Most video cards are rated as DirectX 9.0 Compatible as a result of using programmable pixel and vertex shaders. It's easier to say 'you need a directX 9.0 capable card' than it is to say 'you need a card with PS Level 2.1 or higher.' You are correct, though - Doom 3 Does use OpenGL.
I just bought a new Graphics Card - The Radeon 9800 PRO with 256 megabytes of memory. You can snag one of these babies off of newegg.com for around $270, and it performs within a few frames per second of the 9800XT, which is still going for around $400. If you're looking to buy a new graphics card, I'd recommend this one - you get extremely nice performance out of this baby without spending a lot of dough.
This isn't the only thing for which the chinese are trying to develop their own stadards; they hate the idea of paying royalties for formats that are accepted around the world, they just develop their own standards. I'm sure all of this isn't going to help china's transition into the being a free-market society integrated with the rest of the world.
Funny you should mention 'Silent Spring' - it's a perfect example of how downright stupid documentaries can be. As a result of the ban on DDT, millions of people around the world have died from diseases carried by insects like mosquitos. DDT is an effective pesticide, and when used properly will save the lives of people in impoverished countries who have no defense against killers like malaria. Unfortunately, a bunch of people saw the film 'Silent Spring' and decided that we should ban DDT outright - and so now farmers in countries like uganda who would love to buy the stuff to protect their houses can't because no company is willing to produce it. DDT was used excessively prior to Silent Spring, but the solution was to reduce usage to reasonable levels, as opposed to banning it outright.
The "Silent Spring-DDT" story is a classic case of White Liberals, in an attempt to make the world a better place, screwing a bunch of other people. What does this have to do with Micheal Moore's latest flick? I'm sure the theaters will be full of White Liberals just itching to make the world a better place by ridding America of the eeevil George W. Bush.
I agree with everything you have to say, but my point was that the Viet Cong did not militarily defeat the Americans - my reply was to a post claiming that the American army would have trouble beating the Koreans because of the terrain and the enviroment, and his evidence for this claim was that the americans lost to the vietnamese under simliar conditions. My argument was that the american loss to the vietnamese was purely a result of american policies at home; i.e. it had nothing to do with the military capabilities of the NVA. If the American army ever has any trouble fighting anyone, it will be because of the people at home who don't have a focused mentality, rather than because of the terrain or abilities of the enemy.
So when exactly did the Vietnamese 'defeat the Americans,' forcing them to retreat and shame them? In the Vietnam I know of, the Americans failed not because of superior enemy forces, but because the war was being fought by politicians instead of generals, and the troops had minimal support at home. Consider what happened at the Tet Offensive : the United States forces utterly destroyed the NVA, with about 35 NVA deaths for every one American killed. That's hardly a shameful defeat - but the media kept saying how bad things were going and it was the lack of public support that caused the Americans to eventually withdraw - not the NVA. No army can win a war if that war is fought according to the dictates of politicsal expediency instead of military necessity.
I don't think there's a lot of truth in the ramblings of the North Koreans. Those guys have thousands of artillery peices trained down on the South Koreans, and most of their citizens are starving because all of the food given to them as international aid is diverted to the military. Yet somehow we're the warmongers because of a hypothetical situation created in a video game? Couple that with their prediction of 'miserable defeat for us' and you should realize that you aren't dealing with complaints from a rational group of people, but paranoid ranting and chest thumping from a corrupt and weak regime.
A game "should" be cheaper if there is a fluctuation in market supply or demand - the price of an object "should" have nothing to do with the cost of production, aside from being higher. If these new ads lead to a decrease in the demand for games, then in a true market situation the price of games would fall; unfortunately the economics of video game distribution have always been screwed up. Otherwise, if demand for the games is unchanged by the ads, and supply stays the same, then the price shouldn't change, even though the producer is getting more revenue from the ads.
If "things going downhill" as a result of "laziness on the part of some x-xbox designers" means me getting awesome new content for a great game with a few flaws, I can only hope things go further downhill in the future.
I like the xbox large controller. I find it to be the most comfortable controller I have used, ever. I can deal with the 's' in a pinch, but I definately prefer the way the 'Duke' (the original MSFT name for the controller) fits so comfortably in my hands. Saying that 'this is the worst controller ever' is just dumb - it's entirely a matter of personal preference. I like the large controllers, and so do some of my siblings and friends. Other siblings and friends (I have a lot of siblings) prefer the small. Saying one is 'better' than the other is just as dumb as getting into an argument over which flavor of starburst is the best - it's all personal preference, anyhow.
You mean a company offering its services for free is putting restrictions on said services? *Gasp* Can 1984 be far behind? Surely this is the result of the eeeevil George W. Bush and his Patriot Act.
Serioulsy, though. These companies are offering a free service. There's nothing unethical or illegal about making said service crappier. Even if you were paying for it, they've still got license to do whatever they want with the service (unless of course the TOS say that the TOS are never going to change...) Isn't this just like consoles all being proprietary, so that not just anyone can make games fro them?
It's a good thing you didn't buy the PS2 on accident. I should think that you might have been fairly dissapointed if you went out for an xbox and came back with a PS2...
They do have an incentive - they'll sell more copies. That was the gist of my argument. Because they don't make any money off of the sale of used games, it's in their best interest to prevent used game sales. They're trying crap like self-destructing DVD's, but I'm saying they could make a lot more money if they priced new DVDs just a dollar or two higher than the current going rate for a used copy of the same movie. That way, used sales would be kept to a minimum since most buyers would probably pay the small premium to get a new one instead of a used one. If the price of new content is way above the price of used content, many people will just buy the used content. It's far better for the content producers to see a little less money, rather than no money at all.
He was essentially asking for a Turing Complete language, of which all other languages were special cases. The the thign is, you can't say that FORTRAN is a special case of C, or that Scheme is a special case of Haskell. You can, however, say that all of these languages are special cases of GLOOP. The reason I mentioned GLOOP instead of a turing machine is that a turnign machine isn't a lanuages in the "programming language" sense - It's a computing framework. GLOOP is a programming language that can is Turing complete, but adds no extra functionality beyond that, so you could say that C is a special case of GLOOP.
I have to disagree with you on this one. That may be true for some games, in other games, you need the audio. I'm thinking of FPS titles, specifically Call of Duty. I would say that is one of the few games with audio that just amazes me; and it still does, every single time I play it. With EAX3 and a 5.1 surround sound setup, you feel like you're there. You need every bit of help you can get in figuring out where the enemy is - wether it's identifying just who is shooting beyond that hill by the sound of the gun they're using, or using the doppeler effect to tell whether that clanking you hear is someone coming up the steps to get you or down the steps to get the bad guys. I geuss you could play Call of Duty without a sound, but if you're going to try it, please come to a server that I frequent so I can really take advantage of that fact.
There has never been a feasible Economic Model
on
Yet Another Degrading DVD
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The economic model for content distribution is really, seriously screwed up. You've got a product with extremely high fixed costs (The cost to produce the movie or the video game or the music) and essentially zero marginal cost (The few cents paid to make the jewelcase and the packaging), sold by a single company with monopoly rights for at least 70 years to a set of monopolistic competitors who demand to buy all products at a similar price.
That market is so far out of normal economics that most conventional economic laws fail to exlpain anything about it. Normally, prices convey information to buyers and sellers about the relative abundancy or scarcity of the product. The problem here is that only one entity is deciding how many of said objects to produce, and then a separate group of buyers and resellers (think companies like best buy or circuit city) all decide to buy and then sell at about the same price, regardless of the demand for the product or how many they have to sell.
Price changes for content are based almost entirely on the time since the content was created, rather than the relative popularity of the product itself, and so no information is conveyed to either buyers or sellers about scaricty or abundance. It's all completely absurd. The price at which CDs and DVDs and Video Games are sold does not at all reflect supply or demand or any sort of market condition other than the whims of the single supplier. That's why companies like EBGames and GameStop are all buying and selling used games - they don't make any money on the used games since they have to buy them and sell them for about the same price. There is intense competition among buyers of new games and media (by buyers, I mean resellers here) but only entity supplying those games. Once you have a reasonable supply of used games entering the market, you start to see a semblance of a market economy, with the price of a used game representing the abundancy or scarcity thereof.
How is this all going to be resolved? Suppose the movie companies decide to release content for extremely high prices at first, and then they set their price to about the same level as the going rate for used content. They'll keep selling products because there are plenty of people willing to pay a little extra for a new product over a used one. But then, as more new copies enter circulation, there are more sellers of used copies (since all new copies become used copies and thus all buyers of new copies can become sellers of used copies) and so the price of used copies falls, and then along with it the price of new copies. This causes more people to want to buy the product and the cycle keeps repeating with the price of the content getting closer and closer to the price of the medium on which it is stored. At this point it doesn't make any sense for the movie company to stay in production, so they should just pull back, but keep watching the market. Instead, once games and movies and cds have been out for several years, the content producers tend to ignore market fluctuations in the prices for used content. There are some used games selling on ebay for prices far above the original $50 because they went on to become cult hits. If the producers weren't complete idiots, they would start producing more new content and selling it at a little above the market price of the used games.
Instead, since the content producers seem steeped in economic ignorance, we're getting more of these stupid ideas like disposable DVDs and easily circumvented DRM.
Hey pal, what do you think this is? This is slashdot, that's what. You better not try and explain basic economic principles to people if you know what's good for you or your karma. Try complaining about the USA PATRIOT act, the DMCA, outsourcing, the crappiness of Microsoft, and the Personal Suckiness of George W. Bush instead of pointing out basic economics.
I've heard that as well. From my understanding, the Xbox is the easiest to code for, followed closely by GameCube. The PS2 is supposed to be a real pain. I'm really curious to see how things turn out with the PS3 - my understanding is that it's supposed to have around 16 processors.
Of course corporations aren't people; I never said they were! They are, however, groups of people. If you attempt to restrict the manner in which groups can operate, you are limiting the freedoms of the individuals in said groups. Are not CEOs and shareholders american citizens as well? If you have the right to switch purchasing one product to a cheaper one, shouldn't a group of people have the same right?
Any jerk can stand up for his own freedom, but it takes a real American to stand up for the freedoms of the men he despises. By shouting 'Corporations aren't people,' you're simply refuting a statement I never made, and ignoring the fact that corporations are run by and for shareholders, who are most definately people.
If the idea out outsourcing really bothers you, instead of using the government to force your beleifs on others, why don't you and a bunch of your buddies either start your own outsourcing-free company, or just buy up all the stock in a company and appoint your own people to the board of directors? I'll tell you why - it's much easier to criticize others for a perceived problem than it is to take matters into your own hands.
If a company doesn't lower prices, they'll lose sales to the companies which have lowered their prices. This has happened over and over again. If you keep your prices high, people won't buy your products. Why did Microsoft lower the price of the XBox from $300 to $200, $180, and eventually $150 ? According to your logic, if they would have kept the price at $300, they'd have made more profit. Obviously that isn't the case - Xbox sales really took off when the thing dropped to $150, and a result, microsoft probably made more money then when the Xbox was selling for $170, because more people were buying it. Who benefits? Microsoft, because they make more money, and consumers because the Xbox is cheaper. Economics is not a zero-sum game - both producers and consumers win when all sides are given more freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
Most video cards are rated as DirectX 9.0 Compatible as a result of using programmable pixel and vertex shaders. It's easier to say 'you need a directX 9.0 capable card' than it is to say 'you need a card with PS Level 2.1 or higher.' You are correct, though - Doom 3 Does use OpenGL.
I just bought a new Graphics Card - The Radeon 9800 PRO with 256 megabytes of memory. You can snag one of these babies off of newegg.com for around $270, and it performs within a few frames per second of the 9800XT, which is still going for around $400. If you're looking to buy a new graphics card, I'd recommend this one - you get extremely nice performance out of this baby without spending a lot of dough.
This isn't the only thing for which the chinese are trying to develop their own stadards; they hate the idea of paying royalties for formats that are accepted around the world, they just develop their own standards. I'm sure all of this isn't going to help china's transition into the being a free-market society integrated with the rest of the world.
The same could be said about guns.
Funny you should mention 'Silent Spring' - it's a perfect example of how downright stupid documentaries can be. As a result of the ban on DDT, millions of people around the world have died from diseases carried by insects like mosquitos. DDT is an effective pesticide, and when used properly will save the lives of people in impoverished countries who have no defense against killers like malaria. Unfortunately, a bunch of people saw the film 'Silent Spring' and decided that we should ban DDT outright - and so now farmers in countries like uganda who would love to buy the stuff to protect their houses can't because no company is willing to produce it. DDT was used excessively prior to Silent Spring, but the solution was to reduce usage to reasonable levels, as opposed to banning it outright.
The "Silent Spring-DDT" story is a classic case of White Liberals, in an attempt to make the world a better place, screwing a bunch of other people. What does this have to do with Micheal Moore's latest flick? I'm sure the theaters will be full of White Liberals just itching to make the world a better place by ridding America of the eeevil George W. Bush.
I agree with everything you have to say, but my point was that the Viet Cong did not militarily defeat the Americans - my reply was to a post claiming that the American army would have trouble beating the Koreans because of the terrain and the enviroment, and his evidence for this claim was that the americans lost to the vietnamese under simliar conditions. My argument was that the american loss to the vietnamese was purely a result of american policies at home; i.e. it had nothing to do with the military capabilities of the NVA. If the American army ever has any trouble fighting anyone, it will be because of the people at home who don't have a focused mentality, rather than because of the terrain or abilities of the enemy.
So when exactly did the Vietnamese 'defeat the Americans,' forcing them to retreat and shame them? In the Vietnam I know of, the Americans failed not because of superior enemy forces, but because the war was being fought by politicians instead of generals, and the troops had minimal support at home. Consider what happened at the Tet Offensive : the United States forces utterly destroyed the NVA, with about 35 NVA deaths for every one American killed. That's hardly a shameful defeat - but the media kept saying how bad things were going and it was the lack of public support that caused the Americans to eventually withdraw - not the NVA. No army can win a war if that war is fought according to the dictates of politicsal expediency instead of military necessity.
I don't think there's a lot of truth in the ramblings of the North Koreans. Those guys have thousands of artillery peices trained down on the South Koreans, and most of their citizens are starving because all of the food given to them as international aid is diverted to the military. Yet somehow we're the warmongers because of a hypothetical situation created in a video game? Couple that with their prediction of 'miserable defeat for us' and you should realize that you aren't dealing with complaints from a rational group of people, but paranoid ranting and chest thumping from a corrupt and weak regime.
A game "should" be cheaper if there is a fluctuation in market supply or demand - the price of an object "should" have nothing to do with the cost of production, aside from being higher. If these new ads lead to a decrease in the demand for games, then in a true market situation the price of games would fall; unfortunately the economics of video game distribution have always been screwed up. Otherwise, if demand for the games is unchanged by the ads, and supply stays the same, then the price shouldn't change, even though the producer is getting more revenue from the ads.
I know I've definately heard stories of China become upset over its portrayal in video games; I wonder why it is they haven't sounded off yet.
If "things going downhill" as a result of "laziness on the part of some x-xbox designers" means me getting awesome new content for a great game with a few flaws, I can only hope things go further downhill in the future.
I like the xbox large controller. I find it to be the most comfortable controller I have used, ever. I can deal with the 's' in a pinch, but I definately prefer the way the 'Duke' (the original MSFT name for the controller) fits so comfortably in my hands. Saying that 'this is the worst controller ever' is just dumb - it's entirely a matter of personal preference. I like the large controllers, and so do some of my siblings and friends. Other siblings and friends (I have a lot of siblings) prefer the small. Saying one is 'better' than the other is just as dumb as getting into an argument over which flavor of starburst is the best - it's all personal preference, anyhow.
You mean a company offering its services for free is putting restrictions on said services? *Gasp* Can 1984 be far behind? Surely this is the result of the eeeevil George W. Bush and his Patriot Act. Serioulsy, though. These companies are offering a free service. There's nothing unethical or illegal about making said service crappier. Even if you were paying for it, they've still got license to do whatever they want with the service (unless of course the TOS say that the TOS are never going to change...) Isn't this just like consoles all being proprietary, so that not just anyone can make games fro them?
It's a good thing you didn't buy the PS2 on accident. I should think that you might have been fairly dissapointed if you went out for an xbox and came back with a PS2...
They do have an incentive - they'll sell more copies. That was the gist of my argument. Because they don't make any money off of the sale of used games, it's in their best interest to prevent used game sales. They're trying crap like self-destructing DVD's, but I'm saying they could make a lot more money if they priced new DVDs just a dollar or two higher than the current going rate for a used copy of the same movie. That way, used sales would be kept to a minimum since most buyers would probably pay the small premium to get a new one instead of a used one. If the price of new content is way above the price of used content, many people will just buy the used content. It's far better for the content producers to see a little less money, rather than no money at all.
He was essentially asking for a Turing Complete language, of which all other languages were special cases. The the thign is, you can't say that FORTRAN is a special case of C, or that Scheme is a special case of Haskell. You can, however, say that all of these languages are special cases of GLOOP. The reason I mentioned GLOOP instead of a turing machine is that a turnign machine isn't a lanuages in the "programming language" sense - It's a computing framework. GLOOP is a programming language that can is Turing complete, but adds no extra functionality beyond that, so you could say that C is a special case of GLOOP.
You can find this meta-language you speak of, if you read Godel, Escher, Bach By Douglass Hofstadter. It's called 'GLOOP'.
I have to disagree with you on this one. That may be true for some games, in other games, you need the audio. I'm thinking of FPS titles, specifically Call of Duty. I would say that is one of the few games with audio that just amazes me; and it still does, every single time I play it. With EAX3 and a 5.1 surround sound setup, you feel like you're there. You need every bit of help you can get in figuring out where the enemy is - wether it's identifying just who is shooting beyond that hill by the sound of the gun they're using, or using the doppeler effect to tell whether that clanking you hear is someone coming up the steps to get you or down the steps to get the bad guys. I geuss you could play Call of Duty without a sound, but if you're going to try it, please come to a server that I frequent so I can really take advantage of that fact.
The economic model for content distribution is really, seriously screwed up. You've got a product with extremely high fixed costs (The cost to produce the movie or the video game or the music) and essentially zero marginal cost (The few cents paid to make the jewelcase and the packaging), sold by a single company with monopoly rights for at least 70 years to a set of monopolistic competitors who demand to buy all products at a similar price.
That market is so far out of normal economics that most conventional economic laws fail to exlpain anything about it. Normally, prices convey information to buyers and sellers about the relative abundancy or scarcity of the product. The problem here is that only one entity is deciding how many of said objects to produce, and then a separate group of buyers and resellers (think companies like best buy or circuit city) all decide to buy and then sell at about the same price, regardless of the demand for the product or how many they have to sell.
Price changes for content are based almost entirely on the time since the content was created, rather than the relative popularity of the product itself, and so no information is conveyed to either buyers or sellers about scaricty or abundance. It's all completely absurd. The price at which CDs and DVDs and Video Games are sold does not at all reflect supply or demand or any sort of market condition other than the whims of the single supplier. That's why companies like EBGames and GameStop are all buying and selling used games - they don't make any money on the used games since they have to buy them and sell them for about the same price. There is intense competition among buyers of new games and media (by buyers, I mean resellers here) but only entity supplying those games. Once you have a reasonable supply of used games entering the market, you start to see a semblance of a market economy, with the price of a used game representing the abundancy or scarcity thereof.
How is this all going to be resolved? Suppose the movie companies decide to release content for extremely high prices at first, and then they set their price to about the same level as the going rate for used content. They'll keep selling products because there are plenty of people willing to pay a little extra for a new product over a used one. But then, as more new copies enter circulation, there are more sellers of used copies (since all new copies become used copies and thus all buyers of new copies can become sellers of used copies) and so the price of used copies falls, and then along with it the price of new copies. This causes more people to want to buy the product and the cycle keeps repeating with the price of the content getting closer and closer to the price of the medium on which it is stored. At this point it doesn't make any sense for the movie company to stay in production, so they should just pull back, but keep watching the market. Instead, once games and movies and cds have been out for several years, the content producers tend to ignore market fluctuations in the prices for used content. There are some used games selling on ebay for prices far above the original $50 because they went on to become cult hits. If the producers weren't complete idiots, they would start producing more new content and selling it at a little above the market price of the used games.
Instead, since the content producers seem steeped in economic ignorance, we're getting more of these stupid ideas like disposable DVDs and easily circumvented DRM.
Hey pal, what do you think this is? This is slashdot, that's what. You better not try and explain basic economic principles to people if you know what's good for you or your karma. Try complaining about the USA PATRIOT act, the DMCA, outsourcing, the crappiness of Microsoft, and the Personal Suckiness of George W. Bush instead of pointing out basic economics.
I've heard that as well. From my understanding, the Xbox is the easiest to code for, followed closely by GameCube. The PS2 is supposed to be a real pain. I'm really curious to see how things turn out with the PS3 - my understanding is that it's supposed to have around 16 processors.
Isn't that what he'd want, anyhow?
Of course corporations aren't people; I never said they were! They are, however, groups of people. If you attempt to restrict the manner in which groups can operate, you are limiting the freedoms of the individuals in said groups. Are not CEOs and shareholders american citizens as well? If you have the right to switch purchasing one product to a cheaper one, shouldn't a group of people have the same right?
Any jerk can stand up for his own freedom, but it takes a real American to stand up for the freedoms of the men he despises. By shouting 'Corporations aren't people,' you're simply refuting a statement I never made, and ignoring the fact that corporations are run by and for shareholders, who are most definately people.
If the idea out outsourcing really bothers you, instead of using the government to force your beleifs on others, why don't you and a bunch of your buddies either start your own outsourcing-free company, or just buy up all the stock in a company and appoint your own people to the board of directors? I'll tell you why - it's much easier to criticize others for a perceived problem than it is to take matters into your own hands.
Communism is more like "You share your things with me and the other fellows in power, or else you're on your way to the goulags."
If a company doesn't lower prices, they'll lose sales to the companies which have lowered their prices. This has happened over and over again. If you keep your prices high, people won't buy your products. Why did Microsoft lower the price of the XBox from $300 to $200, $180, and eventually $150 ? According to your logic, if they would have kept the price at $300, they'd have made more profit. Obviously that isn't the case - Xbox sales really took off when the thing dropped to $150, and a result, microsoft probably made more money then when the Xbox was selling for $170, because more people were buying it. Who benefits? Microsoft, because they make more money, and consumers because the Xbox is cheaper. Economics is not a zero-sum game - both producers and consumers win when all sides are given more freedom.