that was a criminal negligence lawsuit waiting to happen. And it happened.
IANAL, but at this point it is a completely reasonable argument that employers should install anti-porn software by default and that failure to do so constitutes neglect. At this point any company should think twice about hiring a woman to do man's job.
Porn at work is a perk that is used as a part of compensation package. Allowing women to mess with this means allowing them to reduce company's productivity.
But what if you find out that the paper scissors you bought could easily cut through flesh and bone with very little pressure applied? You just wanted to open the envelope, but accidentally cut all your fingers on your left hand. Wouldn't you be both surprised and pissed off?
The woman that sued McDonalds received third degree burns over 6% of her body because the coffee wasn't hot. It was scalding. Normal coffee is 60 degrees, McDonalds served coffee at 85, because it was cheaper. Coffee at 85 degrees is capable of causing full thickness burns to your skin in as little as two seconds. Do you really expect your coffee to be more dangerous than hydrochloric acid?
Yeah, taxation without representation... Now you know how much it sucks!:) Seriously, try to look at it the other way - you are not only providing a free service to the US, you get the chance to educate Americans and influence their political process (and social development too). That's what the US did with their radio "Svoboda" and "Voice of America" in the past, that's what Britain does with British Council - that's cultural expansion at its best and it's really good for the UK.
Not everything that is watched should be paid for. You should be happy that a lot of people can share quality British broadcasting, even though they do not pay for it.
P.S. I am Russian, I like BBC and I even worked for it a bit. I don't (and I can't) pay the BBC tax, but I am really thankful to you Britons.
Technically you're right. But I meant that they haven't done anything special, they just acted the voices in the show. If you would play one of the characters, Simpsons would be just as popular, but now the public would remember your voice.
Pirating software, however, is in direct contravention of the terms and conditions that the author has set on your use of their work. That's a different argument from the one you originally made. Do you admit your first one was wrong? Now you say that one should pay for things according to the terms set by the author. This comment costs 10$ to read. Will you pay me? Why not? Have you not read it?
Ahhhhh... ok... so it's your natural born right to pirate games because you deserve (somehow) to be entertained? Cool. Now you get it!:) I deserve to be entertained, especially since I do in fact get entertained. The author deserves to get paid when he gets paid and as much as he gets paid. I do not think you can get everywhere with moral relativism, but this is exactly the case where it works.
There is no way to determine with absolute certainty who should be paid and how much and by whome (as you just demonstrated twice) - the only realistic way is to say that people decide this. John Carmack deserved to get 7 Ferraris, and his poor equally talented colleague, who is already unemployed for 12 months, deserves nothing.
Chess is a mega-classic. Mega-classics live forever and ever. Chess also isn't a computer game and so can't be outdated. A few weeks ago my sister was talking with me about games and how her friends play CS and UT2k4 and there was like one girl, who got like a Dandy or a Sega and everyone was going oh kewl, that's totally awesome! And my sister said it would be totally cool to play some classic games. And I said like no shit, you can do it with an emulator, all old systems are totally emulated today, go and google for it. After she downloaded like hundreds of roms, I saw he play some really shit stuff. It was like ewww! Totally lame. She was all like classic games rule, but then she could only play like a few out of a few hundreds, and the rest were total crap.:)
So my point is that out of all the games he listed only a few would be worth playing today. May be Tyrian, Duke3d, GTA1 and SimCity 2000. All the rest, while influencial and interesting at their time, either pale in comparision with modern games or have fatal flaws like outdated user interfaces.
I sometimes play old games myself (Digger, Colonisation, Dangerous Dave, UGH, Doom) but his choice of PC games to play is really strange.
Nice way to reply...well done. Now we wouldn't want to make Slashdot too friendly a place, would we? Anyway, sorry if I offended you, though there still is a "or what" option.
Now next to the question of optimisation. If you are so sure about its potential, can you give some impressive examples? I can name some games that ran much slower than warranted by their visual quality (Halo and GTA3 being the prime culprits), but I can't really think of any prominent titles that did the opposite.
My main point is that rendering a modern game at acceptable quality requires rendering about 50 million pixels per second. And there is a minimum number of processor cycles that you need to just generate the geometry and add a simple one-pass texture - you can't cheat here. When we start talking about effects, a lot of shortcuts are possible. But even with the shortcuts, every generation of hardware has its limits. You can get closer to them, but that would never give you a qualitative improvement, like switching to a next generation hardware would.
Check out some PS2 screenshots here and compare it with something like this. Do you see a lot of progress? I honestly don't. This is Quake3 level technology, there is nothing you can do about it. Yes, it's possible to use good artists to try to hide the fact that the platform is almost 4 years old, but whatever you do, you can't hide the fact that Mercedes-Benz World Racing looks way better than any PS2 racing sim and that FarCry or Painkiller look so much better than any game on PS2.
If such extensive optimisation (as opposed to limited improvements during exploring the limits of new technology) was possible, surely we would see some PS2 developers do it. The fact that all modern PS2 games look the same as old ones did (which is like shit, by modern standards) proves that you are wrong.
But when you make a poor-quality game, all the screenshots won't help you. They can guarantee you initial interest, but not a favourable review. Consider Unreal II - with amazing (at that time) graphics it had a shitty story and shitty everything else. It got bad press.
The four biggest upcoming FPS games are not hyped for their graphics, or at least not for graphics alone. Half-Life 2 is supposed to have great story, great character animation, great AI and great physics. Doom 3 is supposed to have great gameplay and be really scary. Stalker is supposed to have a detailed simulation of the world and great AI. Duke Nukem Forever (I've heard it will be out soon) is supposed to have an extremely fun and cool game - graphics are pretty much irrelevant.
Are you stupid or what? If you want to render a pixel, there is only so much optimisation possible. In the end of the day you still need to spend a few processing cycles on it. And if you want anything more than raw texturing, you need more processing cycles. And if you want complex geometry and effects, add yet more cycles. They have to come from somewhere, and this "where" is hardware.
There is one reason we need better algorithms - to more efficiently utilise the power of new hardware. Yes, some optimisation is possible after the new technology is first introduced (like nVidia does with their drivers), but there are very real limits on that.
My feelings exactly. It's the first game I ever played to feature a human-level AI. At least if by human-level we mean as good as I am in this particular area - playing FPS games.:)
You can't improve stories as easily as you can improve graphics. A game is something which takes about 40 hours and, if we are talking about FPS (RPG), involves you running around and shooting stuff. There is only so much story that you can inject into the game and it has already be done. Half-Life, Max Payne, Mafia and other games are example of 100% good story. You can't make it better, or rather you can't predictably make it better.
Graphics, on the other hand, can be improved and they will be improved until they hit reality level. Then people will start getting creative...
Tell me, would you rather play a game with HL-level story and 100% realistic graphics or a game with some really really good (Nobel prize worthy) story, but with Half-Life graphics?
In fact there was a recent article (linked here on Slashdot?) about making cartoons. They told about Simpsons in particular and explicitly stated that voice is done first and then very detailed information about what to draw (every move) is sent overseas, where it's actually animated.
If they're that hard to replace, they obviously crucial to the shows success and deserve the raise. A logical fallacy. While the first part is correct, the second part doesn't necessarily follow. Their voices are familiar to listeners, but not because of anything these actors have done.
Any developer worth their salt has an in-house tools group whose sole responsibility is to improve productivity Sure. I didn't mean to say that nobody cares about productivity at all, just that it's quite difficult to find time and money to make any changes on strategic level, especially in regards to how the business itself is run. And a lot of the technology you are talking about doesn't have the time to mature beyond what is necessary right here and now. The potential is there, but the ephemeral nature of game development means it is not realised.
PC games are in a slump, and have been for the last 12 months. Consoles are a much more attractive place to be: fixed hardware platform, and while there is piracy it's of the level that the PC was before widespread broadband/P2P (i.e., not endemic and largely confined to territories like Russian/parts of Asia - the US and Europe are relatively OK). 12 months is just a fluctuation. And everything related to consoles today will not necessarily remain true in 5 years. We are talking about 4th generation consoles - XBox 3, PS 4... The convergence of PCs, consoles, media centres, handheld devices, etc. makes one more optimistic about the fate of PC gaming. And don't forget that by saying "PC gaming" we actually mean "MS Windows gaming". And who is to say that XBox 3 will not be compatible with MS media centres and MS PC OS. And who is to say that the console market will not become more fragmented leading to smaller number of players on Sony PS (because just like before, we are not talking about "console games", we are talking about "Sony PS2 games"). Not to mention that as the larger fraction of costs today lies in art/design, there are fewer limits to porting successful games between two gaming universes.
Given that the price of an average game (of any game, not just FPS) is between $2 and $5 million nowadays, I'm not sure why you need "simple microeconomics" to get a figure that's out by a factor of 10. Oh, wait, unless you're just throwing terms around to try and look smart... I wasn't talking about average. As of today, Half-Life 2 costed $40 millions.
And your source for that is what? Shit, EA laid off 100 people the other month, MS have just cancelled a couple of big projects (Mythica and Train Sim 2), and at least half a dozen small developers have gone under since the start of this year. These are just parts of normal business. Heck, a well known fact is that 97% (or something like that) of small businesses go bankrupt in the first year, but noone is crying wolf and declaring the imminent death of small business. Furthermore, the whole American IT industry crashed a few years ago, but noone argued that in 5 years there will be no computers. Get real!:) The problems in the PC gaming industry are real and it's really scary for shareholders and employees, but from the macroeconomic point of view it's just business as usual. The whole American economy operates this way - every 4 years you have a recession. With double digit growth it's easy to miss a recession, but as gaming market matures, it finally has to notice that.
widespread net piracy is a lot more significant for PC games than you seem to think it is. Pick any high profile game from the last year, add "+torrent", and you can probably find a download on Google within 30 seconds: you're not trying to tell me that has no effect on sales? Surely this has an effect on sales, but it doesn't mean the industry is doomed. Just one simple fact - it costs 3-4 times less to make the same game in Eastern Europe or Russia. So even if piracy rates increase from 30% (my estimate) to 80%, moving development abroad will allow to compensate for the effect of piracy. And this is just an organisational change - you can offset the effect of piracy with technology too, with marketing and many other tools.
As long as PC exist, there will be a market for PC games. The industry as a whole will not going anywhere.
And my day job says your textbook is full of shit. And my day job says you need to go back to school.
OK. So your model is that games look (even more) like they're all built out of the same code/artwork/sound, and yet people will pay more and steal less if they're given variety? Virtually all game programmers use C++ and DirectX. By your logic they should give up the commonly used tools to make more original. Also by your logic composers should give up the music notation, because how can you make anything original when there are only 7 notes?! In case the fallacy of your argument is still not obvious to you, I will explain. You can use the same engine, same toolset, same programmable models and textures (as long as you can customize them) to make entirely different games. It was possible as early as ten years ago to make a fantasy FPS and a sci-fi FPS using the same engine with practically no modifcations (Doom/Heretic). The fact that some games are built on the same engine doesn't mean they need to look the same.
In case you hadn't noticed, that (games are all the same nowadays) is one of the biggest problems facing the industry - and your suggestion to reduce piracy is to make it worse? In case you hadn't noticed, exactly the same problem was the biggest one in auto manufacturing starting from mid-nighties. The problem was how to make different models while still reusing as much of the components as possible. It was successfully solved, though car manufacturers still strive to push standartisation to the limit (GM's Autonomy).
Are you really that fucking stupid? Do you not think that the people whose livelihood depends on this spend every waking minute trying to find a way to make themselves more efficient? In fact I do think that these very people spend every waking minute doing precisely the opposite. If what you describe was true, a lot of people, including many researchers in management science would be extremely surprised. I won't comment on your intelligence, but it has been common knowledge for a few decades already that most people spend to much time doing their job to find time to look into ways to improve their own productivity. Everything that I read on the topic of management in game developing companies so far confirms that.
If the business model for PC games collapses (I would give it a 50% chance of survival over the next 5 years), there won't be any more PC games - simple as that. Most game developers, publishers and industry analysts would disagree with your 50% estimate. In fact, most of them would probably think you are insane. Simple microeconomics proves that you can create a quality FPS game for anything from 2 million to 50 million. If unthinkable happens and sales of blockbuster games decrease (they actually show the tendency to increase, despite the piracy, and the common argument is that piracy harms the "innovative independent small developer" most), the average budget will decrease, but FPS games in particular and computer games in general are not going anywhere.
Ergo, they do have value to you - which means that you should pay for them. A fallacious argument - does the air have value to you? What about sunshine? What about freeware and open source applications? Have you paid for all that?
I am not going to buy a lot of games. If I couldn't get very cheap pirated copies, I wouldn't play them. And I only should do what I consider right, not what someone else says I "should do". And piracy is right.
Piracy won't "force" any improvements in the game development paradigm My economics textbook says it will. Seriously, if game developers/publishers have some innovativeness left, they will find a way. Businesses always do, whether it concerns selling plane tickets for 10$ or doubling your product's performance in 18 months. There are ways to make games very cheaply. The only problem is to find these ways, but thankfully, this isn't my problem.:)
Just kidding. The solution is to reuse more code, to use less manual labour and automate more tasks (including content creation), to share code (and art, or actually art-generating software) between games and between companies. Probably an open source model where you pay a membership fee for the access to code and must contribute everything that you write to the pool (perhaps with a clause that it can't be used immediately) would work for the game industry. I am amazed at screenshots and videos of Stalker, but I think I know the reason they had to delay their game (like Valve and id did before, not to mention 3D Realms) - trying to make everything themselves. And since they are doing everything themselves, they don't have much to gain from automation - it would take more time to write a face-generating software than to make the faces in 3D max manually.
The developers need some pressure on them, like Ford, GM and Crysler needed in the 80s. By pirating games I support innovation!
Slashdot Mirror
Will books become much better? Negative.
Will Internet become bigger and Google (or its successor) more efficient? Sure thing.
Does the younger generation need to learn skills that will likely be outdated in 5 years? You tell me.
Well, it might look that way from the US, but the reality is different. Estonia gets a lot of money from tranist of oil and other goods from Russia to Europe. And not because they add a lot of value, they are just located properly. Expect this to stop as soon as Russia finishes its own terminals on the Baltic sea. Second huge source of money in Estonia was Swedish and Finnish capital. These countries were very eager to invest in this little friendly country when it because independent, but it's not like they got huge profits from that. And the boom is certainly over. So there is really nothing radically great about Estonian economy and, while things like e-voting and better than average wifi coverage are good, they do not make it a high-tech heaven or something.
First things first. There is nothing I like more than a Troll moderation for saying something that contradicts the whole thread. Beats +5 Insightful for repeating some bland boring shit any day.
Now to your reply. What's wrong with biases if they are (as I believe mine are) founded in fact? By humankind I mean everyone. Everyone benefits from faster computers, some directly, some indirectly. Faster computers help progress in pretty much every area. Of course, other things are just as (and sometimes more) imporant as well, but without faster computers we can't get smart robots, human-level AI, virtual reality, mind uploading, advanced nanotech, immortality and other neat things. Another aspect is that R&D is generally underfunded in most countries - it's only a few percent of GDP, which is way less than the optimal share. So every research-intensive product deserves to be rammed down everyone's throats, just because it supports applied and fundamental research.
Second, I am not saying MS deserves to be the captain of our computer progress - I agree it would be much better if we had a healthy competitive marketplace. But things are what they are and we should be happy MS is improving their software at all. And they even manage to get some things right.
Third, you may not trust your machine (or your MS machine specifically), but ignoring the obvious trend is extremely silly of you. Your life will be tracked by computers, like it or not. And however serious are security issues, they will be worked out. They always do. There are simply so many ways to approach the monitoring, recording and analysing that some of them are bound to prove fruitful. And this isn't techno-lust at all, I just state an obvious fact (or rather a speculation, which I try to masquerade as fact, but that's beside the point).
I am not naive. I don't have "faith" in Microsoft. But I am pretty sure they understand personal computing market slightly better than me and you. Especially in regards to market research, user surveys, etc. The opinions described in the article are not official MS strategy yet, but they probably come from someone who has at least some solid data on upgrade trends, on production forecasts, etc. And if Microsoft thinks people will have 4-6GHz PCs when Longhorn is out, I don't see many reasons not to trust them on this one.
Finally, I don't see how my political preferences are relevant. First, I don't vote, because it's a waste of time. Second, if I did vote, I would not vote for Bush. And third, I don't live in the USA.
That's an entirely different issue - bundling and lack of customization. We should blame MS for that and not for adding MIDI support to the OS in the first place. Since they sell an operating system to pretty much the whole world population, they need to add support for every potential feature some odd 0.01% of the users would want. Just like Linux or any other OS does. Yes, it should have been possible to separate the operating system and operating environment layers, but because of MS monopoly these layers were combined into one.
Most people want everything to be available on their machine - that's why given the choice most users would install Windows Professional over Windows Home Edition, even though they may not need it. And even though I would applaud more customization possible for Windows installations, your situation is atypical. If it wasn't, Transmeta (or Cyrix) would be much more successful and network computers would be widely used. Turns out people want powerful PCs with support for every modern feature. These people are just not as loud about their preferences as those whose needs would be better served by a programmable TI calculator... I mean, seriously, are you proud that automation in your company is on 1994 level? Are you proud that you don't have voice recognition phone system, that you don't have automatic issue management, statistical analysis of issues and real time predictions, integration with hundreds of other offices around the world doing the same, AI assistants to improve the quality and speed of service, wireless connectivity with field teams/techs, etc.?
And why exactly should computer industry (including Intel and MS) care about the minority of tech-averse companies if you don't want to buy what they have to offer? You don't want latest Windows on a fast modern PC? Fine, whatever, go buy one if you want, but nobody of the big guys is interested in your business. Intel doesn't make much profits on 486 processors today... Ditto for MS and Win 3.11. It makes perfect business sense for them to ignore you. Don't like it? Find a niche provider who will happily charge you 500$ for a 486 with Windows 3.11 OEM preinstalled. People these days...
I expected much better from the audience here. It seems so far that almost every +4 or +5 comment at this moment is blaming MS and arguing that nobody needs that kinds of performance for a desktop PC, so would MS please stop selling bloated OSes. Shit, and I thought slashdotters were NOT a bunch of mindless drones.
I am personally quite anti-MS, but in this I am 100% on their side. First, the humankind does benefit enormously from faster processors and if you are forced to buy a new Intel or AMD every 4 or 5 years, so be it. Second, there is a huge potential for further software (OS in particular) development and if MS is going to catch up, so much the better. We need dynamically indexed database filesystem that keep every version of your work. We need your computer to keep track of everything you see, say, hear, write or do (for you). We need better voice synthesis, voice recognition and image recognition. We need at least some rudimentary AI in everyday applications. We need hi-definition video and surround music on desktop. We need dynamic real-time evolving networks, uniting smart devices to better serve you. We need home automation, media centres and robotic control centres. There is plenty of stuff to do and the iron MS is aiming for is only adequate for the tasks. Third, hard disks still tend to be filled up and CPU still have something to do (even though most of the time they are relatively idle, we still need better peak performance). I've got 480Gb of disk space for a desktop PC and it gets used up pretty quickly. And I don't even have a fast Net connection (256K only). And I can't really delete anything. Fourth, your individual upgrade history doesn't mean shit. Fifth, games ARE important. With average American 40+ y.o. woman playing 6 hours of online games, you can't get some sort of idea of how computer games are important to our society today. The fact that you run Linux doesn't mean everyone else should suddenly stop playing games. And games will use any power you can give them, even though at the moment ATi and nVidia just made a huge leap in productivity and appear to oversaturate existing games with raw power. Sixth, don't you ever thing that MS is stupid. Yes, Bill himself is no genius and they ignored Internet and Linux for too long, but they are still the number one software company in the world. Trust them at least a little bit, won't you?
I fully expect to meat the HDD space requirement as soon as I can fit that into a standard computer and CPU and RAM when I do my next major upgrade (2006?). As for graphics processing power, my card (Radeon 9600 Pro) is already 3-4 times slower than the recently released monsters and in 2-3 years I will definitely upgrade to X800 or probably something better.
First, coffee is supposed to be 60 degrees - that's the way it is served in coffee shops, that's they way it is drinken by people. 85 degree hot coffee that was served to that poor woman is unfit for consumption, McDonalds specialists admitted it. I suggest you try drinking 85 degree hot coffee. Just don't do it alone, or you would not even be able to call 911 with a burned throat and stuff.
And just for your reference, the car was not moving and the woman was 70+ years old. And McDonalds already knew about the danger because there have been a few hundreds accidents already, but refused to do anything, because it is cheaper to serve hot coffee.
This wasn't a Darwin award waiting to happen, that was a criminal negligence lawsuit waiting to happen. And it happened.
IANAL, but at this point it is a completely reasonable argument that employers should install anti-porn software by default and that failure to do so constitutes neglect.
At this point any company should think twice about hiring a woman to do man's job.
Porn at work is a perk that is used as a part of compensation package. Allowing women to mess with this means allowing them to reduce company's productivity.
But what if you find out that the paper scissors you bought could easily cut through flesh and bone with very little pressure applied? You just wanted to open the envelope, but accidentally cut all your fingers on your left hand. Wouldn't you be both surprised and pissed off?
The woman that sued McDonalds received third degree burns over 6% of her body because the coffee wasn't hot. It was scalding. Normal coffee is 60 degrees, McDonalds served coffee at 85, because it was cheaper. Coffee at 85 degrees is capable of causing full thickness burns to your skin in as little as two seconds. Do you really expect your coffee to be more dangerous than hydrochloric acid?
Yeah, taxation without representation... Now you know how much it sucks! :) Seriously, try to look at it the other way - you are not only providing a free service to the US, you get the chance to educate Americans and influence their political process (and social development too). That's what the US did with their radio "Svoboda" and "Voice of America" in the past, that's what Britain does with British Council - that's cultural expansion at its best and it's really good for the UK.
Not everything that is watched should be paid for. You should be happy that a lot of people can share quality British broadcasting, even though they do not pay for it.
P.S. I am Russian, I like BBC and I even worked for it a bit. I don't (and I can't) pay the BBC tax, but I am really thankful to you Britons.
Technically you're right. But I meant that they haven't done anything special, they just acted the voices in the show. If you would play one of the characters, Simpsons would be just as popular, but now the public would remember your voice.
Pirating software, however, is in direct contravention of the terms and conditions that the author has set on your use of their work.
:) I deserve to be entertained, especially since I do in fact get entertained. The author deserves to get paid when he gets paid and as much as he gets paid. I do not think you can get everywhere with moral relativism, but this is exactly the case where it works.
That's a different argument from the one you originally made. Do you admit your first one was wrong? Now you say that one should pay for things according to the terms set by the author. This comment costs 10$ to read. Will you pay me? Why not? Have you not read it?
Ahhhhh... ok... so it's your natural born right to pirate games because you deserve (somehow) to be entertained?
Cool. Now you get it!
There is no way to determine with absolute certainty who should be paid and how much and by whome (as you just demonstrated twice) - the only realistic way is to say that people decide this. John Carmack deserved to get 7 Ferraris, and his poor equally talented colleague, who is already unemployed for 12 months, deserves nothing.
Chess is a mega-classic. Mega-classics live forever and ever. Chess also isn't a computer game and so can't be outdated. A few weeks ago my sister was talking with me about games and how her friends play CS and UT2k4 and there was like one girl, who got like a Dandy or a Sega and everyone was going oh kewl, that's totally awesome! And my sister said it would be totally cool to play some classic games. And I said like no shit, you can do it with an emulator, all old systems are totally emulated today, go and google for it. After she downloaded like hundreds of roms, I saw he play some really shit stuff. It was like ewww! Totally lame. She was all like classic games rule, but then she could only play like a few out of a few hundreds, and the rest were total crap. :)
So my point is that out of all the games he listed only a few would be worth playing today. May be Tyrian, Duke3d, GTA1 and SimCity 2000. All the rest, while influencial and interesting at their time, either pale in comparision with modern games or have fatal flaws like outdated user interfaces.
I sometimes play old games myself (Digger, Colonisation, Dangerous Dave, UGH, Doom) but his choice of PC games to play is really strange.
Nice way to reply...well done.
Now we wouldn't want to make Slashdot too friendly a place, would we? Anyway, sorry if I offended you, though there still is a "or what" option.
Now next to the question of optimisation. If you are so sure about its potential, can you give some impressive examples? I can name some games that ran much slower than warranted by their visual quality (Halo and GTA3 being the prime culprits), but I can't really think of any prominent titles that did the opposite.
My main point is that rendering a modern game at acceptable quality requires rendering about 50 million pixels per second. And there is a minimum number of processor cycles that you need to just generate the geometry and add a simple one-pass texture - you can't cheat here. When we start talking about effects, a lot of shortcuts are possible. But even with the shortcuts, every generation of hardware has its limits. You can get closer to them, but that would never give you a qualitative improvement, like switching to a next generation hardware would.
Check out some PS2 screenshots here and compare it with something like this. Do you see a lot of progress? I honestly don't. This is Quake3 level technology, there is nothing you can do about it. Yes, it's possible to use good artists to try to hide the fact that the platform is almost 4 years old, but whatever you do, you can't hide the fact that Mercedes-Benz World Racing looks way better than any PS2 racing sim and that FarCry or Painkiller look so much better than any game on PS2.
If such extensive optimisation (as opposed to limited improvements during exploring the limits of new technology) was possible, surely we would see some PS2 developers do it. The fact that all modern PS2 games look the same as old ones did (which is like shit, by modern standards) proves that you are wrong.
But when you make a poor-quality game, all the screenshots won't help you. They can guarantee you initial interest, but not a favourable review. Consider Unreal II - with amazing (at that time) graphics it had a shitty story and shitty everything else. It got bad press.
The four biggest upcoming FPS games are not hyped for their graphics, or at least not for graphics alone. Half-Life 2 is supposed to have great story, great character animation, great AI and great physics. Doom 3 is supposed to have great gameplay and be really scary. Stalker is supposed to have a detailed simulation of the world and great AI. Duke Nukem Forever (I've heard it will be out soon) is supposed to have an extremely fun and cool game - graphics are pretty much irrelevant.
Are you stupid or what? If you want to render a pixel, there is only so much optimisation possible. In the end of the day you still need to spend a few processing cycles on it. And if you want anything more than raw texturing, you need more processing cycles. And if you want complex geometry and effects, add yet more cycles. They have to come from somewhere, and this "where" is hardware.
There is one reason we need better algorithms - to more efficiently utilise the power of new hardware. Yes, some optimisation is possible after the new technology is first introduced (like nVidia does with their drivers), but there are very real limits on that.
My feelings exactly. It's the first game I ever played to feature a human-level AI. At least if by human-level we mean as good as I am in this particular area - playing FPS games. :)
You can't improve stories as easily as you can improve graphics. A game is something which takes about 40 hours and, if we are talking about FPS (RPG), involves you running around and shooting stuff. There is only so much story that you can inject into the game and it has already be done. Half-Life, Max Payne, Mafia and other games are example of 100% good story. You can't make it better, or rather you can't predictably make it better.
Graphics, on the other hand, can be improved and they will be improved until they hit reality level. Then people will start getting creative...
Tell me, would you rather play a game with HL-level story and 100% realistic graphics or a game with some really really good (Nobel prize worthy) story, but with Half-Life graphics?
250 millions is only the cost of their servers (if you can't RTFA, read the blurb at least), the IPO is $e*10^9, or more than 10 times bigger.
> It is now 2004. This is a operating system from 1998. WTF?
/mnt/win/games, ls.
I can tell you what the fuck, by ssh'ing over into my Lin/Win98 dual boot machine, cd
All great games. All bought and paid for. And none of which I want to stop playing just because I've changed main machine OSes in the meantime.
Let me repeat, it is now 2004. WTF?
In fact there was a recent article (linked here on Slashdot?) about making cartoons. They told about Simpsons in particular and explicitly stated that voice is done first and then very detailed information about what to draw (every move) is sent overseas, where it's actually animated.
If they're that hard to replace, they obviously crucial to the shows success and deserve the raise.
A logical fallacy. While the first part is correct, the second part doesn't necessarily follow. Their voices are familiar to listeners, but not because of anything these actors have done.
Any developer worth their salt has an in-house tools group whose sole responsibility is to improve productivity
:) The problems in the PC gaming industry are real and it's really scary for shareholders and employees, but from the macroeconomic point of view it's just business as usual. The whole American economy operates this way - every 4 years you have a recession. With double digit growth it's easy to miss a recession, but as gaming market matures, it finally has to notice that.
Sure. I didn't mean to say that nobody cares about productivity at all, just that it's quite difficult to find time and money to make any changes on strategic level, especially in regards to how the business itself is run. And a lot of the technology you are talking about doesn't have the time to mature beyond what is necessary right here and now. The potential is there, but the ephemeral nature of game development means it is not realised.
PC games are in a slump, and have been for the last 12 months. Consoles are a much more attractive place to be: fixed hardware platform, and while there is piracy it's of the level that the PC was before widespread broadband/P2P (i.e., not endemic and largely confined to territories like Russian/parts of Asia - the US and Europe are relatively OK).
12 months is just a fluctuation. And everything related to consoles today will not necessarily remain true in 5 years. We are talking about 4th generation consoles - XBox 3, PS 4... The convergence of PCs, consoles, media centres, handheld devices, etc. makes one more optimistic about the fate of PC gaming. And don't forget that by saying "PC gaming" we actually mean "MS Windows gaming". And who is to say that XBox 3 will not be compatible with MS media centres and MS PC OS. And who is to say that the console market will not become more fragmented leading to smaller number of players on Sony PS (because just like before, we are not talking about "console games", we are talking about "Sony PS2 games"). Not to mention that as the larger fraction of costs today lies in art/design, there are fewer limits to porting successful games between two gaming universes.
Given that the price of an average game (of any game, not just FPS) is between $2 and $5 million nowadays, I'm not sure why you need "simple microeconomics" to get a figure that's out by a factor of 10. Oh, wait, unless you're just throwing terms around to try and look smart...
I wasn't talking about average. As of today, Half-Life 2 costed $40 millions.
And your source for that is what? Shit, EA laid off 100 people the other month, MS have just cancelled a couple of big projects (Mythica and Train Sim 2), and at least half a dozen small developers have gone under since the start of this year.
These are just parts of normal business. Heck, a well known fact is that 97% (or something like that) of small businesses go bankrupt in the first year, but noone is crying wolf and declaring the imminent death of small business. Furthermore, the whole American IT industry crashed a few years ago, but noone argued that in 5 years there will be no computers. Get real!
widespread net piracy is a lot more significant for PC games than you seem to think it is. Pick any high profile game from the last year, add "+torrent", and you can probably find a download on Google within 30 seconds: you're not trying to tell me that has no effect on sales?
Surely this has an effect on sales, but it doesn't mean the industry is doomed. Just one simple fact - it costs 3-4 times less to make the same game in Eastern Europe or Russia. So even if piracy rates increase from 30% (my estimate) to 80%, moving development abroad will allow to compensate for the effect of piracy. And this is just an organisational change - you can offset the effect of piracy with technology too, with marketing and many other tools.
As long as PC exist, there will be a market for PC games. The industry as a whole will not going anywhere.
And my day job says your textbook is full of shit.
And my day job says you need to go back to school.
OK. So your model is that games look (even more) like they're all built out of the same code/artwork/sound, and yet people will pay more and steal less if they're given variety?
Virtually all game programmers use C++ and DirectX. By your logic they should give up the commonly used tools to make more original. Also by your logic composers should give up the music notation, because how can you make anything original when there are only 7 notes?! In case the fallacy of your argument is still not obvious to you, I will explain. You can use the same engine, same toolset, same programmable models and textures (as long as you can customize them) to make entirely different games. It was possible as early as ten years ago to make a fantasy FPS and a sci-fi FPS using the same engine with practically no modifcations (Doom/Heretic). The fact that some games are built on the same engine doesn't mean they need to look the same.
In case you hadn't noticed, that (games are all the same nowadays) is one of the biggest problems facing the industry - and your suggestion to reduce piracy is to make it worse?
In case you hadn't noticed, exactly the same problem was the biggest one in auto manufacturing starting from mid-nighties. The problem was how to make different models while still reusing as much of the components as possible. It was successfully solved, though car manufacturers still strive to push standartisation to the limit (GM's Autonomy).
Are you really that fucking stupid? Do you not think that the people whose livelihood depends on this spend every waking minute trying to find a way to make themselves more efficient?
In fact I do think that these very people spend every waking minute doing precisely the opposite. If what you describe was true, a lot of people, including many researchers in management science would be extremely surprised. I won't comment on your intelligence, but it has been common knowledge for a few decades already that most people spend to much time doing their job to find time to look into ways to improve their own productivity. Everything that I read on the topic of management in game developing companies so far confirms that.
If the business model for PC games collapses (I would give it a 50% chance of survival over the next 5 years), there won't be any more PC games - simple as that.
Most game developers, publishers and industry analysts would disagree with your 50% estimate. In fact, most of them would probably think you are insane. Simple microeconomics proves that you can create a quality FPS game for anything from 2 million to 50 million. If unthinkable happens and sales of blockbuster games decrease (they actually show the tendency to increase, despite the piracy, and the common argument is that piracy harms the "innovative independent small developer" most), the average budget will decrease, but FPS games in particular and computer games in general are not going anywhere.
Ergo, they do have value to you - which means that you should pay for them.
A fallacious argument - does the air have value to you? What about sunshine? What about freeware and open source applications? Have you paid for all that?
I am not going to buy a lot of games. If I couldn't get very cheap pirated copies, I wouldn't play them. And I only should do what I consider right, not what someone else says I "should do". And piracy is right.
Piracy won't "force" any improvements in the game development paradigm :)
My economics textbook says it will. Seriously, if game developers/publishers have some innovativeness left, they will find a way. Businesses always do, whether it concerns selling plane tickets for 10$ or doubling your product's performance in 18 months. There are ways to make games very cheaply. The only problem is to find these ways, but thankfully, this isn't my problem.
Just kidding. The solution is to reuse more code, to use less manual labour and automate more tasks (including content creation), to share code (and art, or actually art-generating software) between games and between companies. Probably an open source model where you pay a membership fee for the access to code and must contribute everything that you write to the pool (perhaps with a clause that it can't be used immediately) would work for the game industry. I am amazed at screenshots and videos of Stalker, but I think I know the reason they had to delay their game (like Valve and id did before, not to mention 3D Realms) - trying to make everything themselves. And since they are doing everything themselves, they don't have much to gain from automation - it would take more time to write a face-generating software than to make the faces in 3D max manually.
The developers need some pressure on them, like Ford, GM and Crysler needed in the 80s. By pirating games I support innovation!