This is at least a $100m loss, likely closer to $200m-$250m
I was so wrong thinking a game like this requires only 50 developers. Here's what they spent/used for WoW:
Austin GDC 2009: Frank Pearce explains what it takes to craft 7,650 quests, 70,000 spells, 40,000 NPCs, 1.5 million assets, and 5.5 million lines of code; some 4,000 employees, 13,250 server blades, and 75,000 CPU cores keep MMORPG running.
Can they really afford to write off the couple-million-and-change Titan undoubtedly cost to make?
It's probably near the $20-40 million range for seven years rather than $2 million. But that's okay since they make well over $100 million per year just from world of warcraft.
According to a post in this thread, some negative comments were deleted by pubpeer mods. The image evidence does seem pretty damning, even to someone who knows nothing about cancer research.
I'm also not sure how research papers are actually authored, especially so many by one person. Couldn't it be someone else did the actual research, perhaps grad or PhD students and he just mentored them, gave them advice and edited a few things which gave him the right to put his name on the papers? In which case, I guess claiming credit for others' work bit him in the ass.
Eh I guess you can sue anyone for anything in 'merica
Is losing a $350,000 job offer something you consider trivial? The scientist and his lawyer suspect foul play by anonymous person(s) who allegedly defamed him by posting ad hominem attacks in their pubpeer comments and then distributed those comment pages to both universities associated with him.
Any criticism of his work should be valid and fact based and that should be enforced by the site's moderators. Still, anonymity is important when criticizing someone and they should not use this as an excuse to force critics to reveal their identities.
Not sure why parent is modded down. In many cases, the company making the product using Kickstarter gets a zero-risk, zero-interest loan without selling part of its company to VCs or banks. That's a huge deal, because if the company used VCs for funding, a portion of their profits would go to the VCs. So if they made $1 million profit, perhaps $400,000 would go to VCs. With crowdsourcing, once the company has delivered the product to the backers, they get to keep all $1 million of those profits for themselves for any future batch of products sold.
Also, Kickstarter makes a nice commission by being a middleman for backers and creators. So yes, it's all about the money.
You lost me when you assigned an arbitrary number as your cutoff rather than defining the cutoff on reasonably definable measures of physical and mental health.
It's not arbitrary if you think about it. It's the age when people are least productive since they have been retired for 5-7 years and their health care costs are starting to rise, by a huge margin, statistically speaking. Mr. Bio-ethicist does not want to waste public healthcare funds to care for these people -- he wishes they were dead instead, or worse, no longer covered by state healthcare plans.
Venture capitalists have legal contracts and the all important lawyers for when the two sides disagree on whether the requirements for a phase have been met.
Right now it's completely a black box how backer money is spent. Maybe the creators should list itemized bills in their Kickstarter project page so backers can see if their money is being spent reasonably. Don't VCs also monitor how their money is spent? I'm not sure.
Wouldn't limiting the transfer of funds, via signed contracts or something, limit the risks of such a thing happening?
That's how venture capital is distributed to entrepreneurs, in chunks -- series A, series B and so on. So after completing phase 1, they get $X, after phase 2, they get $Y and so on. This is how Kickstarter should distribute funds to the creators. Otherwise, there is a chance the creators will simply take the money, stop working and give bogus status updates.
When the creators create their sales pitch web page on Kickstarter, they should show how much they want to get paid for each phase. If there are 5 phases and the creators can only deliver 2, the backers will be refunded payment for the 3 unfinished phases.
Yes, the "portability premium" IS pretty goddamn high to make AN ENTIRE COMPUTER about the size of a laptop's hard drive alone.
Sorry, I don't buy it that the premium is so ridiculously high. They took a dumb phone and added a more powerful cpu, a touch screen and more RAM -- that's about it. A laptop is a stripped down PC (you can't plug in your device card in the pci/pcie slot). And a smartphone is a stripped down laptop so they are similar but not the same thing shrunk down.
"Underpowered"? Compared to what, exactly?
Compared to a currently selling laptop, obviously. But it's priced same/higher than that laptop. Why?
Also, there's this little thing called "physics"... how big do you want the battery to be to run a device at a certain performance level for any reasonable amount of time? Do you think there's no difference between the current draw of a big stomping desktop compared to a smartphone?
Fine, don't run it at the performance level of a laptop. But then don't charge the customer the same price as a laptop. The CPU speed/RAM size vary as much as 10 times between an iphone 6 and a $1000 laptop. That's a ripoff.
Seriously, how did you get a "+5, Insightful" out of that?
Okay, smart guy, you better address all the points I'm making both in this post and the thread. Don't be intellectually dishonest, like many slashdotters, by skipping portions of text that contradict your point of view.
Most laptop manufacturers, like Lenovo, have copied Apple's laptop design. The keyboard (including the hard-to-use chiclet keys), hand rest and trackpad areas are pretty much cloned from macbooks.
Here's a pic of a lenovo laptop that looks like clone of macbook air.
Well, to make a long story short, the phone is 1/10th in almost every respect compared to a similarly priced laptop (cpu, ram, screen, storage etc) but the price is same as a laptop. Don't you think we deserve a discount for less powerful parts and fewer/cheaper parts used? I bet the RAM does not perform as good as that on the latest laptops. In other words, does apple pay 10 times as much as laptop manufacturers for RAM or flash? Of course not, so why should the consumer?
Charge a premium for making it compact, and a functionally and aesthetically designed case, but still, it should be priced nowhere near as much as a laptop. Well, maybe we can forgive Apple for overcharging since they are a manufacturer of luxury goods. But other phones (i.e. Samsung etc.) should not be charging the same ridiculous premiums Apple is charging.
No, the cost of miniaturized components is higher.
I looked at the iPhone 6 tear down and the chip sizes are not that much smaller than a laptop's chips. So it's just miniaturized case, motherboard, battery and camera (and the battery holds a lot less charge than a laptop battery).
And that's not even counting your gross exaggeration, the iPhone is 2 times the cost of a crappy barely-functional laptop, NOT a "powerful" laptop.
But you can buy a very decent laptop for 1000 bucks, with 10-15 times more RAM, 10 times more processing power with an i7 CPU, and 10-100 times more persistent storage.
In an age where 16 GB is available as RAM on many desktops and laptops, it's stupid to sell/buy a computer with only 16 GB persistent storage.
The iPhone is just an underpowered palm computer with touch interface instead of keyboard/mouse of a laptop. Is the portability premium so high, or the case so shiny, that we have to pay 2 times the cost of a powerful laptop while getting computing power/memory of a 5 year old laptop?
BTW, please stop calling flash as "Memory" (in the title) because memory is often confused with RAM.
Not because he's hungry, but because he doesn't like the fact that the baby lions are not his.
No, he does it so that in the future, when he's no longer strong, and the baby alphas are now alpha, like their papa, are going to do to him what he did to their father. It's simply eliminating (future) competitors so he and his descendants can rule for as long as possible.
This was quite common when kings ruled around the world -- surprising similarity between kings and lions.
A patent is just a poorly reworded description of that process.
Poorly worded patents don't get accepted and published by the USPTO. The patents have to be quite clear and complete.
Detailed pseudo-code is enough for a competent programmer to convert to code. There are also sections in the patent which give description of the patent (and therefore the pseudo-code). You may stumble a bit due to the legalese, but it's not much and you can easily get past it once you know what to look for.
Patents don't disclose source code. So they don't teach a programmer how to "put the bits of plastic together".
Those statements are quite wrong. Patents can and do include source code. However the claims (the IP the patent owner is claiming exclusive rights to) have to be written in a mixture of pseudo-code and legalese. Therefore, a competent programmer with just a little bit of legal knowledge can transform the patent pseudo-code into working code.
The whole idea behind patents is to express secret methods such that an average practitioner of the field can recreate real working code from the patent instructions (or pseudocode in the case of software patents).
Because face time is important. Interacting with coworkers is important.
Not really. Face time is very little unless you're a manager type of employee and you can interact with coworkers over phone/video chat. They want employees on site so they can keep an eye on them, i.e. personally supervise them, otherwise the employees are likely to goof off.
Re:no wonder apple dropped 16GB machines
on
iOS 8 Review
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· Score: 1
Why support some many phone types? just make 1 64GB phone.
Sweet profits. Apple charges ridiculous markups ($200 or more) for $10 to $30 flash chips. Look at these unlocked iphone 6 prices on amazon:
They are probably burnt out. But they could've hired a couple of developers to port it iOS/Android and made more money than games like Tetris and Pac Man.
You think the iphone/ipad market (apple world) is small? They should have done this sooner because obj-c is too low level (difficult/time-consuming to code/debug) for your typical $0.99 app. This language will probably cut development time of ios apps by a factor 2 to 10.
I don't think other platforms need it though as they already have java, python,.net, and newer languages.
Really? So why haven't all the big companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, Adobe, etc. shut down yet? They have already made billions per year and increase earnings every year. What could they possibly hope to achieve by adding billions to their existing stockpile of billions?
Slashdot Mirror
I was so wrong thinking a game like this requires only 50 developers. Here's what they spent/used for WoW:
http://www.gamespot.com/articl...
It's probably near the $20-40 million range for seven years rather than $2 million. But that's okay since they make well over $100 million per year just from world of warcraft.
According to a post in this thread, some negative comments were deleted by pubpeer mods. The image evidence does seem pretty damning, even to someone who knows nothing about cancer research.
I'm also not sure how research papers are actually authored, especially so many by one person. Couldn't it be someone else did the actual research, perhaps grad or PhD students and he just mentored them, gave them advice and edited a few things which gave him the right to put his name on the papers? In which case, I guess claiming credit for others' work bit him in the ass.
Is losing a $350,000 job offer something you consider trivial? The scientist and his lawyer suspect foul play by anonymous person(s) who allegedly defamed him by posting ad hominem attacks in their pubpeer comments and then distributed those comment pages to both universities associated with him.
Any criticism of his work should be valid and fact based and that should be enforced by the site's moderators. Still, anonymity is important when criticizing someone and they should not use this as an excuse to force critics to reveal their identities.
Not sure why parent is modded down. In many cases, the company making the product using Kickstarter gets a zero-risk, zero-interest loan without selling part of its company to VCs or banks. That's a huge deal, because if the company used VCs for funding, a portion of their profits would go to the VCs. So if they made $1 million profit, perhaps $400,000 would go to VCs. With crowdsourcing, once the company has delivered the product to the backers, they get to keep all $1 million of those profits for themselves for any future batch of products sold.
Also, Kickstarter makes a nice commission by being a middleman for backers and creators. So yes, it's all about the money.
It's not arbitrary if you think about it. It's the age when people are least productive since they have been retired for 5-7 years and their health care costs are starting to rise, by a huge margin, statistically speaking. Mr. Bio-ethicist does not want to waste public healthcare funds to care for these people -- he wishes they were dead instead, or worse, no longer covered by state healthcare plans.
Right now it's completely a black box how backer money is spent. Maybe the creators should list itemized bills in their Kickstarter project page so backers can see if their money is being spent reasonably. Don't VCs also monitor how their money is spent? I'm not sure.
That's how venture capital is distributed to entrepreneurs, in chunks -- series A, series B and so on. So after completing phase 1, they get $X, after phase 2, they get $Y and so on. This is how Kickstarter should distribute funds to the creators. Otherwise, there is a chance the creators will simply take the money, stop working and give bogus status updates.
When the creators create their sales pitch web page on Kickstarter, they should show how much they want to get paid for each phase. If there are 5 phases and the creators can only deliver 2, the backers will be refunded payment for the 3 unfinished phases.
Sorry, I don't buy it that the premium is so ridiculously high. They took a dumb phone and added a more powerful cpu, a touch screen and more RAM -- that's about it. A laptop is a stripped down PC (you can't plug in your device card in the pci/pcie slot). And a smartphone is a stripped down laptop so they are similar but not the same thing shrunk down.
Compared to a currently selling laptop, obviously. But it's priced same/higher than that laptop. Why?
Fine, don't run it at the performance level of a laptop. But then don't charge the customer the same price as a laptop. The CPU speed/RAM size vary as much as 10 times between an iphone 6 and a $1000 laptop. That's a ripoff.
Okay, smart guy, you better address all the points I'm making both in this post and the thread. Don't be intellectually dishonest, like many slashdotters, by skipping portions of text that contradict your point of view.
Tell them what? "Fuck off, lower your product quality. It's so high we can't copy/leverage your work easily."
Most laptop manufacturers, like Lenovo, have copied Apple's laptop design. The keyboard (including the hard-to-use chiclet keys), hand rest and trackpad areas are pretty much cloned from macbooks.
Here's a pic of a lenovo laptop that looks like clone of macbook air.
Well, to make a long story short, the phone is 1/10th in almost every respect compared to a similarly priced laptop (cpu, ram, screen, storage etc) but the price is same as a laptop. Don't you think we deserve a discount for less powerful parts and fewer/cheaper parts used? I bet the RAM does not perform as good as that on the latest laptops. In other words, does apple pay 10 times as much as laptop manufacturers for RAM or flash? Of course not, so why should the consumer?
Charge a premium for making it compact, and a functionally and aesthetically designed case, but still, it should be priced nowhere near as much as a laptop. Well, maybe we can forgive Apple for overcharging since they are a manufacturer of luxury goods. But other phones (i.e. Samsung etc.) should not be charging the same ridiculous premiums Apple is charging.
I looked at the iPhone 6 tear down and the chip sizes are not that much smaller than a laptop's chips. So it's just miniaturized case, motherboard, battery and camera (and the battery holds a lot less charge than a laptop battery).
But you can buy a very decent laptop for 1000 bucks, with 10-15 times more RAM, 10 times more processing power with an i7 CPU, and 10-100 times more persistent storage.
Then add a microSD slot with support for 64GB memory slot. On a grandma/grandpa or luddite would be okay with only 16GB.
In an age where 16 GB is available as RAM on many desktops and laptops, it's stupid to sell/buy a computer with only 16 GB persistent storage.
The iPhone is just an underpowered palm computer with touch interface instead of keyboard/mouse of a laptop. Is the portability premium so high, or the case so shiny, that we have to pay 2 times the cost of a powerful laptop while getting computing power/memory of a 5 year old laptop?
BTW, please stop calling flash as "Memory" (in the title) because memory is often confused with RAM.
If this type of info gathering is common from governments and commercial agencies, we need a more anonymous Internet.
No, he does it so that in the future, when he's no longer strong, and the baby alphas are now alpha, like their papa, are going to do to him what he did to their father. It's simply eliminating (future) competitors so he and his descendants can rule for as long as possible.
This was quite common when kings ruled around the world -- surprising similarity between kings and lions.
Poorly worded patents don't get accepted and published by the USPTO. The patents have to be quite clear and complete.
Detailed pseudo-code is enough for a competent programmer to convert to code. There are also sections in the patent which give description of the patent (and therefore the pseudo-code). You may stumble a bit due to the legalese, but it's not much and you can easily get past it once you know what to look for.
Those statements are quite wrong. Patents can and do include source code. However the claims (the IP the patent owner is claiming exclusive rights to) have to be written in a mixture of pseudo-code and legalese. Therefore, a competent programmer with just a little bit of legal knowledge can transform the patent pseudo-code into working code.
The whole idea behind patents is to express secret methods such that an average practitioner of the field can recreate real working code from the patent instructions (or pseudocode in the case of software patents).
Not really. Face time is very little unless you're a manager type of employee and you can interact with coworkers over phone/video chat. They want employees on site so they can keep an eye on them, i.e. personally supervise them, otherwise the employees are likely to goof off.
Sweet profits. Apple charges ridiculous markups ($200 or more) for $10 to $30 flash chips. Look at these unlocked iphone 6 prices on amazon:
iphone 6, 16GB: $999
iphone 6+, 16GB: $999
iphone 6, 64GB: $999
iphone 6+, 64GB: $1180
iphone 6+, 128GB: $2000
They are probably burnt out. But they could've hired a couple of developers to port it iOS/Android and made more money than games like Tetris and Pac Man.
You think the iphone/ipad market (apple world) is small? They should have done this sooner because obj-c is too low level (difficult/time-consuming to code/debug) for your typical $0.99 app. This language will probably cut development time of ios apps by a factor 2 to 10.
I don't think other platforms need it though as they already have java, python, .net, and newer languages.
What's going to take/give delivery to uber/drone delivery services? A cheetah.
Really? So why haven't all the big companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, Adobe, etc. shut down yet? They have already made billions per year and increase earnings every year. What could they possibly hope to achieve by adding billions to their existing stockpile of billions?