Actually, the power and cooling requirements might not be that bad. When the full-sized version of the 980 first appeared back in 2014, it came as a bit of a surprise. It wasn't, in some respects, the generational leap in terms of raw performance over its direct predecessor, the 780, that some had expected. But it was significantly cooler and more power efficient; startlingly so for what was, at the time, Nvidia's top-end card.
The official specs list the power requirement of the desktop-version card itself as 165W and recommend a PC with a PSU of 500W or higher. That compares with 250W for the card and 600W for the PSU for the 780 (which is where Nvidia's high end cards had been pitched for a couple of generations previously).
My 980 does have a reasonably sized fan on it, but even under heavy load (for instance, in The Witcher 3, which is a real hardware stress-test) that fan rarely operates at full speed. I can't find specs on the official site yet, but by the sound of things, they've managed to get those power and cooling requirements down even further for the notebook version.
Of course, the basic 980 is no longer the top-end desktop card. Nvidia's two higher-end offerings, the (ludicrously priced) Titan and the (significantly more attractive) 980ti are both listed as having a 250W power requirement. Some of AMD's top end cards, meanwhile, more or less require that you hook them up to their own power-plant (coal, gas or nuclear is fine), while seating them at the bottom of a frozen Antarctic lake.
Having looked through this and the other responses, it does seem that "resources (particularly metals/minerals)" is the real advantage to a planetary colony.
Given the difficulties of getting to Mars, the fact that Mars is barely any more suited to habitation than space and the fact that trips to and from Mars need to deal with the planet's gravity well... why do we assume that the first off-Earth permanent habitation would necessarily need to be on Mars, or indeed on any other planet?
If we want a permanent off-world habitat, would it not be more worthwhile to devote energy to exploring the possibility of permanently-habitable, (near) self-sustaining space stations? These could be closer to Earth , would presumably have rather better access to solar power and journeys to and from Earth would only need to deal with a single planetary gravity well. They would have their own challenges; dealing with radiation and with the effects of zero-gravity on the human body in the longer term, but those don't instinctively feel as difficult as some of the problems highlighted in TFA. Other challenges, such as those around hydroponics and recycling, might not be that different from those associated with a settlement on Mars.
Or is there a good reason why this is in fact more difficult than Mars-colonisation which I've just overlooked?
It can be both. I've worked in the aviation field and come across quite a few of the issues associated with this.
There are now some seriously busy ATC sectors around the globe; the ones around New York and London are probably the busiest, but there are plenty of others. The problem's a growing one; while global aviation demand fell during the early years of the recession, it is spiking back sharply now and looks set to continue to grow.
Without the IT systems that have already been brought in, management of some of the throughput rates in those very busy sectors today would be pretty much impossible. Going forward, more advanced systems are going to be needed to help manage down the potential for human error as things get very difficult indeed; take a look at London's airspace systems (with traffic flows from Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, London City and Southend all requiring management to maintain both throughputs and separations.
The risk comes from deskilling. No automation system is perfect and, in a safety critical sector like aviation, you need to be able to avoid compromising safety when systems fail. That might not require maintaining those throughput rates (realistically, you are going to accept flight delays and cancellations when you get a major IT failure), but it does involve being able to get aircraft that are in the air onto the ground safely.
To date, these issues have been managed. A major computer failure in the UK earlier this year was managed safely. But as you reduce the number of operators and, in many cases, shift their role to the management of IT systems rather than the management of air traffic, you have to face a real concern about how you keep the skills required to cope when things go wrong.
It's a tough one. But the industry is aware of it. Genuine cost-stripping is very rare in the aviation industry; it has a safety culture like nothing else I've ever seen.
I wasn't implying that the PS3 was a failure. But it wasn't as big a success as it could have been. As console wars go, the seventh generation was a damned close run thing (as demonstrated by your link), and it was much more complicated than the numbers imply.
The Wii "won" the start of the cycle, with a massive sales lead at the 2-year point. But it ran out of steam in the late cycle and Nintendo fell to its first annual losses in the company's history during the closing years of the cycle. Its later years were characterized by a fairly miserable attach rate for games as well - a lot of those consoles sold early on just sat in cupboards neglected after a year or two.
The 360 more or less "won" the middle years, when it closed a lot of ground on the Wii and was comfortably ahead of the PS3 at the mid-point of the cycle. MS were investing a lot of money in exclusive titles at that point and the 360 had a (generally deserved) reputation as the best system for cross-platform gaming.
And the PS3 basically "won" the end-game, when its sales pulled ahead of the 360's, buoyed by a much stronger late line-up of exclusives (MS seemed to lose interest in supporting the 360 once the Kinect wave subsided).
But Sony's performance must have been a disappointment for the company. They had been the "must own" console of the previous cycle (a large portion of Xbox and Gamecube owners also owned a PS2) and they never quite re-took that position. There were certainly signs and statements from Sony during the first half of the PS3's life that indicated it was performing below expectations.
Following up a mega-successful console has historically proved difficult. The SNES dominated its generation, but Nintendo fumbled the successor. The Nintendo DS sold by the bucketloads and yet, despite a massive sales push (and the company moving to the hardware-at-a-loss model for the first time ever), the 3DS has never really broken beyond the kind of sales that the (successful, but to a lesser degree) PSP seemed to manage.
My original post a few layers back was basically about the inability of all three of the major console manufacturers to turn a commanding position in one console cycle into an equally commanding one in the next. There are strong signs that in this particular market, success breeds arrogance and complacency. I don't think any of the responses have refuted that.
Nah, I just checked and they still seem to be doing it for hardware, at least. The release gaps between Japan and the West on the New 3DS were several months.
That's a stark contrast with Sony's strategy. Despite being a Japanese company, they released the PS4 in the US and Europe months before the Japanese release. They could see that the Japanese home-console market isn't really worth a gnat's fart these days.
Funny, really, when MS launched the Xbox 360, they threw a huge amount of effort into breaking into Japan. Their Japanese teams were heavily involved in the design of the console and the controller. They pumped a fortune into Japanese games development, funding exclusives such as Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, while paying for (time-limited) exclusive ports of otaku-focussed arcade titles like Idolm@ster and the Cave bullet-hell shooters. It failed. They didn't crack Japan. But the 360 still went on to be a successful console. This time around, neither MS nor Sony has really bothered with Japan.
In Nintendo's defence with the New 3DS, I guess the handheld market is a bit different. That's in decline in the West, squeezed between home console, PC and mobile gaming, but is still fairly resilient in Japan (even the Vita's doing quite well there now).
The PS2 managed something like 4 times the Xbox's installed base. Had Sony managed to replicate that kind of ratio in the PS3/360 generation, I suspect MS would have given up and gone home. Certainly, things were poor enough for MS in the PS2/Xbox generation that smaller third party developers often went PS2-exclusive even though they didn't have an exclusivity agreement with Sony; it just wasn't worth the costs of pointing to the Xbox or Gamecube.
And yes, the PS2 was slightly more expensive than the Xbox, while also being a bit harder to develop for. But the PS3 represented a significant escalation in both respects; the price was pretty eye-watering when it launched, compared to previous console launches. Hell, the 360 and even, to some extent, the Wii were pricey compared to past generations, but the PS3 was on another level entirely.
A simpler, cheaper PS3, without the (in retrospect reckless) gamble on Cell architecture might have resulted in a console generation that played out very differently.
The late 80s and early 90s are Nintendo's comfort zone. They absolutely dominated the console gaming scene at the time. Then they made the decision to jerk the industry around with the N64's specs (opting for cartridges over a CD drive at a late stage in the process) and handed most of the third party developer ecosystem, and with them market share dominance, to Sony.
Funny, really, how every time it looks like a console manufacturer might have the console wars "won", they go and shoot themselves in the collective foot. Nintendo did it with the N64 hardware (and with general unpleasantness to third parties). Sony had the competition on the ropes in the PS2 cycle, but then went for a PS3 design which was over-priced and hard to develop for, allowing Microsoft to leap-frog them. Then Microsoft, on the verge of locking up the US as "their territory" and fighting Sony to a stalemate in Europe, goes on to commit a series of entirely unforced errors during the development of the Xbox One. Sony's back ahead these days, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time now until it over-reaches itself.
And yes, don't expect to see any particular changes in direction from Nintendo under its new leadership. What's really sad is that Iwata began talking last year about potentially ending region-locking on future Nintendo consoles, which would mean it would be effectively dead across the industry. What little we know about Kimishima from his time at Nintendo of America would imply that he is one of region locking's biggest defenders, so I don't think we can expect any Glasnost or Perestroika on that front now.
It's fairly rare for an HR director to step up to CEO level. In a lot of companies, the HR director isn't even on the board.
I'm only guessing here, really, but it looks as though he was more or less just filling time as HR director, possibly while being groomed as a potential successor. Even though nobody saw Iwata's death coming, there was speculation that another year of poor results could have led to calls for him to stand down, so I'm sure there was succession planning going on.
His time as the head of Nintendo of America (predecessor to Reggie Fils-Aime) is probably more notable. That's a fairly meaty job. It's also one he didn't do particularly well in some respects; Nintendo's US market-share generally declined during his tenure.
He doesn't seem to have a particularly high public profile. From what little I've been able to gleam, he's very conservative in his approach. Don't expect Nintendo to go embracing any radical ideas, or even many sensible modernisations, under his tenure. This is a conservative appointment by a conservative company based in the most conservative city of a country whose business practices tend to default to conservative. The message that this appointment sends is about a commitment to business as usual.
There's a chance that Kimishima's tenure might be quite a short one. If the NX doesn't take off (and the odds are against it - mid-cycle console launches have a poor history) and Nintendo doesn't protect or grow other areas of its business (handheld and mobile respectively), then shareholders are likely to look to see him replaced with somebody a bit more radical.
That's not to say there's never been good D&D storytelling - there are, I'm sure, any number of tabletop Dungeon Masters who have managed to make the setting shine. The Baldur's Gate computer games managed to tell a pretty good story in the Forgotten Realms setting, but they had the benefit of having some phenomenally talented people work on them.
For somebody starting out to create a Hollywood blockbuster, there are just more promising places to start than D&D.
My biggest frustration in working with engineers (I'm British and we don't have "liberal arts majors", but if we did, I would be one) is a tendency among many of them to regard anything outside of their own field as "easy" - including other technical specialisms.
I spent a few years of work managing a complicated project that involved specialists from across a good few disciplines; mainly civil engineering, vehicle engine design and transport congestion modelling. One of the main challenges was to keep the various specialists from each other's throats, because of a marked trend on the part of each team towards regarding themselves as the people with the "real job" and everybody else as time-wasters.
You see the same here on Slashdot. A good portion of users here - perhaps not a majority, but maybe close to one - regard anything that is not a coding job as a waste of space. Reality check; people management is difficult, project management is difficult, business planning is difficult, finance is difficult and, yes, even human resources is difficult.
And the problem here is one of supply and demand. Or rather, that the supply of people who want to work in the games industry vastly outstrips demand for developers. So developers get treated like disposable assets.
The indie gaming scene is not a wonderful, exciting alternative. There are a handful of genuinely talented small studios, most of whom have been around since before the start of the present indie boom, and a lot of millennial narcissists burning through either mommy and daddy's savings or a pile of kickstarter funds they have no ability to manage. As they do so, for every hour they spend developing, they spend three in reddit and twitter bitch fights. That Gamergate shitspolosion? It came from the indie scene and mostly stayed in the indie scene (none of the established developers wanted to be anywhere near it). A product, on both sides, of the rampant immaturity and narcissism that characterise the indie gaming subculture.
And while all that was going on, AAA gaming was getting interesting again. Shadow of Mordor, Alien: Isolation, Bloodborne, Witcher 3, Metal Gear Solid 5... all of those are well executed games, with high production values and, crucially, more creativity and new ideas than anything that's come out of the indie scene over the same period. Outside of Call of Duty and Battlefield, the days of the 6-hour corridor shooter are basically over in AAA gaming.
The issues with working practices at some AAA studios are real, but indie gaming isn't the solution. It's just a path to impoverished parents and ripped-off kickstarter backers. Ultimately, we don't need so many people working in the video games industry. Until we stop pushing people into it as a career and start giving a reality check to teenagers who want to make games for a living because they really enjoy playing them, the problem for those working in the industry won't go away.
Shovelware? Try the pseudo-8-bit-retro-sprite-art-roguelike-zombie-crafting-survival games that spam the Steam front page daily and seem to make up 75% of the Humble Bundles (with most of the remainder being elderly franchise titles pushed out by a mainstream publisher, usually as promotion for a new entry in said franchise which will go nowhere near such a bundle.
And the major studios are not failing, for the most part, to produce non-Windows PC games because of a lack of experienced developers. They are refusing to produce them because almost everybody who tries finds that the returns don't justify it. The decisions over which platforms to port a commercial game to are not made by coders, but by businessmen.
The indie scene these days increasingly looks like a toxic swamp filled with egomaniacs who don't have the discipline to pay their dues working for an established studio, but who want to grab some kickstarter funds to put out their oh-so-unique special artistic vision, which either fails before it gets to release, produces a dull piece of hipster garbage of no interest to anybody outside of a very niche community, or, more often, produces yet another pseudo-8-bit-retro-sprite-art-roguelike-zombie-crafting-survival game.
And most Humble Bundles are filled with indie shovelware or commercial games whose sales-potential has long since slipped into irrelevance on Steam/Origin. They are not a proxy for the "proper" commercial games market.
Pretty much. They've also more or less completely rebuilt Windows Update on Win7 and Vista machines. The new version of Windows Update is doing all kinds of new activities, some of which includes nasty telemetry stuff, all of which involves a huge amount of hard drive churn every time you boot up. If you have an SSD, it should get through this in a couple of minutes. Users with mechanical drives have been reporting up to 40 minutes of constant disk churn in some cases (and reports of BSODs for some users during this process as well).
On the XB-One, you can get generally larger external drives than you can with the 2.5" internal drives you use with the PS4. You also don't need to open up the console to perform the drive-swap (though I've done said swap and it is pretty painless).
On the other hand, that external drive is another unsightly box taking up space under your TV and will likely need external power, meaning it is yet another power-cable and socket you need to fit into the viper's nest behind your TV.
There have been some pretty big 30+ gig PC games over the last few months. I can't check exact sizes easily from here, but Witcher 3, GTA5, Metal Gear Solid 5 and Titanfall all have fairly vast install-footprints. As developers stop cross-developing for the Xbox 360, which is the last platform around limited to DVDs for its physical media, 30+ gig installs are only going to become more common on PC.
Falcon are an option, but are US based which would mean getting the thing shipped transatlantic. I'm currently favouring a UK-based firm called Novatech, who massively outcompete Alienware on price. Won't be buying for 6-9 months, though (barring sudden hardware failures), so plenty can change in that time.
I've had an Alienware PC before. My current machine is a self-build, but the two before it came from Alienware. They've historically had a lot of strengths; the build-quality on their desktops is excellent, the cases are a joy to work in, they don't (unlike Dell-proper) load the machines with crudware, you get proper OS reinstall media and there is a degree of reassurance from having the backing of a major player like Dell behind the company you're handing over several thousand dollars to.
That said, they've been on a downward trajectory for a while, with their margins (always considerable) hitting stratospheric levels and the latest kit often taking a long time to appear as options on their builds. I'm thinking of replacing my current PC (well, case, PSU, motherboard, CPU, RAM, and probably graphics card - my storage and optical drives are fine) in 6-9 months time, once the Nvidia 1000-series (or whatever they call it) is available and was looking at the Alienware site just a couple of nights ago to size them up.
But there's absolutely no way I could justify buying from them right now. Even leaving aside the base prices, there are some serious holes in their offering. They didn't, when I checked less than a week ago, have the Nvidia 980Ti as an option on graphics cards. On lots of other components - CPU in particular - they would tend to offer something not-quite-good-enough as part of the base package and then charge a huge margin on the optional upgrade.
We have a fairly competitive market for high-end components and pre-built systems here in the UK. With half an hour's shopping around, I was able to find reputable places I could get equivalent or better pre-built systems than those Alienware was selling for almost 1,000GBP less than Alienware was asking.
I've been using water-cooled home desktops for around 6 years now and I've never had so much as a single drop of water escape from them. There are lots of myths about water-cooled PCs; that they leak, that they don't travel well and so on. But if you put them together properly and exercise the normal care while carrying them that you would exercise when carrying any other piece of expensive electronic kit, they are absolutely fine.
There's some circumstantial evidence from a recent patent filing that the Nintendo NX may ditch the disk drive (and possibly all physical media). A patent-filing is by no means indicative of final intent. After all, Sony filed quite a few "always-online" type patents during the PS4's development but ended up not going down that direction. But it's a sign that Nintendo is at least considering it.
This is an area where there's a huge disadvantage to being the first mover. As MS learned in the run up to the Xbox One's launch, having an always-online download-focussed/only console when your competitor is advancing a more traditional offering can look fairly suicidal. But once one of the major parties has made the move, don't be surprised if the others follow.
Re:Sink it into the ground
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How To Fix Twitter
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· Score: 4, Informative
A couple of years ago, I was involved in the recruitment of somebody for a high-profile and politically sensitive job. Twitter was the number-one means by which candidates managed to exclude themselves. Bear in mind we're talking here about late-career professionals with, at the least, six-figure salaries, not about teenagers.
The nature of the job meant that anybody who had demonstrated poor judgement in public communications could be considered for it (the press would have torn them to shreds). Surprise, surprise, almost everybody who had used twitter had demonstrated (very) poor judgement at some point, usually on multiple occasions and sometimes over a span of several years.
The rapid-fire nature of twitter and the tight character limit encourage flamebait, knee-jerk responses and escalating incivility. It is the ultimate career-limitation tool and nobody who aspires to be regarded as "serious" should have a personal twitter account.
A friend's wife works as a recruitment consultant and tells similar stories; countless people whose angry twitter exchanges, viewable by the general public and posted with their real name, have created such an impression of poor judgement that employers don't want to touch them.
But nowhere that sells books, DVDs, music or anything else that isn't clothing or video games. Depends what you're after, really. Millennia is certainly better in the clothing niche than Florida or Altamonte, but not everybody just wants clothing.
Personally, I thought the point where they began their downwards slide was when they lost their FYE and the book store. At that point, it basically became an Apple Store, two Gamestops and a vast array of over-priced clothing and accessory stores. Millennia's better but is inexorably going the same direction. When I'm in Orlando these days (got a family place out there that we used to run as a rental business), I end up driving right up to Altamonte Mall for shopping (which is relatively civilised and has stores that non-hipster males might be interested in).
Parking at the Prime Outlets is almost impossible now, for around 10 months of the year (unless you feel like driving slowly in circles for half an hour first). To some degree they've become victims of their own success.
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Actually, the power and cooling requirements might not be that bad. When the full-sized version of the 980 first appeared back in 2014, it came as a bit of a surprise. It wasn't, in some respects, the generational leap in terms of raw performance over its direct predecessor, the 780, that some had expected. But it was significantly cooler and more power efficient; startlingly so for what was, at the time, Nvidia's top-end card.
The official specs list the power requirement of the desktop-version card itself as 165W and recommend a PC with a PSU of 500W or higher. That compares with 250W for the card and 600W for the PSU for the 780 (which is where Nvidia's high end cards had been pitched for a couple of generations previously).
My 980 does have a reasonably sized fan on it, but even under heavy load (for instance, in The Witcher 3, which is a real hardware stress-test) that fan rarely operates at full speed. I can't find specs on the official site yet, but by the sound of things, they've managed to get those power and cooling requirements down even further for the notebook version.
Of course, the basic 980 is no longer the top-end desktop card. Nvidia's two higher-end offerings, the (ludicrously priced) Titan and the (significantly more attractive) 980ti are both listed as having a 250W power requirement. Some of AMD's top end cards, meanwhile, more or less require that you hook them up to their own power-plant (coal, gas or nuclear is fine), while seating them at the bottom of a frozen Antarctic lake.
Having looked through this and the other responses, it does seem that "resources (particularly metals/minerals)" is the real advantage to a planetary colony.
Genuine question...
Given the difficulties of getting to Mars, the fact that Mars is barely any more suited to habitation than space and the fact that trips to and from Mars need to deal with the planet's gravity well... why do we assume that the first off-Earth permanent habitation would necessarily need to be on Mars, or indeed on any other planet?
If we want a permanent off-world habitat, would it not be more worthwhile to devote energy to exploring the possibility of permanently-habitable, (near) self-sustaining space stations? These could be closer to Earth , would presumably have rather better access to solar power and journeys to and from Earth would only need to deal with a single planetary gravity well. They would have their own challenges; dealing with radiation and with the effects of zero-gravity on the human body in the longer term, but those don't instinctively feel as difficult as some of the problems highlighted in TFA. Other challenges, such as those around hydroponics and recycling, might not be that different from those associated with a settlement on Mars.
Or is there a good reason why this is in fact more difficult than Mars-colonisation which I've just overlooked?
It can be both. I've worked in the aviation field and come across quite a few of the issues associated with this.
There are now some seriously busy ATC sectors around the globe; the ones around New York and London are probably the busiest, but there are plenty of others. The problem's a growing one; while global aviation demand fell during the early years of the recession, it is spiking back sharply now and looks set to continue to grow.
Without the IT systems that have already been brought in, management of some of the throughput rates in those very busy sectors today would be pretty much impossible. Going forward, more advanced systems are going to be needed to help manage down the potential for human error as things get very difficult indeed; take a look at London's airspace systems (with traffic flows from Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, London City and Southend all requiring management to maintain both throughputs and separations.
The risk comes from deskilling. No automation system is perfect and, in a safety critical sector like aviation, you need to be able to avoid compromising safety when systems fail. That might not require maintaining those throughput rates (realistically, you are going to accept flight delays and cancellations when you get a major IT failure), but it does involve being able to get aircraft that are in the air onto the ground safely.
To date, these issues have been managed. A major computer failure in the UK earlier this year was managed safely. But as you reduce the number of operators and, in many cases, shift their role to the management of IT systems rather than the management of air traffic, you have to face a real concern about how you keep the skills required to cope when things go wrong.
It's a tough one. But the industry is aware of it. Genuine cost-stripping is very rare in the aviation industry; it has a safety culture like nothing else I've ever seen.
I wasn't implying that the PS3 was a failure. But it wasn't as big a success as it could have been. As console wars go, the seventh generation was a damned close run thing (as demonstrated by your link), and it was much more complicated than the numbers imply.
The Wii "won" the start of the cycle, with a massive sales lead at the 2-year point. But it ran out of steam in the late cycle and Nintendo fell to its first annual losses in the company's history during the closing years of the cycle. Its later years were characterized by a fairly miserable attach rate for games as well - a lot of those consoles sold early on just sat in cupboards neglected after a year or two.
The 360 more or less "won" the middle years, when it closed a lot of ground on the Wii and was comfortably ahead of the PS3 at the mid-point of the cycle. MS were investing a lot of money in exclusive titles at that point and the 360 had a (generally deserved) reputation as the best system for cross-platform gaming.
And the PS3 basically "won" the end-game, when its sales pulled ahead of the 360's, buoyed by a much stronger late line-up of exclusives (MS seemed to lose interest in supporting the 360 once the Kinect wave subsided).
But Sony's performance must have been a disappointment for the company. They had been the "must own" console of the previous cycle (a large portion of Xbox and Gamecube owners also owned a PS2) and they never quite re-took that position. There were certainly signs and statements from Sony during the first half of the PS3's life that indicated it was performing below expectations.
Following up a mega-successful console has historically proved difficult. The SNES dominated its generation, but Nintendo fumbled the successor. The Nintendo DS sold by the bucketloads and yet, despite a massive sales push (and the company moving to the hardware-at-a-loss model for the first time ever), the 3DS has never really broken beyond the kind of sales that the (successful, but to a lesser degree) PSP seemed to manage.
My original post a few layers back was basically about the inability of all three of the major console manufacturers to turn a commanding position in one console cycle into an equally commanding one in the next. There are strong signs that in this particular market, success breeds arrogance and complacency. I don't think any of the responses have refuted that.
Nah, I just checked and they still seem to be doing it for hardware, at least. The release gaps between Japan and the West on the New 3DS were several months.
That's a stark contrast with Sony's strategy. Despite being a Japanese company, they released the PS4 in the US and Europe months before the Japanese release. They could see that the Japanese home-console market isn't really worth a gnat's fart these days.
Funny, really, when MS launched the Xbox 360, they threw a huge amount of effort into breaking into Japan. Their Japanese teams were heavily involved in the design of the console and the controller. They pumped a fortune into Japanese games development, funding exclusives such as Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, while paying for (time-limited) exclusive ports of otaku-focussed arcade titles like Idolm@ster and the Cave bullet-hell shooters. It failed. They didn't crack Japan. But the 360 still went on to be a successful console. This time around, neither MS nor Sony has really bothered with Japan.
In Nintendo's defence with the New 3DS, I guess the handheld market is a bit different. That's in decline in the West, squeezed between home console, PC and mobile gaming, but is still fairly resilient in Japan (even the Vita's doing quite well there now).
To an extent, yes, but...
The PS2 managed something like 4 times the Xbox's installed base. Had Sony managed to replicate that kind of ratio in the PS3/360 generation, I suspect MS would have given up and gone home. Certainly, things were poor enough for MS in the PS2/Xbox generation that smaller third party developers often went PS2-exclusive even though they didn't have an exclusivity agreement with Sony; it just wasn't worth the costs of pointing to the Xbox or Gamecube.
And yes, the PS2 was slightly more expensive than the Xbox, while also being a bit harder to develop for. But the PS3 represented a significant escalation in both respects; the price was pretty eye-watering when it launched, compared to previous console launches. Hell, the 360 and even, to some extent, the Wii were pricey compared to past generations, but the PS3 was on another level entirely.
A simpler, cheaper PS3, without the (in retrospect reckless) gamble on Cell architecture might have resulted in a console generation that played out very differently.
The late 80s and early 90s are Nintendo's comfort zone. They absolutely dominated the console gaming scene at the time. Then they made the decision to jerk the industry around with the N64's specs (opting for cartridges over a CD drive at a late stage in the process) and handed most of the third party developer ecosystem, and with them market share dominance, to Sony.
Funny, really, how every time it looks like a console manufacturer might have the console wars "won", they go and shoot themselves in the collective foot. Nintendo did it with the N64 hardware (and with general unpleasantness to third parties). Sony had the competition on the ropes in the PS2 cycle, but then went for a PS3 design which was over-priced and hard to develop for, allowing Microsoft to leap-frog them. Then Microsoft, on the verge of locking up the US as "their territory" and fighting Sony to a stalemate in Europe, goes on to commit a series of entirely unforced errors during the development of the Xbox One. Sony's back ahead these days, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time now until it over-reaches itself.
And yes, don't expect to see any particular changes in direction from Nintendo under its new leadership. What's really sad is that Iwata began talking last year about potentially ending region-locking on future Nintendo consoles, which would mean it would be effectively dead across the industry. What little we know about Kimishima from his time at Nintendo of America would imply that he is one of region locking's biggest defenders, so I don't think we can expect any Glasnost or Perestroika on that front now.
It's fairly rare for an HR director to step up to CEO level. In a lot of companies, the HR director isn't even on the board.
I'm only guessing here, really, but it looks as though he was more or less just filling time as HR director, possibly while being groomed as a potential successor. Even though nobody saw Iwata's death coming, there was speculation that another year of poor results could have led to calls for him to stand down, so I'm sure there was succession planning going on.
His time as the head of Nintendo of America (predecessor to Reggie Fils-Aime) is probably more notable. That's a fairly meaty job. It's also one he didn't do particularly well in some respects; Nintendo's US market-share generally declined during his tenure.
He doesn't seem to have a particularly high public profile. From what little I've been able to gleam, he's very conservative in his approach. Don't expect Nintendo to go embracing any radical ideas, or even many sensible modernisations, under his tenure. This is a conservative appointment by a conservative company based in the most conservative city of a country whose business practices tend to default to conservative. The message that this appointment sends is about a commitment to business as usual.
The lack of a real public profile makes it hard to tell, but he doesn't seem to be particularly passionate about games. The closest he's been to the coal-face seems to be during his time at The Pokémon Company, but even there he was very much on the business and marketing side rather than the development side. There's no rule that gaming company CEOs need to be passionate about games. But there are risks from going the other direction; would MS have fallen into so many obvious pitfalls during the development of the Xbox One if they'd had somebody who actually understood gaming and gamers in charge?
There's a chance that Kimishima's tenure might be quite a short one. If the NX doesn't take off (and the odds are against it - mid-cycle console launches have a poor history) and Nintendo doesn't protect or grow other areas of its business (handheld and mobile respectively), then shareholders are likely to look to see him replaced with somebody a bit more radical.
To an extent, yes.
D&D isn't actually just one universe. It's a number of settings linked by some core board-game source material. The problem in translating it to the big screen is that its best-known settings - Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk, I suspect - are fairly undistinguished "generic fantasy" stuff, with bog standard elves, dwarves, wizards and so on, which are going to seem horribly clichéd to the modern audience used to watching Game of Thrones on TV. It has some more "out there" settings - Planescape in particular is fairly unique - but that probably goes too far the other way. It's hard to imagine anything so eccentric translating into a major commercial movie.
That's not to say there's never been good D&D storytelling - there are, I'm sure, any number of tabletop Dungeon Masters who have managed to make the setting shine. The Baldur's Gate computer games managed to tell a pretty good story in the Forgotten Realms setting, but they had the benefit of having some phenomenally talented people work on them.
For somebody starting out to create a Hollywood blockbuster, there are just more promising places to start than D&D.
My biggest frustration in working with engineers (I'm British and we don't have "liberal arts majors", but if we did, I would be one) is a tendency among many of them to regard anything outside of their own field as "easy" - including other technical specialisms.
I spent a few years of work managing a complicated project that involved specialists from across a good few disciplines; mainly civil engineering, vehicle engine design and transport congestion modelling. One of the main challenges was to keep the various specialists from each other's throats, because of a marked trend on the part of each team towards regarding themselves as the people with the "real job" and everybody else as time-wasters.
You see the same here on Slashdot. A good portion of users here - perhaps not a majority, but maybe close to one - regard anything that is not a coding job as a waste of space. Reality check; people management is difficult, project management is difficult, business planning is difficult, finance is difficult and, yes, even human resources is difficult.
And the problem here is one of supply and demand. Or rather, that the supply of people who want to work in the games industry vastly outstrips demand for developers. So developers get treated like disposable assets.
The indie gaming scene is not a wonderful, exciting alternative. There are a handful of genuinely talented small studios, most of whom have been around since before the start of the present indie boom, and a lot of millennial narcissists burning through either mommy and daddy's savings or a pile of kickstarter funds they have no ability to manage. As they do so, for every hour they spend developing, they spend three in reddit and twitter bitch fights. That Gamergate shitspolosion? It came from the indie scene and mostly stayed in the indie scene (none of the established developers wanted to be anywhere near it). A product, on both sides, of the rampant immaturity and narcissism that characterise the indie gaming subculture.
And while all that was going on, AAA gaming was getting interesting again. Shadow of Mordor, Alien: Isolation, Bloodborne, Witcher 3, Metal Gear Solid 5... all of those are well executed games, with high production values and, crucially, more creativity and new ideas than anything that's come out of the indie scene over the same period. Outside of Call of Duty and Battlefield, the days of the 6-hour corridor shooter are basically over in AAA gaming.
The issues with working practices at some AAA studios are real, but indie gaming isn't the solution. It's just a path to impoverished parents and ripped-off kickstarter backers. Ultimately, we don't need so many people working in the video games industry. Until we stop pushing people into it as a career and start giving a reality check to teenagers who want to make games for a living because they really enjoy playing them, the problem for those working in the industry won't go away.
Shovelware? Try the pseudo-8-bit-retro-sprite-art-roguelike-zombie-crafting-survival games that spam the Steam front page daily and seem to make up 75% of the Humble Bundles (with most of the remainder being elderly franchise titles pushed out by a mainstream publisher, usually as promotion for a new entry in said franchise which will go nowhere near such a bundle.
And the major studios are not failing, for the most part, to produce non-Windows PC games because of a lack of experienced developers. They are refusing to produce them because almost everybody who tries finds that the returns don't justify it. The decisions over which platforms to port a commercial game to are not made by coders, but by businessmen.
The indie scene these days increasingly looks like a toxic swamp filled with egomaniacs who don't have the discipline to pay their dues working for an established studio, but who want to grab some kickstarter funds to put out their oh-so-unique special artistic vision, which either fails before it gets to release, produces a dull piece of hipster garbage of no interest to anybody outside of a very niche community, or, more often, produces yet another pseudo-8-bit-retro-sprite-art-roguelike-zombie-crafting-survival game.
And most Humble Bundles are filled with indie shovelware or commercial games whose sales-potential has long since slipped into irrelevance on Steam/Origin. They are not a proxy for the "proper" commercial games market.
Pretty much my entire PC games library is Windows only. If you think that is "some bullshit reason" for sticking with Windows, you are sadly deluded.
Pretty much. They've also more or less completely rebuilt Windows Update on Win7 and Vista machines. The new version of Windows Update is doing all kinds of new activities, some of which includes nasty telemetry stuff, all of which involves a huge amount of hard drive churn every time you boot up. If you have an SSD, it should get through this in a couple of minutes. Users with mechanical drives have been reporting up to 40 minutes of constant disk churn in some cases (and reports of BSODs for some users during this process as well).
Advantages and drawbacks to both approaches.
On the XB-One, you can get generally larger external drives than you can with the 2.5" internal drives you use with the PS4. You also don't need to open up the console to perform the drive-swap (though I've done said swap and it is pretty painless).
On the other hand, that external drive is another unsightly box taking up space under your TV and will likely need external power, meaning it is yet another power-cable and socket you need to fit into the viper's nest behind your TV.
There have been some pretty big 30+ gig PC games over the last few months. I can't check exact sizes easily from here, but Witcher 3, GTA5, Metal Gear Solid 5 and Titanfall all have fairly vast install-footprints. As developers stop cross-developing for the Xbox 360, which is the last platform around limited to DVDs for its physical media, 30+ gig installs are only going to become more common on PC.
Falcon are an option, but are US based which would mean getting the thing shipped transatlantic. I'm currently favouring a UK-based firm called Novatech, who massively outcompete Alienware on price. Won't be buying for 6-9 months, though (barring sudden hardware failures), so plenty can change in that time.
I've had an Alienware PC before. My current machine is a self-build, but the two before it came from Alienware. They've historically had a lot of strengths; the build-quality on their desktops is excellent, the cases are a joy to work in, they don't (unlike Dell-proper) load the machines with crudware, you get proper OS reinstall media and there is a degree of reassurance from having the backing of a major player like Dell behind the company you're handing over several thousand dollars to.
That said, they've been on a downward trajectory for a while, with their margins (always considerable) hitting stratospheric levels and the latest kit often taking a long time to appear as options on their builds. I'm thinking of replacing my current PC (well, case, PSU, motherboard, CPU, RAM, and probably graphics card - my storage and optical drives are fine) in 6-9 months time, once the Nvidia 1000-series (or whatever they call it) is available and was looking at the Alienware site just a couple of nights ago to size them up.
But there's absolutely no way I could justify buying from them right now. Even leaving aside the base prices, there are some serious holes in their offering. They didn't, when I checked less than a week ago, have the Nvidia 980Ti as an option on graphics cards. On lots of other components - CPU in particular - they would tend to offer something not-quite-good-enough as part of the base package and then charge a huge margin on the optional upgrade.
We have a fairly competitive market for high-end components and pre-built systems here in the UK. With half an hour's shopping around, I was able to find reputable places I could get equivalent or better pre-built systems than those Alienware was selling for almost 1,000GBP less than Alienware was asking.
I've been using water-cooled home desktops for around 6 years now and I've never had so much as a single drop of water escape from them. There are lots of myths about water-cooled PCs; that they leak, that they don't travel well and so on. But if you put them together properly and exercise the normal care while carrying them that you would exercise when carrying any other piece of expensive electronic kit, they are absolutely fine.
There's some circumstantial evidence from a recent patent filing that the Nintendo NX may ditch the disk drive (and possibly all physical media). A patent-filing is by no means indicative of final intent. After all, Sony filed quite a few "always-online" type patents during the PS4's development but ended up not going down that direction. But it's a sign that Nintendo is at least considering it.
This is an area where there's a huge disadvantage to being the first mover. As MS learned in the run up to the Xbox One's launch, having an always-online download-focussed/only console when your competitor is advancing a more traditional offering can look fairly suicidal. But once one of the major parties has made the move, don't be surprised if the others follow.
A couple of years ago, I was involved in the recruitment of somebody for a high-profile and politically sensitive job. Twitter was the number-one means by which candidates managed to exclude themselves. Bear in mind we're talking here about late-career professionals with, at the least, six-figure salaries, not about teenagers.
The nature of the job meant that anybody who had demonstrated poor judgement in public communications could be considered for it (the press would have torn them to shreds). Surprise, surprise, almost everybody who had used twitter had demonstrated (very) poor judgement at some point, usually on multiple occasions and sometimes over a span of several years.
The rapid-fire nature of twitter and the tight character limit encourage flamebait, knee-jerk responses and escalating incivility. It is the ultimate career-limitation tool and nobody who aspires to be regarded as "serious" should have a personal twitter account.
A friend's wife works as a recruitment consultant and tells similar stories; countless people whose angry twitter exchanges, viewable by the general public and posted with their real name, have created such an impression of poor judgement that employers don't want to touch them.
But nowhere that sells books, DVDs, music or anything else that isn't clothing or video games. Depends what you're after, really. Millennia is certainly better in the clothing niche than Florida or Altamonte, but not everybody just wants clothing.
Personally, I thought the point where they began their downwards slide was when they lost their FYE and the book store. At that point, it basically became an Apple Store, two Gamestops and a vast array of over-priced clothing and accessory stores. Millennia's better but is inexorably going the same direction. When I'm in Orlando these days (got a family place out there that we used to run as a rental business), I end up driving right up to Altamonte Mall for shopping (which is relatively civilised and has stores that non-hipster males might be interested in).
Parking at the Prime Outlets is almost impossible now, for around 10 months of the year (unless you feel like driving slowly in circles for half an hour first). To some degree they've become victims of their own success.