Very serious developers even rely on various operations to execute in a specific amount of time. If one spin of the board did certain operations faster, it would be a nightmare on developers. They have a hard enough time as it is.
And not-so-serious developers also rely on operations to execute in a specific amount of time, they just don't realize it!
Changing the speed of some features of the board may likely result in race conditions.
Though I must say I wouldn't mind if they sped up memory accesses;) ouch!
Power went haywire in Calif. not because of de-regulation in general, but California's "de-regulation" [reason.com] specifically.
Which was heavily lobbied for by the private electric companies.
I live in Los Angeles. My house is served by LADWP, which was not subject to the deregulation. While the rest of the state suffered rolling blackouts, power shortages, and long term contracts for overpriced electricity, we had the same good level of service we've always had, without interruption.
Private sector solutions to consumer's needs are not always superior to "inefficient" government agencies. It all depends on the agency in question.
And these guys wanna do internet access now? Bring it on! I'm sure they could do a better job than Verizon and Comcast.
Cheaply made consumer electronics equipment, light dimmers, poorly maintained power lines and other "unintentional radiators" are a major source of interference in many places. That includes all of you people who run your computer with the case open.
So this is how I can get back at the dork who's racial epithets I keep picking up on my unshielded stereo cables? Cool!
The American Civil Liberties Union and other liberal think tanks are getting in the way of what is important, and they don't realize that we have to sacrifice a certain amount of privacy in excange for national security.
Cool, then I guess that means that you won't mind surrendering your right to keep and bear arms in the interest of fighting crime and domestic violence either?
Oh, wait, sorry I forgot. That's a conservative think tank issue, we can't possibly do without our guns.
John Ashcroft was talking about the need to have wiretaps to catch terrorists, and a reporter asked him if he was planning to look through gun purchase records to find terrorists. He replied that it was illegal for the FBI to use those records, and that he had no interest in pursuing a change in that law with congress.
The law didn't seem to stop him from interfering with attorney client priviledge, why are gun records different?
I think that sacrificing our liberties to have more security is a red herring. It's just an excuse for the FBI or whoever to have to be less careful in how they exercise their power. They have the tools they need now to do the job, that's not the issue. There were indications that something big was being planned for 9/11, why was there no follow up on these???
I work at Dreamworks Interactive (now part of EA), and the reason Steven Spielberg was credited was because the Medal of Honor series was originally his idea, he told us we should make a FPS that was based on WWII and was highly realistic. This was about the same time he was filming SPR.
-marsh
Re:I haven't been able to nail it down
on
Defining Globalism
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· Score: 1
It's not the responsibility of "the movement" to control a lunatic fringe that may not even be connected to them. Lots of other groups have lunatic fringes, yet we take them seriously...
There's a lot that happened in Seattle that didn't make the news, I only heard about it from friends who were there. Non-violent protesters being attacked by cops. Violent protesters being put into paddy wagons, ferried across town, and released to cause more damage for the cameras. I don't know what's true about any of what I heard, but the one thing that I do think is strange is that thousands of people would come from all over the country/world to protest something, most of them non-violently, yet all the media can say about their reasons for protesting is that they want to make trouble. Surely they can investigate much deeper than that. Or maybe they don't want to?
Hey, you mind letting me know when you get laid off, so I can remind you of your post and laugh at you??
I've known plenty of companies that lay off not based on "lack of talent" but because of high pay scales...
so those complaining about being unemployed are often unemployed because they won't take a 30-40% cut in their asking price.
(I have a friend who was a web producer who was looking for a year, and didn't find anything until he chopped his asking price and broadened his job objective... he was hired pretty soon after that).
I bet there aren't a whole lot of CEOs out there who've taken a 30-40% cut in what they get paid.
(IMHO, the "REAL WORLD" prefers "tinie punie" tricks... for example sales people are highly paid for the "punie" trick of being likeable and persuasive. More highly paid than those who have the REAL talents of making the things they're selling.)
The funny thing about this comment is that the whole point of the booths are not to attract the "nerd-geek" gamers, but to attract buyers from retail chains to check out your game. So the sex is directed towards getting those guys in your booth. The marketing people who put up booths could care less if Joe Gamer pays them a visit. They just distract from the real target audience.
Also, the amount of booth babes present at this years E3 was markedly lower than last years. No Space Channel 5 girls on raised platforms.
The dynamic IP that cable provides isn't too bad, the address changes so rarely it may as well be static (like every 3-4 months if that!). All you need is a responsive host for your domain name (I have a friend who takes care of it for me off his DSL box) and you're all set!
As someone with a BS in computer science, I somewhat regret not majoring in another engineering discipline. The computer science stuff that I actually use I could have picked up on the fly: a CS curriculum does not teach you how to program. What a CS degree gets you is a lot of theoretical understanding about software construction which is not terribly useful in a lot of programming jobs.
The thing that was useful I could have gotten from any engineering degree program: problem analysis and reduction. But had I been something other than a CS I would have gotten a more solid grounding in math, something I am hurting for now.
You can pick up all the CS stuff you need on the job. Choose a degree that teaches you about other things than programming. Actually computer engineering would have been great had my school offered it.
It credits Jon Mandel, the guy who spouted this quote, as "a longtime observer of children's television trends".
I hope that's not his job description, for his company's sake, because he's really dropped the ball on this one. Geeky kids were the earliest watchers of anime. I was watching Starblazers(Space Cruiser Yamato), Danguard Ace, and Gaiking 20 years ago. Sheesh.
3DFX came in to speak to us about what the Voodoo 3 was going to be like a while back, in one of those "talk with the developers to get them to support our cards" meetings. This was before anything had been announced, and we were all eager to see what cool new revolutionary features they were going to put on this card.
We were, needless to say, disappointed. It was going to be faster, and have more memory. Woo woo.
When asked about why the board didn't seem that impressive, they started talking about ATI being their major competitor, not NVidia as we had thought, and got really enthusiastic about using their brand name to get OEM deals. They were repositioning themselves to be consumer cards, not high-end gamer cards. They were pretty much willing to GIVE that market to NVidia.
I left that meeting pretty much writing them off as a serious innovator.
And that's part of why they suck now.
Re:PeerToPeer will live on the backs of the Horadr
on
Scour is Dead
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· Score: 1
Actually Gnutella is unusable because of it's architecture.
<a href=http://dss.clip2.com/dss_barrier.html>Bandwid th Barriers to Gnutella Network Scalability</a>
Eventually the slow links (modems) get saturated with search requests and stop responding to pings.
Which has nothing to do with how many people are sharing files.
Anyway, back onto topic - I believe the market can support 2 consoles. The Nintendo 64 was supported though this generation - the companies make their money from software sales, not hardware sales. Look at the Top 10 games sales lists. New 1st and 2nd party N64 software is constantly in the top positions. People buy the software, N64 games sell incredibly well. The Ocarina of Time was a huge seller (and a damn great game too).
You are gonna have huge sellers on a platform if the installed base is large and the number of games released is comparatively small. Everybody has been rushing to get games to market for the launch of the PS2, so that they can have parity sales (for each machine sold, their game is sold too). Instant hit, regardless of the quality of the game. That can't happen on the PSX because too many people are making games for it. On the Nintendo, though, it can. Why? Because their per cartridge royalty and manufacturing costs (about $30 believe it or not) are so steep, and the required pre-order so huge, that only the big players can really afford to make cartridges.
Rumor has it that Nintendo is keeping their royalty pricing strategy for the Cube, so you can expect to see the same thing again. Fewer games available on the Nintendo, but not necessarily better ones. So all the #1 titles that sell like crazy, because nothing else is worth buying.
The PS2 is here, if only due to it's hype machine fooling the public that it is a great consol (it's not imho). The Gamecube will be at least as successful as the N64 (and the N64 made Nintendo money), if not more (it is FAR easier on 3rd parties to code for then the N64 or PS2).
Do you know this? Or are you believing Nintendo's hype? PS2 is a perfectly fine console... fast fast fast, though simple. The people complaining about it are likely ex-PC programmers that can't adapt to console development ("what do you mean I don't have 128MB of RAM and lightmaps? That sucks!") The Game cube... I dunno, we will see. I will bet that the xbox will be easier to code for, if only because of it's unified memory and the flexibility of the nvidia graphics chip. But to really exploit it and get an edge on your competitors will be just as hard.
I haven't seen much evidence of Nintendo being friendly to developers in the past to bet that they will change their strategy this time.
-marsh
Re:Suprised this is posted so late?!?!?!?
on
Watch Camera
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· Score: 1
There's no rhyme or reason to which gadget stories get published. This watch has been up on GadgetCentral's website since APRIL.
I used to submit "cool gadget" posts but they always got bounced. Maybe they have to show up in Newsweek before they get posted?;)
Mr. Bronfman seems to think that the only people who will provide us with content are people who are after money, and without that incentive there will BE no content. Without corporate content creators, the internet would be "a valueless collection of silent machines with gray screens."
The internet was here before you could make money off it. It would be here without that money. The thing that's killing it is not violation of IP, it's massive quantities of lawyers sending cease-and-desist letters to web page creators as fast as they can type. Without intellectual property protection, those people would be free to create; whether they were doing it themselves or taking from others or whatever. And the internet would NOT be a "collection of silent machines".
The issue here is not stealing. You haven't "stolen" something if the owner still has it. He keeps talking about people "taking" intellectual property from you as if you no longer had it when you were done. It's not like stealing your car, which he tries to make an analogy to.
The thing that is being lost is not the property, it's the control of access to that property. Well, guess what, Mr. Bronfman? You've been taking that from the consumers of the world for years, every time you buy and sell our personal information! That to me is far more important "intellectual property" than the latest Metallica album!! We don't have the right to control who trades our info, why should you have the rights over who trades your music??
That's a weak argument... to frame things as a choice between bettering yourself so you can be rich, powerful, and have everything you want, or to wallow in mediocrity.
What about bettering yourself so that you will have more power to help those around you? I don't mean that you have to be a martyr, but that you use your affluence and influence to affect changes that you find important and that improve society.
I do know that there are lots of people who do this, but only to a limited degree. We don't have a culture that teaches people to give back, that encourages them to think about others. We show people that it's desirable to become educated, work hard, and amass wealth, but after that they're on their own. So lots of people use that wealth to buy extravagant things for themselves, and to show off to others.
The problem is not that we don't have higher taxes to redistribute wealth, because government is too much of an inefficient and corrupt mechanism to effectively promote positive social change). Private charity would work better, if we had a culture that emphasized the value of charity.
> There is a valuable lesson to be taken from Ion Storm: Hot-shit programmers may think they're always right, but they're not.
Ya, there's a lesson to be learned from your post too. You should know what the fuck you're posting about before you spew your babble on the internet.
The development of Daikatana was driven by Mr. "Design-Is-LAW" John Romero, a DESIGNER, not a programmer. And he was more interested in promoting himself than working on the game. So your comment is pretty worthless.
In the game industry, companies always put language in their employment contracts that state that any work done by employees during their tenure at the company that relates to the purpose they were hired for belongs to that company.
I would not be surprised if other industries do the same for their programmers. Especially a media company like AOL. Gnapster certainly would fall under that category.
I don't know how enforceable the language is... anyone?
Actually it's picking up here, because the price of the players and recorders are dropping. Best Buy carries a good selection of MD players, recorders, components, and bookshelf systems.
A hybrid standard would be nice, right now I am optically transferring MP3s to MD, but I can only do that in real time and it involves recompressing them. It would be nice to avoid that.
"..., there is a lot of crap published with spaceships on the cover..."
Which is why I had a rule of thumb that generally ensured I would have a better chance of avoiding the crap: never read sci fi books that have spaceships on the cover.
It doesn't always work, and sometimes you miss good stuff, but I have managed to avoid a lot of derivative space operas that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Very serious developers even rely on various operations to execute in a specific amount of time. If one spin of the board did certain operations faster, it would be a nightmare on developers. They have a hard enough time as it is.
;) ouch!
And not-so-serious developers also rely on operations to execute in a specific amount of time, they just don't realize it!
Changing the speed of some features of the board may likely result in race conditions.
Though I must say I wouldn't mind if they sped up memory accesses
Power went haywire in Calif. not because of de-regulation in general, but California's "de-regulation" [reason.com] specifically.
Which was heavily lobbied for by the private electric companies.
I live in Los Angeles. My house is served by LADWP, which was not subject to the deregulation. While the rest of the state suffered rolling blackouts, power shortages, and long term contracts for overpriced electricity, we had the same good level of service we've always had, without interruption.
Private sector solutions to consumer's needs are not always superior to "inefficient" government agencies. It all depends on the agency in question.
And these guys wanna do internet access now? Bring it on! I'm sure they could do a better job than Verizon and Comcast.
Cheaply made consumer electronics equipment, light dimmers, poorly maintained power lines and other "unintentional radiators" are a major source of interference in many places. That includes all of you people who run your computer with the case open.
So this is how I can get back at the dork who's racial epithets I keep picking up on my unshielded stereo cables? Cool!
The American Civil Liberties Union and other liberal think tanks are getting in the way of what is important, and they don't realize that we have to sacrifice a certain amount of privacy in excange for national security.
Cool, then I guess that means that you won't mind surrendering your right to keep and bear arms in the interest of fighting crime and domestic violence either?
Oh, wait, sorry I forgot. That's a conservative think tank issue, we can't possibly do without our guns.
John Ashcroft was talking about the need to have wiretaps to catch terrorists, and a reporter asked him if he was planning to look through gun purchase records to find terrorists. He replied that it was illegal for the FBI to use those records, and that he had no interest in pursuing a change in that law with congress.
The law didn't seem to stop him from interfering with attorney client priviledge, why are gun records different?
I think that sacrificing our liberties to have more security is a red herring. It's just an excuse for the FBI or whoever to have to be less careful in how they exercise their power. They have the tools they need now to do the job, that's not the issue. There were indications that something big was being planned for 9/11, why was there no follow up on these???
I work at Dreamworks Interactive (now part of EA), and the reason Steven Spielberg was credited was because the Medal of Honor series was originally his idea, he told us we should make a FPS that was based on WWII and was highly realistic. This was about the same time he was filming SPR.
-marsh
It's not the responsibility of "the movement" to control a lunatic fringe that may not even be connected to them. Lots of other groups have lunatic fringes, yet we take them seriously...
There's a lot that happened in Seattle that didn't make the news, I only heard about it from friends who were there. Non-violent protesters being attacked by cops. Violent protesters being put into paddy wagons, ferried across town, and released to cause more damage for the cameras. I don't know what's true about any of what I heard, but the one thing that I do think is strange is that thousands of people would come from all over the country/world to protest something, most of them non-violently, yet all the media can say about their reasons for protesting is that they want to make trouble. Surely they can investigate much deeper than that. Or maybe they don't want to?
"Youuuuuuuu... with your fancy clothes....
Dance all night, till your heart explodes..."
(not posting the link because I don't wanna give Adam more headaches with 2 slashdot effects... hahahah. but look for "club drugs" on morpheus)
-marsh
Hey, you mind letting me know when you get laid off, so I can remind you of your post and laugh at you??
I've known plenty of companies that lay off not based on "lack of talent" but because of high pay scales...
so those complaining about being unemployed are often unemployed because they won't take a 30-40% cut in their asking price.
(I have a friend who was a web producer who was looking for a year, and didn't find anything until he chopped his asking price and broadened his job objective... he was hired pretty soon after that).
I bet there aren't a whole lot of CEOs out there who've taken a 30-40% cut in what they get paid.
(IMHO, the "REAL WORLD" prefers "tinie punie" tricks... for example sales people are highly paid for the "punie" trick of being likeable and persuasive. More highly paid than those who have the REAL talents of making the things they're selling.)
-marsh
The funny thing about this comment is that the whole point of the booths are not to attract the "nerd-geek" gamers, but to attract buyers from retail chains to check out your game. So the sex is directed towards getting those guys in your booth. The marketing people who put up booths could care less if Joe Gamer pays them a visit. They just distract from the real target audience.
Also, the amount of booth babes present at this years E3 was markedly lower than last years. No Space Channel 5 girls on raised platforms.
-marsh
The dynamic IP that cable provides isn't too bad, the address changes so rarely it may as well be static (like every 3-4 months if that!). All you need is a responsive host for your domain name (I have a friend who takes care of it for me off his DSL box) and you're all set!
-marsh
As someone with a BS in computer science, I somewhat regret not majoring in another engineering discipline. The computer science stuff that I actually use I could have picked up on the fly: a CS curriculum does not teach you how to program. What a CS degree gets you is a lot of theoretical understanding about software construction which is not terribly useful in a lot of programming jobs.
The thing that was useful I could have gotten from any engineering degree program: problem analysis and reduction. But had I been something other than a CS I would have gotten a more solid grounding in math, something I am hurting for now.
You can pick up all the CS stuff you need on the job. Choose a degree that teaches you about other things than programming. Actually computer engineering would have been great had my school offered it.
-marsh
It credits Jon Mandel, the guy who spouted this quote, as "a longtime observer of children's television trends".
I hope that's not his job description, for his company's sake, because he's really dropped the ball on this one. Geeky kids were the earliest watchers of anime. I was watching Starblazers(Space Cruiser Yamato), Danguard Ace, and Gaiking 20 years ago. Sheesh.
I ran into him at a couple of raves in SoCal in '97 when he was living at the Loft... but he had disappeared soon after Dune III...
;)
I had always thought he was an urban legend until I discovered he was hanging out in the rave scene
-marsh
3DFX came in to speak to us about what the Voodoo 3 was going to be like a while back, in one of those "talk with the developers to get them to support our cards" meetings. This was before anything had been announced, and we were all eager to see what cool new revolutionary features they were going to put on this card.
We were, needless to say, disappointed. It was going to be faster, and have more memory. Woo woo.
When asked about why the board didn't seem that impressive, they started talking about ATI being their major competitor, not NVidia as we had thought, and got really enthusiastic about using their brand name to get OEM deals. They were repositioning themselves to be consumer cards, not high-end gamer cards. They were pretty much willing to GIVE that market to NVidia.
I left that meeting pretty much writing them off as a serious innovator.
And that's part of why they suck now.
Actually Gnutella is unusable because of it's architecture.
d th Barriers to Gnutella Network Scalability</a>
<a href=http://dss.clip2.com/dss_barrier.html>Bandwi
Eventually the slow links (modems) get saturated with search requests and stop responding to pings.
Which has nothing to do with how many people are sharing files.
Anyway, back onto topic - I believe the market can support 2 consoles. The Nintendo 64 was supported though this generation - the companies make their money from software sales, not hardware sales. Look at the Top 10 games sales lists. New 1st and 2nd party N64 software is constantly in the top positions. People buy the software, N64 games sell incredibly well. The Ocarina of Time was a huge seller (and a damn great game too).
You are gonna have huge sellers on a platform if the installed base is large and the number of games released is comparatively small. Everybody has been rushing to get games to market for the launch of the PS2, so that they can have parity sales (for each machine sold, their game is sold too). Instant hit, regardless of the quality of the game. That can't happen on the PSX because too many people are making games for it. On the Nintendo, though, it can. Why? Because their per cartridge royalty and manufacturing costs (about $30 believe it or not) are so steep, and the required pre-order so huge, that only the big players can really afford to make cartridges.
Rumor has it that Nintendo is keeping their royalty pricing strategy for the Cube, so you can expect to see the same thing again. Fewer games available on the Nintendo, but not necessarily better ones. So all the #1 titles that sell like crazy, because nothing else is worth buying.
The PS2 is here, if only due to it's hype machine fooling the public that it is a great consol (it's not imho). The Gamecube will be at least as successful as the N64 (and the N64 made Nintendo money), if not more (it is FAR easier on 3rd parties to code for then the N64 or PS2).
Do you know this? Or are you believing Nintendo's hype? PS2 is a perfectly fine console... fast fast fast, though simple. The people complaining about it are likely ex-PC programmers that can't adapt to console development ("what do you mean I don't have 128MB of RAM and lightmaps? That sucks!") The Game cube... I dunno, we will see. I will bet that the xbox will be easier to code for, if only because of it's unified memory and the flexibility of the nvidia graphics chip. But to really exploit it and get an edge on your competitors will be just as hard.
I haven't seen much evidence of Nintendo being friendly to developers in the past to bet that they will change their strategy this time.
-marsh
There's no rhyme or reason to which gadget stories get published. This watch has been up on GadgetCentral's website since APRIL.
;)
I used to submit "cool gadget" posts but they always got bounced. Maybe they have to show up in Newsweek before they get posted?
Mr. Bronfman seems to think that the only people who will provide us with content are people who are after money, and without that incentive there will BE no content. Without corporate content creators, the internet would be "a valueless collection of silent machines with gray screens."
The internet was here before you could make money off it. It would be here without that money. The thing that's killing it is not violation of IP, it's massive quantities of lawyers sending cease-and-desist letters to web page creators as fast as they can type. Without intellectual property protection, those people would be free to create; whether they were doing it themselves or taking from others or whatever. And the internet would NOT be a "collection of silent machines".
The issue here is not stealing. You haven't "stolen" something if the owner still has it. He keeps talking about people "taking" intellectual property from you as if you no longer had it when you were done. It's not like stealing your car, which he tries to make an analogy to.
The thing that is being lost is not the property, it's the control of access to that property. Well, guess what, Mr. Bronfman? You've been taking that from the consumers of the world for years, every time you buy and sell our personal information! That to me is far more important "intellectual property" than the latest Metallica album!! We don't have the right to control who trades our info, why should you have the rights over who trades your music??
That's a weak argument... to frame things as a choice between bettering yourself so you can be rich, powerful, and have everything you want, or to wallow in mediocrity.
What about bettering yourself so that you will have more power to help those around you? I don't mean that you have to be a martyr, but that you use your affluence and influence to affect changes that you find important and that improve society.
I do know that there are lots of people who do this, but only to a limited degree. We don't have a culture that teaches people to give back, that encourages them to think about others. We show people that it's desirable to become educated, work hard, and amass wealth, but after that they're on their own. So lots of people use that wealth to buy extravagant things for themselves, and to show off to others.
The problem is not that we don't have higher taxes to redistribute wealth, because government is too much of an inefficient and corrupt mechanism to effectively promote positive social change). Private charity would work better, if we had a culture that emphasized the value of charity.
-marsh
Metallica is offering metallica.com email addresses off their website mail.metallica.com.
;)
Do with this information what you want
-marsh
gimme_your_cash@metallica.com
> There is a valuable lesson to be taken from Ion Storm: Hot-shit programmers may think they're always right, but they're not.
Ya, there's a lesson to be learned from your post too. You should know what the fuck you're posting about before you spew your babble on the internet.
The development of Daikatana was driven by Mr. "Design-Is-LAW" John Romero, a DESIGNER, not a programmer. And he was more interested in promoting himself than working on the game. So your comment is pretty worthless.
Dumbass.
In the game industry, companies always put language in their employment contracts that state that any work done by employees during their tenure at the company that relates to the purpose they were hired for belongs to that company.
I would not be surprised if other industries do the same for their programmers. Especially a media company like AOL. Gnapster certainly would fall under that category.
I don't know how enforceable the language is... anyone?
Actually it's picking up here, because the price of the players and recorders are dropping. Best Buy carries a good selection of MD players, recorders, components, and bookshelf systems.
A hybrid standard would be nice, right now I am optically transferring MP3s to MD, but I can only do that in real time and it involves recompressing them. It would be nice to avoid that.
"..., there is a lot of crap published with spaceships on the cover..."
Which is why I had a rule of thumb that generally ensured I would have a better chance of avoiding the crap: never read sci fi books that have spaceships on the cover.
It doesn't always work, and sometimes you miss good stuff, but I have managed to avoid a lot of derivative space operas that way.