In 1996 a Voodoo 1 card cost $300+ and you had to buy a 2D card too which also often ran at least another $100. So you were looking at $400 just for the video card. $400 + $1500 midrange PC = $2,000 PC.
The more grunt the system has, the harder it becomes to make effective use of that grunt.
It's ridiculously easy to make effective use of that grunt. It's trivial to bring a modern octocore 4 GPU SLI machine to its knees. The PS3 was hard to program for because it was a weird and non-standard hardware model that had poor development tools.
When you get right down to it: why does the CPU and GPU grunt under the hood matter? Only so they can power the graphics, physics, and AI effects of the games. Come up with a game that's fun to play, and people won't care how powerful the console is, as long as that game will run. We're seeing this play out in a major way on the iPhone and iPad.
Because graphics, physics and AI all make the game fun. How many game reviews have you heard complain about "stupid enemies".
The reason we had "monsters in corridors" games for so long was because that's all that we could render well. If you have more "grunt" at your disposal you can start creating more immersive and expansive worlds. Imagine Red Dead Redemption if you couldn't leave the canyon because nothing could render the rest of the world? Hardware enables new game-play capabilities.
There are certainly more gaming opportunities with 2D and other lightweight rendering technology but I remember being completely and utterly blown away by Zelda Ocarina of Time due to the leap into a 3D world with characters I could *see* and interact with.
As to the rise of tablets and cell phones... the GPUs and CPUs in a latest generation cell phone or tablet is nearly on par with an Xbox 360 if you are willing to sacrifice resolution. The latest PowerVR chipsets even support DX11.
Even Star Citizen acknowledges that their budget will be about 4-5x more than they raise on Kickstarter. So you're looking at $12-$25m to make your game. And you have to start wondering "Have all of our customers already pledged?" It's certainly great to have 10-20% of your budget up front to attract investors but investors have to wary too that the game is going to bomb and they're going to lose the other 80% of their investment in the game.
Also the budget for a AAA title is about $75m. And if they can make $500m off of $75m budget that's a lot better than making $4m off of a $12m budget.
The other thing that concerns me is that every single one of the named 'blockbuster' Kickstarter projects are by well established designers who want to re-make some nostalgia for customers.
"Hey did you love wing commander? Do you want another one? Great!"
For all of the complaints that the big publishers are just doing re-makes and clones--they are the ones who are taking the big risks on actually funding a new generation of game designers. Portal was the result of Valve funding a small team not kickstarter. When the next Portal is funded by kickstarter then we'll have something to really talk about. I just can't help but think if nothing changes in 20 years we'll have Cliff Bleszinski on Kickstarter "Hey guys remember chainsawing people in Gears of War?! For only $10m I'm going to make another third person cover based shooter!"
Now of course I'm a kickstarter funder for many of these projects (I'm as nostalgic as the next guy). But I don't see it having any notable impact. After all, the publishers passed up these projects for a reason. As happy as I am to play a new Wing Commander, I don't expect them to be kicking themselves when it barely breaks even in 3 years.
I'm more than happy to risk my money for something I want. But there is no way for Activision to ask me for $50 and maybe or maybe not release a game that may or may not be good. There's a good chance a lot of these games are going to suck and bomb. A chance I'm willing to take with some daring individuals. Otherwise I'm waiting for the demo.
Then why not quit and go work for another company?
Because there probably aren't many jobs where they live. And a massive expensive factory/bakery is cheaper to 'retool' for a similar product. If someone buys out Hostess then they'll probably keep making the same product under new management. While people talk about employment being the be-all-end-all there is a point where it no longer makes sense to work. If I'm making less than I need to pay my bills and put food on the table then I have to look for a new job anyway.
Health foods are what are selling well. If I worked in a Twinkie factory and it could potentially get bought out by a successful business like Nature's Valley then there would be some down-time but the factory would be creating a product with a future and presumably a company that can pay me a good wage. Get the bloated old dying carcass out of the way so that someone new can use their facilities.
They were thinking they would rather work with a new company who has a product consumers want to buy instead of going down with a sinking ship that would bleed them dry on the way down.
If hostess can't properly market and sell products then they should go bankrupt.
I've seen this happen numerous times: a company starts doing poorly, they ask their employees to take cuts. The employees take cuts. The company keeps doing worse, the employees even sometimes start working for free "don't worry we'll turn this around soon." A few months later the company declares bankruptcy and everybody gets fired anyway and the company refuses back pay.
Hostess could have sold to another company which wanted to buy them but they said no. As the article mentions, Pringles was doing poorly, it sold off and now it's incredibly successful because it got new management and marketing.
I haven't eaten a hostess product in years. When I think hostess I think truck stop 10 year old Styrofoam. I can't remember the last time I saw someone eat a Hostess product. Cutting wages isn't going to help. The sooner its property and assets are sold off to someone who can either reinvigorate the brand or put its kitchens to better use the better imo.
You're forgetting one critical feature: predictability. For all of the complaints about Android fragmentation it's 10,000,000x less fragmented than linux.
Every application targets one OS version or a set of OS versions. On Linux I'm battling 100 package dependencies. Does it have the correct driver version? Does it support this version of pyside. Does it need Mono? Do I need Python? Do I need.... ?
People say that Android is "open source" which is technically true, but let's be honest--99.9% of all devices use Android-As-Shipped-From-Google. Sure manufacturers have been known to tweak the app launcher a bit and maybe customize details but only Amazon has actually broken compatibility and released a unique product.
Linux on the other hand is a wild west of "well I tested it on Redhat but it's not working on Ubuntu..."
For one, our general education level is far higher than the ancient Greeks so even if they were intellectually better, it wasn't developed to the same degree in the *average* person. We're almost all literate. We're almost all mathematically at least basically literate. And we have a far larger middle class that has time for philosophy and intellectual discussion so we probably have more people interested and enthusiastic to learn.
Secondly even if they were genetically superior, nutrition has a huge effect on intellectual development. Even our poor are generally not terribly malnourished.
Why is the Antarctic ice growing? Lots of excellent and empirically supported explanations. But just because you can't itemize the specific outcomes of an event doesn't mean you shouldn't work to prevent it.
"Oh there's a feral rabid monkey on the loose downtown should we stop it?" "Nah, we don't know exactly who it's going to bite or when. Until we really understand the feral monkey's motivations we shouldn't do anything or assume we can understand what it'll do next. Maybe a feral monkey is good for society. Maybe killing a rabid feral monkey will have unintended consequences!"
Or view exercises for what they are... exercises. The test/final project is what it is. Maybe your students don't need the exercises because they already have a strong grasp of the task.
a black man is the president of the united states of america I dont ever want to hear that ever again.
Just because 51% of the country doesn't discriminate doesn't mean 49% doesn't.
In fact it's the electoral college deciding so technically you could theoretically have 55% of the country being Jim Crow racists and still win the presidency.
Obama could have lost the entire states of Ohio, Virginia and Florida. And every state that he lost could have voted 100% Romney and he would have won. It would have been a popular vote blow-out against Obama but an electoral college victory.
10 years ago you would have paid $20 for an application. Today it's free or $0.99 I would say that has a lot to do with the proliferation of ads. I like ad supported apps. I want to see the developers make a living and I don't really feel like spending money most of the time so we all win.
You should really think of the Music App as Spotify that can also play your local music. It's really designed to be used with the subscription, hence the overt push to use it as such.
When you use it as a glorified Spotify + Hard Drive MP3s the UI works pretty smoothly. A search for music returns either your music or streaming music. If you choose a Pandora style mix it uses again both your own music and the internet service.
If you just want a pure "play my music" the UI is atrocious.
Microsoft will send you the bill for their licensing of Reuters etc.
This is a stupid non-story. The reason Microsoft has ads (besides a desire to make money) is that these features are delivering content that costs money. Stock symbols don't just magically tell you their value, you have to subscribe to someone who host's live stock tickers. You have to pay Reuters, the WSJ and New York Times to publish their news stories. You have to pay the Weather channel to provide you with detailed hourly forecasts and historical data.
Microsoft is providing a premium service through the ad supported apps. And these are also applications which aren't a part of the core OS experience. If you don't want them... uninstall and pick another app without ads.
Received my ballot in the mail about a month ago. Filled it out while reading the numerous newspaper endorsements online and our State's online voter's guide with all the Pro/Con arguments.
I dropped it in our outgoing letter box the next day... realized seconds later that I had forgot to put a stamp on it and ran up to our office, grabbed a post-in note and asked if the mail man could bring it up when he came.
A couple hours later the mailman stopped by the office, I popped a stamp on it and off he went.
Washington State has its shit together. The only thing I could improve upon the system would be to have the ballot be a bulk-mailer and not require a stamp.
Yeah but you can just pop in an SDXC mini-SD card for $50 have have another 64GB for music/movies which is what fills a device.
The 32GB is essentially a system and application drive. And since it's Windows RT I doubt most applications will be larger than 100MB. So from a functional standpoint that leaves space for 20GB * (1000/100) = 200 applications at least. More likely most applications are around 10MB.
Because programmers don't *need* unions. Often there is a surplus of open positions. When there is a surplus of open positions then you have a position to negotiate.
When there is a surplus of labor (as there often is for union positions) then you have a situation where desperation to not starve will drive people to take any deal that keeps them alive until next week (even if it means racking up some debt and digging a deeper hole).
You also have unions in a lot of places where your job might be a political hot potato such as a police officer who could as easily be thrown under the bus by a politician as protected. If any of us think politics is bad in our office... imagine how much worse it would be with actual elected politicians being in charge of hiring/firing etc.
The easiest solution that solves both problems is to provide universal healthcare so that people don't have to get a job--any job to stay alive should they fall ill and to ensure they can afford it even while unemployed.
I think what he is saying is that the SBS needs periodic administration too. In fact, I know it does. It needs updates, it needs logs read, it needs disk and storage space monitored. backups, It needs services monitored. it needs users added and removed, it needs passwords changed, That is of course if you are doing anything with it that it was designed to do instead of putting it on a network with no internet access and using it as an overgrown NAS.
All of which is spectacularly easy thanks to the SBS Console. He's right, having someone configure it is a good investment. Which is what we do. We have a company that we contact when we need something new "We need 5TB of fast storage." They give us some prices and then they show up, plug it in and add it to network.
Everything else we build ourselves. If something is seriously FUBAR they come in hourly and set it straight. For the day-to-day stuff we're perfectly capable of doing it ourselves. But to date it requires almost no intervention.
I'm guessing one of two things here. 1. You performed an epic hack. 2. You really don't know what the hell your doing.
3. I wasn't interested in pedantic product naming. And always assumed they were part of the SBS family of products. Apparently only SBS is SBS and the other SKUs are a different family of servers.
For those who are truly interested, and I can't possibly imagine why...
Domain Controller: Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2008 File Servers: Microsoft Windows Server Standard Edition 2008 R2(tm)(c) for primary RAID and then we're replacing Samba boxes with Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 (tm)(c).
Also while we're being pedantic about which of 500 server products our small company is deploying... it's "you're doing" not "your doing".
To everyone considering Samba... fine. I don't care. Use Samba, I'm not going to but I'm sure it'll bake you cookies and fluff your pillows. I could care less. I've had a bad experience with it--but maybe my experience was the exception not the rule. All I know is that it was a PITA and never really worked right.
All of the clocks on our domain are sync'ed apparently that's a "feature" of Active Directory. Linux doesn't apparently respect that so when our file server somehow got a couple minutes out of sync with our AD, AD decided that it would just lock out access.
Slashdot Mirror
In 1996 a Voodoo 1 card cost $300+ and you had to buy a 2D card too which also often ran at least another $100. So you were looking at $400 just for the video card. $400 + $1500 midrange PC = $2,000 PC.
The more grunt the system has, the harder it becomes to make effective use of that grunt.
It's ridiculously easy to make effective use of that grunt. It's trivial to bring a modern octocore 4 GPU SLI machine to its knees. The PS3 was hard to program for because it was a weird and non-standard hardware model that had poor development tools.
When you get right down to it: why does the CPU and GPU grunt under the hood matter? Only so they can power the graphics, physics, and AI effects of the games. Come up with a game that's fun to play, and people won't care how powerful the console is, as long as that game will run. We're seeing this play out in a major way on the iPhone and iPad.
Because graphics, physics and AI all make the game fun. How many game reviews have you heard complain about "stupid enemies".
The reason we had "monsters in corridors" games for so long was because that's all that we could render well. If you have more "grunt" at your disposal you can start creating more immersive and expansive worlds. Imagine Red Dead Redemption if you couldn't leave the canyon because nothing could render the rest of the world? Hardware enables new game-play capabilities.
There are certainly more gaming opportunities with 2D and other lightweight rendering technology but I remember being completely and utterly blown away by Zelda Ocarina of Time due to the leap into a 3D world with characters I could *see* and interact with.
As to the rise of tablets and cell phones... the GPUs and CPUs in a latest generation cell phone or tablet is nearly on par with an Xbox 360 if you are willing to sacrifice resolution. The latest PowerVR chipsets even support DX11.
The Xbox 360 windows-based-os only uses about 32MB of RAM. That 480MB is after the OS usage and available for games.
If you want to start one of my game-dev friends on a rant ask them about the PS3 OS's RAM usage. :P
which device from them had a complicated board or cutting edge performance?
Nintendo 64 had cutting edge performance. 3D performance was better than most $2,000 computers at the time.
That's not the average outcome but the average *budget* is about $23m
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/97413-Study-Claims-Average-Game-Budget-Is-23-Million
Even Star Citizen acknowledges that their budget will be about 4-5x more than they raise on Kickstarter. So you're looking at $12-$25m to make your game. And you have to start wondering "Have all of our customers already pledged?" It's certainly great to have 10-20% of your budget up front to attract investors but investors have to wary too that the game is going to bomb and they're going to lose the other 80% of their investment in the game.
Also the budget for a AAA title is about $75m. And if they can make $500m off of $75m budget that's a lot better than making $4m off of a $12m budget.
The other thing that concerns me is that every single one of the named 'blockbuster' Kickstarter projects are by well established designers who want to re-make some nostalgia for customers.
"Hey did you love wing commander? Do you want another one? Great!"
For all of the complaints that the big publishers are just doing re-makes and clones--they are the ones who are taking the big risks on actually funding a new generation of game designers. Portal was the result of Valve funding a small team not kickstarter. When the next Portal is funded by kickstarter then we'll have something to really talk about. I just can't help but think if nothing changes in 20 years we'll have Cliff Bleszinski on Kickstarter "Hey guys remember chainsawing people in Gears of War?! For only $10m I'm going to make another third person cover based shooter!"
Now of course I'm a kickstarter funder for many of these projects (I'm as nostalgic as the next guy). But I don't see it having any notable impact. After all, the publishers passed up these projects for a reason. As happy as I am to play a new Wing Commander, I don't expect them to be kicking themselves when it barely breaks even in 3 years.
I'm more than happy to risk my money for something I want. But there is no way for Activision to ask me for $50 and maybe or maybe not release a game that may or may not be good. There's a good chance a lot of these games are going to suck and bomb. A chance I'm willing to take with some daring individuals. Otherwise I'm waiting for the demo.
What if Luke uses the force?
Then why not quit and go work for another company?
Because there probably aren't many jobs where they live. And a massive expensive factory/bakery is cheaper to 'retool' for a similar product. If someone buys out Hostess then they'll probably keep making the same product under new management. While people talk about employment being the be-all-end-all there is a point where it no longer makes sense to work. If I'm making less than I need to pay my bills and put food on the table then I have to look for a new job anyway.
Health foods are what are selling well. If I worked in a Twinkie factory and it could potentially get bought out by a successful business like Nature's Valley then there would be some down-time but the factory would be creating a product with a future and presumably a company that can pay me a good wage. Get the bloated old dying carcass out of the way so that someone new can use their facilities.
I wonder what these idiots were thinking.
They were thinking they would rather work with a new company who has a product consumers want to buy instead of going down with a sinking ship that would bleed them dry on the way down.
If hostess can't properly market and sell products then they should go bankrupt.
I've seen this happen numerous times: a company starts doing poorly, they ask their employees to take cuts. The employees take cuts. The company keeps doing worse, the employees even sometimes start working for free "don't worry we'll turn this around soon." A few months later the company declares bankruptcy and everybody gets fired anyway and the company refuses back pay.
Hostess could have sold to another company which wanted to buy them but they said no. As the article mentions, Pringles was doing poorly, it sold off and now it's incredibly successful because it got new management and marketing.
I haven't eaten a hostess product in years. When I think hostess I think truck stop 10 year old Styrofoam. I can't remember the last time I saw someone eat a Hostess product. Cutting wages isn't going to help. The sooner its property and assets are sold off to someone who can either reinvigorate the brand or put its kitchens to better use the better imo.
You're forgetting one critical feature: predictability. For all of the complaints about Android fragmentation it's 10,000,000x less fragmented than linux.
Every application targets one OS version or a set of OS versions. On Linux I'm battling 100 package dependencies. Does it have the correct driver version? Does it support this version of pyside. Does it need Mono? Do I need Python? Do I need.... ?
People say that Android is "open source" which is technically true, but let's be honest--99.9% of all devices use Android-As-Shipped-From-Google. Sure manufacturers have been known to tweak the app launcher a bit and maybe customize details but only Amazon has actually broken compatibility and released a unique product.
Linux on the other hand is a wild west of "well I tested it on Redhat but it's not working on Ubuntu..."
I think we're all debating different things.
For one, our general education level is far higher than the ancient Greeks so even if they were intellectually better, it wasn't developed to the same degree in the *average* person. We're almost all literate. We're almost all mathematically at least basically literate. And we have a far larger middle class that has time for philosophy and intellectual discussion so we probably have more people interested and enthusiastic to learn.
Secondly even if they were genetically superior, nutrition has a huge effect on intellectual development. Even our poor are generally not terribly malnourished.
Why is the Antarctic ice growing? Lots of excellent and empirically supported explanations. But just because you can't itemize the specific outcomes of an event doesn't mean you shouldn't work to prevent it.
"Oh there's a feral rabid monkey on the loose downtown should we stop it?"
"Nah, we don't know exactly who it's going to bite or when. Until we really understand the feral monkey's motivations we shouldn't do anything or assume we can understand what it'll do next. Maybe a feral monkey is good for society. Maybe killing a rabid feral monkey will have unintended consequences!"
Or view exercises for what they are... exercises. The test/final project is what it is. Maybe your students don't need the exercises because they already have a strong grasp of the task.
a black man is the president of the united states of america I dont ever want to hear that ever again.
Just because 51% of the country doesn't discriminate doesn't mean 49% doesn't.
In fact it's the electoral college deciding so technically you could theoretically have 55% of the country being Jim Crow racists and still win the presidency.
Obama could have lost the entire states of Ohio, Virginia and Florida. And every state that he lost could have voted 100% Romney and he would have won. It would have been a popular vote blow-out against Obama but an electoral college victory.
Adware is heavily frowned upon by most and to have something you paid for be adware is thoroughly unacceptable.
You paid for Windows. You got Windows.
http://windows.com/
I challenge you to find the News app or Finance map listed as a Windows 8 feature.
10 years ago you would have paid $20 for an application. Today it's free or $0.99 I would say that has a lot to do with the proliferation of ads. I like ad supported apps. I want to see the developers make a living and I don't really feel like spending money most of the time so we all win.
You should really think of the Music App as Spotify that can also play your local music. It's really designed to be used with the subscription, hence the overt push to use it as such.
When you use it as a glorified Spotify + Hard Drive MP3s the UI works pretty smoothly. A search for music returns either your music or streaming music. If you choose a Pandora style mix it uses again both your own music and the internet service.
If you just want a pure "play my music" the UI is atrocious.
They're metro apps. They are sandboxed.
Microsoft will send you the bill for their licensing of Reuters etc.
This is a stupid non-story. The reason Microsoft has ads (besides a desire to make money) is that these features are delivering content that costs money. Stock symbols don't just magically tell you their value, you have to subscribe to someone who host's live stock tickers. You have to pay Reuters, the WSJ and New York Times to publish their news stories. You have to pay the Weather channel to provide you with detailed hourly forecasts and historical data.
Microsoft is providing a premium service through the ad supported apps. And these are also applications which aren't a part of the core OS experience. If you don't want them... uninstall and pick another app without ads.
Received my ballot in the mail about a month ago. Filled it out while reading the numerous newspaper endorsements online and our State's online voter's guide with all the Pro/Con arguments.
I dropped it in our outgoing letter box the next day... realized seconds later that I had forgot to put a stamp on it and ran up to our office, grabbed a post-in note and asked if the mail man could bring it up when he came.
A couple hours later the mailman stopped by the office, I popped a stamp on it and off he went.
A week or two later I checked in to our ballot tracker http://info.kingcounty.gov/elections/ballottracker.aspx and saw that it was received and processed. No uncertainty if I'll be counted.
Washington State has its shit together. The only thing I could improve upon the system would be to have the ballot be a bulk-mailer and not require a stamp.
Yeah but you can just pop in an SDXC mini-SD card for $50 have have another 64GB for music/movies which is what fills a device.
The 32GB is essentially a system and application drive. And since it's Windows RT I doubt most applications will be larger than 100MB. So from a functional standpoint that leaves space for 20GB * (1000/100) = 200 applications at least. More likely most applications are around 10MB.
Microsoft Entertainment and Devices dose not equal "Xbox". Xbox is making money, it was Windows Phone that caused the loss.
http://www.businessinsider.com/nokia-payments-cause-entertainment-and-devices-division-loss-2012-7
Because programmers don't *need* unions. Often there is a surplus of open positions. When there is a surplus of open positions then you have a position to negotiate.
When there is a surplus of labor (as there often is for union positions) then you have a situation where desperation to not starve will drive people to take any deal that keeps them alive until next week (even if it means racking up some debt and digging a deeper hole).
You also have unions in a lot of places where your job might be a political hot potato such as a police officer who could as easily be thrown under the bus by a politician as protected. If any of us think politics is bad in our office... imagine how much worse it would be with actual elected politicians being in charge of hiring/firing etc.
The easiest solution that solves both problems is to provide universal healthcare so that people don't have to get a job--any job to stay alive should they fall ill and to ensure they can afford it even while unemployed.
I think what he is saying is that the SBS needs periodic administration too. In fact, I know it does. It needs updates, it needs logs read, it needs disk and storage space monitored. backups, It needs services monitored. it needs users added and removed, it needs passwords changed, That is of course if you are doing anything with it that it was designed to do instead of putting it on a network with no internet access and using it as an overgrown NAS.
All of which is spectacularly easy thanks to the SBS Console. He's right, having someone configure it is a good investment. Which is what we do. We have a company that we contact when we need something new "We need 5TB of fast storage." They give us some prices and then they show up, plug it in and add it to network.
Everything else we build ourselves. If something is seriously FUBAR they come in hourly and set it straight. For the day-to-day stuff we're perfectly capable of doing it ourselves. But to date it requires almost no intervention.
I'm guessing one of two things here.
1. You performed an epic hack.
2. You really don't know what the hell your doing.
3. I wasn't interested in pedantic product naming. And always assumed they were part of the SBS family of products. Apparently only SBS is SBS and the other SKUs are a different family of servers.
For those who are truly interested, and I can't possibly imagine why...
Domain Controller: Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2008
File Servers: Microsoft Windows Server Standard Edition 2008 R2(tm)(c) for primary RAID and then we're replacing Samba boxes with Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 (tm)(c).
Also while we're being pedantic about which of 500 server products our small company is deploying... it's "you're doing" not "your doing".
To everyone considering Samba... fine. I don't care. Use Samba, I'm not going to but I'm sure it'll bake you cookies and fluff your pillows. I could care less. I've had a bad experience with it--but maybe my experience was the exception not the rule. All I know is that it was a PITA and never really worked right.
All of the clocks on our domain are sync'ed apparently that's a "feature" of Active Directory. Linux doesn't apparently respect that so when our file server somehow got a couple minutes out of sync with our AD, AD decided that it would just lock out access.