I see what you're saying and definitely would be suspectful of a rating that included speed and energy consumption all rolled into a single number.
I see this as another important rating to be used simply to evaluate a chip based purely on energy consumption. It should also be a good motivator for chip makers who haven't concerned themselves with energy consumption when their chip suddenly is viewed unfavorable when compared to more energy efficient yet equal performing chips from rivals.
Most IT purchasers are going to understand speed and energy are separate, often opposing numbers just like most understand a semi will have a lower gas mileage than a car. Even with far better gas mileage you still wouldn't buy a car for freight hauling nor would you buy a semi for picking kids up from school, taking kids to soccer, grocery shopping and driving to Wal-mart to stand in line at midnight for the latest great Halo game for your kids.:)
I'm an independent game developer building a non-violent family game MMO service with a game client that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Supporting all flavors of Windows all the way back to Windows 95 is rather trivial; there's one binary build of the application I have to distribute and support for all flavors of Windows users.
Supporting Mac is a little less trivial but still relatively doable with a little extra effort.
Supporting Linux, however, is quite challenging. First there's the sheer number of different distributions all running a different version of the kernel, different and even modified library versions. You can't simply say "we support Linux" with any real confidence.
Second, there's no guarantee of any sort of backwards compatibility with Linux. What you finally get working today will likely stop working on the next major release of a given distribution. Most distributions change every 6 months. You know when you get things working on Windows, it will work on nearly all Windows platforms past, present and future. In Linux, it's a constant deluge of re-fixing things over and over and over.
Third, everything is customized on Linux. It's part of its philosophy which is fine except when it comes to trying to support a commercial 3rd party product. The average consumer doesn't want the solution to their problem to be compiling source code to get your application to work on their system nor is that a feasible or economical way of supporting 1000s of customers.
If Linux really wants to become mainstream, it's going to need to greatly improve 3rd party support, distribution and start standardizing things like desktop shortcuts, menus and installation process.
I think what is commonly pointed at as male bias against females is really just biology.
Males are naturally aggressive, looking for whatever advantage they can to get the upper-hand and conquer.
Woman are naturally passive, looking to nurture and keep the peace, often times at their own personal expense.
One style is no better or worse than the other.
Women entering any competitive environment need to realize that if they feel there is a bias against them it is because they allow there to be one not because they are being singled out and discriminated against as women.
Men treat all competitors equally; if they think they can dominate you then they will try to dominate. If they don't think they can dominate you, then they give you respect and work with you in a partnership. Unfortunately for women, navigating this kind of environment is often counter to their natural biology and inclinations so the common outcome is that women make easy targets to be competitively dominated. They aren't being singled out for being women; men treat other men the same.
On the flip side, men need to realize that most women don't enter a competitive environment with the same goals of domination and aggression like men do. Men assume that women compete just like men; to dominate and conquer their opponents. Men will often do things out of ego or to assert their authority regardless if that's beneficial for the task at hand whereas women work out of good faith and with the belief that everything they do is for the good of the group rather than the good of themselves.
Instead of pointing fingers and calling foul on one gender or the other, we need to start understanding and accepting the differences and motivations that influence each gender's actions.
My guess is "fair use exception" revenue generation is largely a result of websites using other people's content to generate ad revenue. Without fair use exceptions, 80% of the Internet "content" would disappear. When our economy gets past websites and Internet "companies" relying on a business model of profiting from the aggregation of other people's original efforts, I'm betting revenue generated from "fair use exceptions" will drop accordingly.
An economy can only sustain itself so long from re-packaging other people's work before it runs out of gas. Rewarding original creation is what is needed more.
White paper design proposals should only be given limited patent protection with the requirement of a fully functional, revenuing generating implementation completed within a limited time frame before being granted full patent rights, protection and legal authority to sue for infringement. That would eliminate the patent trolls.
Trivial/obvious patents are a bit more difficult since many things seem obvious or trivial after the fact.
As a developer and upcoming business entrepreneur, patents are an area I'm forced to consider and become familiar with. I realize I'm not saying anything new, but, I like to think out loud and hear what others have to say when I'm learning a new area.:)
1. Patents seem to have turned from being a reward, incentive or recognition for inventors and innovation to being a bludgeoning weapon for business. In many ways, the patent system seems to be used as a legalized method to facilitate anti-competitive practices. What better way to bar startups from becoming a threat than to mire them in litigation right from the start.
2. The only groups that seem to consistently profit from the patent system are lawyers and the USPTO.
3. It seems the patent system can never be run properly when the government agency running it is doing so for profit. The USPTO has great incentive to grant patents as quickly as possible to increase the money coming into the agency. Missing a few obvious patents here and prior art there doesn't seem to be a high priority.
4. It's bothersome to me that the system allows patent trolls to profit; filing for patents they have no intention of developing but waiting in the grass like a snake to pounce on others who come along. It feels like one requirement for filing a patent is to demonstrate not only a working version at the time of filing but also to not be granted full protection and legalization to bludgeon others until you're actually using the patent for real business. Trademarks work in that fashion.
With US ISPs gouging service providers 400$ a month per 1.5mbit of upstream bandwidth, US consumer upstream broadband will continue to be crappy until the ISPs find a way to give regular customers cheap access to better upstream without losing their ability to charge ridiculous prices to service providers for the same upstream access.
The real obstacles with developing a commercial game on Linux isn't the performance or technicalities of developing the game like it was years ago; it's distribution and support.
Linux has plenty of horsepower and driver support these days to run even the most demanding 3D games and the development platform is consistent enough with Windows to make porting issues or cross-platform development a manageable, almost transparent task.
The big obstacle is distributing and supporting a game for Linux. For a third party developer such as a commercial game developer, packaging and releasing a game for Windows is a relatively easy, standardized task. A commercial developer knows that once they develop the game for Windows it's going to work as expected on the greater majority of consumer Windows machines in existence; even those running older versions of Windows and most likely will run on future versions of Windows. The commercial game developer generally does not have to worry about new hardware coming not working because of lack of drivers or new releases of the Windows OS coming out every 6 months that causes their product to stop functioning and needing fixed constantly. The commercial game developer doesn't have to be concerned with what other Windows developers are doing and whether changes going on in another area of the OS or applications being developed are going to effect their game development. Furthermore, the commercial game developer doesn't really have to spend extra effort dealing with multiple versions of Windows; for the most part Windows is Windows.
Contrast this with Linux, where there are literally dozens of recognizable distributions, none of which have an appreciable majority marketshare and many of which change dramatically every few months. Trying to maintain a game and keep it working from one version to the next of a single distribution is a sizeable task; trying to do that for dozens of distributions becomes prohibitive which is what a commercial game developer would have to do if they truly intended to support their game properly. And after all this effort, what would the effective sales increase of their game really be? The economics of properly distributing and supporting a game just isn't worth it.
If Linux really wants to be a practical target for commercial game development, it needs to bolster itself in the areas of distribution, support and platform compatibility stability. This will in turn not only make it more feasible for commercial game developers to consider targeting Linux as a valuable platform but improving these same factors would apply to all application developers and increase marketshare and commercial viability of Linux. If that is the desired effect, of course.
If they are those big tapes used by mainframes, they are probably hanging on the wall at someone's house between stolen "Watch For Ice On Bridge" sign and the "Do Not Enter" sign. To impress chicks of course.:)
As a game developer creating a cross-platform game client that can run on Windows, Mac and Linux, I am definitely interested in the number of "Linux Users" as I evaluate cost of development targeting and supporting Linux and the expected number of players I will get from that effort. What I am personally not as interested in are the number of "Uses of Linux"; however, if I were a tools, library or utility developer I would probably definitely be interested in the total amount of "Uses of Linux" when considering whether to spend my development time targeting that platform.
For me personally, the number of web servers or embedded devices using Linux doesn't mean anything. My car's navigation system must run some sort of operating system, however, I wouldn't consider myself a User of that OS though it certainly is a Use of that OS (whatever it might be). I didn't purposely choose my Nav system because it ran a particular OS, it simply came with whatever it came with and I use it just like I would use a phone or a washer or refrigerator with some embedded OS.
I would feel the data would be useful if broken down into at least two broad categories:
1. All uses of Linux.
2. Users who knowingly and purposely choose Linux as their OS of choice. Presumably this would be a subset of data from #1 and would useful for consumer application developers.
I got into game development in 1995, a little over a year after I graduated from my university with a degree in COBOL and mainframe development. The company that hired me developed in C++, of which I didn't even have enough knowledge of to even carry a 5 minute conversation about, much less develop useful code for the company.
What I *did* have was a demonstrated passion for wanting to work in the gaming industry. I had spent several months prior doing nothing but programming in C after work learning basic game development concepts (at that time it was VGA DOS programming in mode 13h, mode X) from books such as LaMothe's "Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus".
I practically had to beg the recruiter to even turn my name in. When I showed up for my interview, I had created a little game demo. I was later told it was my passion and demo that really got me the job; they felt I could easily learn the technical skills along the way to do my job.
Over the years, I realize how true this is; I've personally hired a few candidates who had very little programming experience but a huge demonstrated passion for wanting to do the job and they've almost always turned out to be really great developers. People passionate about what they are doing can be trained new skills.
Non-violent games do exist such as Dance Dance Revolution, The Sims; but, these games are the exception not the norm. Violence in games is so pervasive that even seemingly non-violent games like Animal Crossing or Paper Mario include eliminates of warfare as their core gameplay.
It's not enough to just get your game to run for Windows, Mac and Linux and build a CD with an installer for all three platforms. If that's all it took, developers would do it.
When you ship a product for a platform, the hidden cost most players don't see or think about is the cost, time and effort supporting that platform. Spending an extra $20,000 to gain an extra $10,000 doesn't make any sense.
The impracticality of supporting Linux is why developers don't develop their game to also work on Linux even when it's technically possible because the costs of supporting Linux far out-weigh the return on investment of doing so.
Agree and good comparison! Making games for Linux now is like what making games for DOS was years ago. Anyone who was (un)lucky enough to work tech support for a game company in the late 80s and early 90s probably have a lot of fun stories to tell.
Not practical or profitable to develop for Linux
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Cedega and Linux Games
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Gaming companies don't develop for Linux because it's not pratical to support properly.
There are too many Linux distributions, none of which have a big enough of the Linux market to be considered the de facto standard Linux distribution to develop for and build a customer service department to support.
Game applications are the most strenous and sensitive to the capabilities of the platform. Windows is pretty standard with DirectX. On Linux you don't know what's going to work; the very philosophy of choice with Linux translates to everyone's machine is just different enough in a way that makes developing a game for Linux a real frustration.
Finally, once you manage to get things working on a couple distributions, a new release comes out that invalidates your existing application. And in another 6 months another release of Linux is going to come out and invalidate your work again. A developer has a hard time keeping his game working under one distribution from one version to the next. Now multiply that by 10-20 for the most popular Linux platforms each releasing new versions every 6 months.
Shipping source code to your customers and expecting them to build it every time they upgrade their machine or switch distributions isn't a solution.
Combine the constant, frequent changes that aren't guaranteed to be backwards compatible like the Windows platform provides with the sheer number of distributions of Linux you would have to support to make it worthwhile, and then consider that all this effort just to support one platform might translate to an extra 5% sales and you have your reason why game companies don't develop for Linux.
Linux is a great platform to develop for; it's a terrible platform to support. This is what's holding Linux back from becoming truly mainstream. It has nothing to do with features or hardware support or useability. If a company can't reasonably develop and SUPPORT their applications for a platform and expect a reasonable amount of sales while doing so then it's not worth doing it when you can simply focus on another platform (Windows) that is much easier to support and maintain and hits 90% of your whole market in the first place.
Re:Not being open to the public probably didn't he
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The End of E3?
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
I apologize for the extremely poor grammar and bad spelling above. Poetic, I reckon, rushing a response about E3 without reviewing it while trying to do other things.
Not being open to the public probably didn't help
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The End of E3?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
E3 used to be a fun public event. This made it as much of a marketing/advertising tool as a publishing and development tools for making new deals. A few years ago, they decided to make E3 off limits to the general public and only available to developers and the media. I'm not surprised companies no longer decided the expensive booths was no longer worth the time, effort and development disruptions. If you've ever worked inside a game company, often times you lose one or two months out of the year just working on throwaway demos to play at E3 and is often some of the worst crunch and chaotic times only reivaled by the emminent release of a new product.
Depending on how the MMO was built, generally the number of players in a zone doesn't necessarily impact an individual player's computer; it's the number of players nearby that impact the player's individual computer. Most MMO developers call this an "update radius" or something similar. That's how an MMO is able to support 1000s of players connected at once withou overloading either the servers or the players.
In UO or SWG, for instance, the only players or objects you know about are the ones that are relatively nearby. When those players get to a certain distance, your game client "forgets" all about them. That basically means the server stops transmitting updates for players (and objects) that aren't nearby you. So a zone could theoretically have a million players (if the server can handle it) in it, but, the only players and objects your game client has to deal with would be those handful of players nearby you. UO, for instance, had a limit of around 700 players per zone at which point it would start telestorming (teleporting players to other zones) random players to keep the zone population down to a level the servers at the time (were talking server machines built in 1996-1997) could handle.
Now, once the number of players and objects do impact your game client it's usually a number of factors that multiple cores would not necessarily solve unless the developers specifically designed the game from the ground up to be threaded or distributed in some fashion. The three main sources of MMO "lag" are: 1. Graphics rendering lag 2. File loading lag (if you are playing a game that dynamically loads textures as needed due to the impossibility of loading all 4gig worth of data at once) 3. Network lag from so much bandwidth being transmitted to you by the server. You know what happens when a little web server gets slashdotted? Well, reverse that and now imagine your game client is the web server and the game server is trying to send you updates for 1000s of players and objects all moving around in your vicinity all at once.
Graphics lag is mostly to do with your graphics card, so having multiple cores is probably not going to have a lot of impact on that. File and networking could possibly benefit from multiple cores if the developers handled the synchronization properly. That is no small feat though and with the sheer complexity an MMO already brings to the table, this would be a tipping point of complexity.
So personally, I could see where two cores would be great. With physics becoming more of a game feature, perhaps even 4 might provide some benefit but I doubt that much benefit and developers aren't going to develop something requiring hardware that only a small niche group of consumers are going to even have. The time and effort fully utilizing even four cores would be very costly and time consuming and error-prone (thread errors are the worst errors to debug and fix) and then you still have to have your game work on what a typical consumer's machine is going to be any way so a developer is still going to have to make it all work on a single CPU machine making all that effort basically wasted for all but bells and whistles special effects.
I tried Ad-aware a couple years ago on a computer that was just completely dogged with spyware. I encountered the same problem; spyware kept reinfecting the system repeatedly even after a full scan, reboot, full scan, reboot, repeat ad nauseum.
I switched to Spyware Doctor which cleaned it all up in one pass. I've since used nothing but Spyware Doctor for all my spyware issues.
Telecos and Cable companies are making money hand over fist by controlling the upload bandwidth. It's why the USA is 16th in broadband usage despite being considered the most powerful country in the world. The more companies give out upload bandwidth at consumer prices, the more they lose the control over the ability to charge 400$ a month for a meager 1.5mbps T1 line to a content provider while customers can get 40$ cable network with up to 5mbps download. Until now, companies could appease their customers with wonderful download bandwidth for $15-40$ a month and completely throttle the upload since most consumers want to download stuff faster. This makes for millions of satisfied, paying customers while forcing anyone actually wanting to provide that content to have to buy expensive prices for upload from the controlling telecos and cable companies.
VoIP, however, suddenly can't be delivered effectively over a throttled upload line which puts the telecos and the cable companies into a bind. How to deliver what their customers want without giving up control? What will happen their their revenues when content providers can suddenly skip the overpriced upload packages and just use a cheap consumer line that now provides all the bandwidth they need. Since it's a catch 22, they are pre-emptively trying to secure their future revenues with blather about 2 tiered Internet, FUD about Internet overload and big companies like Yahoo and Google making tons of money over their lines "without paying for it".
I look forward to a day when the MPAA and the RIAA store everything on their own servers and I simply need to pay a license fee to have access to my music and movies anytime and anywhere (car, home, office, beach, Mars) without having to deal with any physical media at all.
Personally, I get tired of dealing with records, tapes, CDs, DVDs and the cycle of upgrading, the frustration of finding my favorite album scratched and unplayable or my kids tear it up or the dog pees on it or the latest format comes out and everything I have now sounds or looks like crap. Heck, make it a re-occuring license fee so they aren't incentivized to purposely build in self-deprecation to spur new sales of media formats and player hardware.
I personally don't care about the physical media, I don't get my jollies buying, owning and setting up hardware, I don't need to have a room devoted to wall-to-wall CD shelves to impress my friends a couple times a year at my massive collection.
I just want to hear my music and occasionally watch a movie when and where I want.
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I see what you're saying and definitely would be suspectful of a rating that included speed and energy consumption all rolled into a single number.
:)
I see this as another important rating to be used simply to evaluate a chip based purely on energy consumption. It should also be a good motivator for chip makers who haven't concerned themselves with energy consumption when their chip suddenly is viewed unfavorable when compared to more energy efficient yet equal performing chips from rivals.
Most IT purchasers are going to understand speed and energy are separate, often opposing numbers just like most understand a semi will have a lower gas mileage than a car. Even with far better gas mileage you still wouldn't buy a car for freight hauling nor would you buy a semi for picking kids up from school, taking kids to soccer, grocery shopping and driving to Wal-mart to stand in line at midnight for the latest great Halo game for your kids.
I'm an independent game developer building a non-violent family game MMO service with a game client that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Supporting all flavors of Windows all the way back to Windows 95 is rather trivial; there's one binary build of the application I have to distribute and support for all flavors of Windows users.
Supporting Mac is a little less trivial but still relatively doable with a little extra effort.
Supporting Linux, however, is quite challenging. First there's the sheer number of different distributions all running a different version of the kernel, different and even modified library versions. You can't simply say "we support Linux" with any real confidence.
Second, there's no guarantee of any sort of backwards compatibility with Linux. What you finally get working today will likely stop working on the next major release of a given distribution. Most distributions change every 6 months. You know when you get things working on Windows, it will work on nearly all Windows platforms past, present and future. In Linux, it's a constant deluge of re-fixing things over and over and over.
Third, everything is customized on Linux. It's part of its philosophy which is fine except when it comes to trying to support a commercial 3rd party product. The average consumer doesn't want the solution to their problem to be compiling source code to get your application to work on their system nor is that a feasible or economical way of supporting 1000s of customers.
If Linux really wants to become mainstream, it's going to need to greatly improve 3rd party support, distribution and start standardizing things like desktop shortcuts, menus and installation process.
Interesting and thought provoking. Nice post!
Nice post. Wish I had mod points. :)
I think what is commonly pointed at as male bias against females is really just biology.
Males are naturally aggressive, looking for whatever advantage they can to get the upper-hand and conquer.
Woman are naturally passive, looking to nurture and keep the peace, often times at their own personal expense.
One style is no better or worse than the other.
Women entering any competitive environment need to realize that if they feel there is a bias against them it is because they allow there to be one not because they are being singled out and discriminated against as women.
Men treat all competitors equally; if they think they can dominate you then they will try to dominate. If they don't think they can dominate you, then they give you respect and work with you in a partnership. Unfortunately for women, navigating this kind of environment is often counter to their natural biology and inclinations so the common outcome is that women make easy targets to be competitively dominated. They aren't being singled out for being women; men treat other men the same.
On the flip side, men need to realize that most women don't enter a competitive environment with the same goals of domination and aggression like men do. Men assume that women compete just like men; to dominate and conquer their opponents. Men will often do things out of ego or to assert their authority regardless if that's beneficial for the task at hand whereas women work out of good faith and with the belief that everything they do is for the good of the group rather than the good of themselves.
Instead of pointing fingers and calling foul on one gender or the other, we need to start understanding and accepting the differences and motivations that influence each gender's actions.
My guess is "fair use exception" revenue generation is largely a result of websites using other people's content to generate ad revenue. Without fair use exceptions, 80% of the Internet "content" would disappear. When our economy gets past websites and Internet "companies" relying on a business model of profiting from the aggregation of other people's original efforts, I'm betting revenue generated from "fair use exceptions" will drop accordingly.
An economy can only sustain itself so long from re-packaging other people's work before it runs out of gas. Rewarding original creation is what is needed more.
White paper design proposals should only be given limited patent protection with the requirement of a fully functional, revenuing generating implementation completed within a limited time frame before being granted full patent rights, protection and legal authority to sue for infringement. That would eliminate the patent trolls.
Trivial/obvious patents are a bit more difficult since many things seem obvious or trivial after the fact.
As a developer and upcoming business entrepreneur, patents are an area I'm forced to consider and become familiar with. I realize I'm not saying anything new, but, I like to think out loud and hear what others have to say when I'm learning a new area. :)
1. Patents seem to have turned from being a reward, incentive or recognition for inventors and innovation to being a bludgeoning weapon for business. In many ways, the patent system seems to be used as a legalized method to facilitate anti-competitive practices. What better way to bar startups from becoming a threat than to mire them in litigation right from the start.
2. The only groups that seem to consistently profit from the patent system are lawyers and the USPTO.
3. It seems the patent system can never be run properly when the government agency running it is doing so for profit. The USPTO has great incentive to grant patents as quickly as possible to increase the money coming into the agency. Missing a few obvious patents here and prior art there doesn't seem to be a high priority.
4. It's bothersome to me that the system allows patent trolls to profit; filing for patents they have no intention of developing but waiting in the grass like a snake to pounce on others who come along. It feels like one requirement for filing a patent is to demonstrate not only a working version at the time of filing but also to not be granted full protection and legalization to bludgeon others until you're actually using the patent for real business. Trademarks work in that fashion.
With US ISPs gouging service providers 400$ a month per 1.5mbit of upstream bandwidth, US consumer upstream broadband will continue to be crappy until the ISPs find a way to give regular customers cheap access to better upstream without losing their ability to charge ridiculous prices to service providers for the same upstream access.
The real obstacles with developing a commercial game on Linux isn't the performance or technicalities of developing the game like it was years ago; it's distribution and support.
Linux has plenty of horsepower and driver support these days to run even the most demanding 3D games and the development platform is consistent enough with Windows to make porting issues or cross-platform development a manageable, almost transparent task.
The big obstacle is distributing and supporting a game for Linux. For a third party developer such as a commercial game developer, packaging and releasing a game for Windows is a relatively easy, standardized task. A commercial developer knows that once they develop the game for Windows it's going to work as expected on the greater majority of consumer Windows machines in existence; even those running older versions of Windows and most likely will run on future versions of Windows. The commercial game developer generally does not have to worry about new hardware coming not working because of lack of drivers or new releases of the Windows OS coming out every 6 months that causes their product to stop functioning and needing fixed constantly. The commercial game developer doesn't have to be concerned with what other Windows developers are doing and whether changes going on in another area of the OS or applications being developed are going to effect their game development. Furthermore, the commercial game developer doesn't really have to spend extra effort dealing with multiple versions of Windows; for the most part Windows is Windows.
Contrast this with Linux, where there are literally dozens of recognizable distributions, none of which have an appreciable majority marketshare and many of which change dramatically every few months. Trying to maintain a game and keep it working from one version to the next of a single distribution is a sizeable task; trying to do that for dozens of distributions becomes prohibitive which is what a commercial game developer would have to do if they truly intended to support their game properly. And after all this effort, what would the effective sales increase of their game really be? The economics of properly distributing and supporting a game just isn't worth it.
If Linux really wants to be a practical target for commercial game development, it needs to bolster itself in the areas of distribution, support and platform compatibility stability. This will in turn not only make it more feasible for commercial game developers to consider targeting Linux as a valuable platform but improving these same factors would apply to all application developers and increase marketshare and commercial viability of Linux. If that is the desired effect, of course.
If they are those big tapes used by mainframes, they are probably hanging on the wall at someone's house between stolen "Watch For Ice On Bridge" sign and the "Do Not Enter" sign. To impress chicks of course. :)
As a game developer creating a cross-platform game client that can run on Windows, Mac and Linux, I am definitely interested in the number of "Linux Users" as I evaluate cost of development targeting and supporting Linux and the expected number of players I will get from that effort. What I am personally not as interested in are the number of "Uses of Linux"; however, if I were a tools, library or utility developer I would probably definitely be interested in the total amount of "Uses of Linux" when considering whether to spend my development time targeting that platform.
For me personally, the number of web servers or embedded devices using Linux doesn't mean anything. My car's navigation system must run some sort of operating system, however, I wouldn't consider myself a User of that OS though it certainly is a Use of that OS (whatever it might be). I didn't purposely choose my Nav system because it ran a particular OS, it simply came with whatever it came with and I use it just like I would use a phone or a washer or refrigerator with some embedded OS.
I would feel the data would be useful if broken down into at least two broad categories:
1. All uses of Linux.
2. Users who knowingly and purposely choose Linux as their OS of choice. Presumably this would be a subset of data from #1 and would useful for consumer application developers.
Anyone know if Verizon FiOS is going to ever be available in Cedar Park, TX? Or something equivalent from AT&T/SWB?
I got into game development in 1995, a little over a year after I graduated from my university with a degree in COBOL and mainframe development. The company that hired me developed in C++, of which I didn't even have enough knowledge of to even carry a 5 minute conversation about, much less develop useful code for the company.
What I *did* have was a demonstrated passion for wanting to work in the gaming industry. I had spent several months prior doing nothing but programming in C after work learning basic game development concepts (at that time it was VGA DOS programming in mode 13h, mode X) from books such as LaMothe's "Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus".
I practically had to beg the recruiter to even turn my name in. When I showed up for my interview, I had created a little game demo. I was later told it was my passion and demo that really got me the job; they felt I could easily learn the technical skills along the way to do my job.
Over the years, I realize how true this is; I've personally hired a few candidates who had very little programming experience but a huge demonstrated passion for wanting to do the job and they've almost always turned out to be really great developers. People passionate about what they are doing can be trained new skills.
Non-violent games do exist such as Dance Dance Revolution, The Sims; but, these games are the exception not the norm. Violence in games is so pervasive that even seemingly non-violent games like Animal Crossing or Paper Mario include eliminates of warfare as their core gameplay.
It's not enough to just get your game to run for Windows, Mac and Linux and build a CD with an installer for all three platforms. If that's all it took, developers would do it.
When you ship a product for a platform, the hidden cost most players don't see or think about is the cost, time and effort supporting that platform. Spending an extra $20,000 to gain an extra $10,000 doesn't make any sense.
The impracticality of supporting Linux is why developers don't develop their game to also work on Linux even when it's technically possible because the costs of supporting Linux far out-weigh the return on investment of doing so.
Agree and good comparison! Making games for Linux now is like what making games for DOS was years ago. Anyone who was (un)lucky enough to work tech support for a game company in the late 80s and early 90s probably have a lot of fun stories to tell.
Gaming companies don't develop for Linux because it's not pratical to support properly.
There are too many Linux distributions, none of which have a big enough of the Linux market to be considered the de facto standard Linux distribution to develop for and build a customer service department to support.
Game applications are the most strenous and sensitive to the capabilities of the platform. Windows is pretty standard with DirectX. On Linux you don't know what's going to work; the very philosophy of choice with Linux translates to everyone's machine is just different enough in a way that makes developing a game for Linux a real frustration.
Finally, once you manage to get things working on a couple distributions, a new release comes out that invalidates your existing application. And in another 6 months another release of Linux is going to come out and invalidate your work again. A developer has a hard time keeping his game working under one distribution from one version to the next. Now multiply that by 10-20 for the most popular Linux platforms each releasing new versions every 6 months.
Shipping source code to your customers and expecting them to build it every time they upgrade their machine or switch distributions isn't a solution.
Combine the constant, frequent changes that aren't guaranteed to be backwards compatible like the Windows platform provides with the sheer number of distributions of Linux you would have to support to make it worthwhile, and then consider that all this effort just to support one platform might translate to an extra 5% sales and you have your reason why game companies don't develop for Linux.
Linux is a great platform to develop for; it's a terrible platform to support. This is what's holding Linux back from becoming truly mainstream. It has nothing to do with features or hardware support or useability. If a company can't reasonably develop and SUPPORT their applications for a platform and expect a reasonable amount of sales while doing so then it's not worth doing it when you can simply focus on another platform (Windows) that is much easier to support and maintain and hits 90% of your whole market in the first place.
I apologize for the extremely poor grammar and bad spelling above. Poetic, I reckon, rushing a response about E3 without reviewing it while trying to do other things.
E3 used to be a fun public event. This made it as much of a marketing/advertising tool as a publishing and development tools for making new deals. A few years ago, they decided to make E3 off limits to the general public and only available to developers and the media. I'm not surprised companies no longer decided the expensive booths was no longer worth the time, effort and development disruptions. If you've ever worked inside a game company, often times you lose one or two months out of the year just working on throwaway demos to play at E3 and is often some of the worst crunch and chaotic times only reivaled by the emminent release of a new product.
Depending on how the MMO was built, generally the number of players in a zone doesn't necessarily impact an individual player's computer; it's the number of players nearby that impact the player's individual computer. Most MMO developers call this an "update radius" or something similar. That's how an MMO is able to support 1000s of players connected at once withou overloading either the servers or the players.
In UO or SWG, for instance, the only players or objects you know about are the ones that are relatively nearby. When those players get to a certain distance, your game client "forgets" all about them. That basically means the server stops transmitting updates for players (and objects) that aren't nearby you. So a zone could theoretically have a million players (if the server can handle it) in it, but, the only players and objects your game client has to deal with would be those handful of players nearby you. UO, for instance, had a limit of around 700 players per zone at which point it would start telestorming (teleporting players to other zones) random players to keep the zone population down to a level the servers at the time (were talking server machines built in 1996-1997) could handle.
Now, once the number of players and objects do impact your game client it's usually a number of factors that multiple cores would not necessarily solve unless the developers specifically designed the game from the ground up to be threaded or distributed in some fashion. The three main sources of MMO "lag" are:
1. Graphics rendering lag
2. File loading lag (if you are playing a game that dynamically loads textures as needed due to the impossibility of loading all 4gig worth of data at once)
3. Network lag from so much bandwidth being transmitted to you by the server. You know what happens when a little web server gets slashdotted? Well, reverse that and now imagine your game client is the web server and the game server is trying to send you updates for 1000s of players and objects all moving around in your vicinity all at once.
Graphics lag is mostly to do with your graphics card, so having multiple cores is probably not going to have a lot of impact on that. File and networking could possibly benefit from multiple cores if the developers handled the synchronization properly. That is no small feat though and with the sheer complexity an MMO already brings to the table, this would be a tipping point of complexity.
So personally, I could see where two cores would be great. With physics becoming more of a game feature, perhaps even 4 might provide some benefit but I doubt that much benefit and developers aren't going to develop something requiring hardware that only a small niche group of consumers are going to even have. The time and effort fully utilizing even four cores would be very costly and time consuming and error-prone (thread errors are the worst errors to debug and fix) and then you still have to have your game work on what a typical consumer's machine is going to be any way so a developer is still going to have to make it all work on a single CPU machine making all that effort basically wasted for all but bells and whistles special effects.
I tried Ad-aware a couple years ago on a computer that was just completely dogged with spyware. I encountered the same problem; spyware kept reinfecting the system repeatedly even after a full scan, reboot, full scan, reboot, repeat ad nauseum.
I switched to Spyware Doctor which cleaned it all up in one pass. I've since used nothing but Spyware Doctor for all my spyware issues.
Telecos and Cable companies are making money hand over fist by controlling the upload bandwidth. It's why the USA is 16th in broadband usage despite being considered the most powerful country in the world. The more companies give out upload bandwidth at consumer prices, the more they lose the control over the ability to charge 400$ a month for a meager 1.5mbps T1 line to a content provider while customers can get 40$ cable network with up to 5mbps download. Until now, companies could appease their customers with wonderful download bandwidth for $15-40$ a month and completely throttle the upload since most consumers want to download stuff faster. This makes for millions of satisfied, paying customers while forcing anyone actually wanting to provide that content to have to buy expensive prices for upload from the controlling telecos and cable companies.
VoIP, however, suddenly can't be delivered effectively over a throttled upload line which puts the telecos and the cable companies into a bind. How to deliver what their customers want without giving up control? What will happen their their revenues when content providers can suddenly skip the overpriced upload packages and just use a cheap consumer line that now provides all the bandwidth they need. Since it's a catch 22, they are pre-emptively trying to secure their future revenues with blather about 2 tiered Internet, FUD about Internet overload and big companies like Yahoo and Google making tons of money over their lines "without paying for it".
Anyone know when Verizon FiOS is supposed to be made available in Cedar Park/Austin, TX?
I look forward to a day when the MPAA and the RIAA store everything on their own servers and I simply need to pay a license fee to have access to my music and movies anytime and anywhere (car, home, office, beach, Mars) without having to deal with any physical media at all.
Personally, I get tired of dealing with records, tapes, CDs, DVDs and the cycle of upgrading, the frustration of finding my favorite album scratched and unplayable or my kids tear it up or the dog pees on it or the latest format comes out and everything I have now sounds or looks like crap. Heck, make it a re-occuring license fee so they aren't incentivized to purposely build in self-deprecation to spur new sales of media formats and player hardware.
I personally don't care about the physical media, I don't get my jollies buying, owning and setting up hardware, I don't need to have a room devoted to wall-to-wall CD shelves to impress my friends a couple times a year at my massive collection.
I just want to hear my music and occasionally watch a movie when and where I want.