I've been wishing for the death of DirectX for many years, and it's not happened, so I'm not holding my breath this time.
If there's one thing that MS is experts in, it is in creating lock-ins. So whether Armageddon or the death of DirectX come first, let's just say I wouldn't make huge bets.
Agreed completely, however......I used to work in a field fairly close. We weren't passing laws, but essentially we were doing regulations. Here's the thing: If you have a rule that says only amendments that are related can be added, the trolls will simply move to discussing you to death on what exactly "related" means. While you cut down on the obvious bullshit, you add a lot of conflict to the non-obvious and for the actual useful - the same guys who file this nonsense amendments all the time will doubt that your own very closely related amendment actually is related, just to piss you off, delay the process and make everyone hate a law they don't want to see passed.
The original thinking might have been that it's easier to deal with non-related amendments than it is to deal with that kind of bullshit all the time.
I actually think this one is promising, for two reasons.
One, it has a narrow focus on gaming. Narrow focus means it can concentrate on getting one thing done right, and gaming means its use case is something you can just stop doing when it becomes uncomfortable. It's not like sitting still and looking at a screen for hours would be specifically healthy.
Two, many of the problems are in areas where we've expanded our knowledge and abilities recently. Yeah, screens are still below the human resolution, but keep in mind that this is only within a small focus area, and the peripheral vision is much lower-resolution. I don't (yet) know how they handle the FOV of 110Â, but if they do it right, they provide a higher resolution in the center, and from the video it seems that could be the case. And the other is motion/head tracking, which has improved constantly over the years, and is important to avoid motion-sickness, which is largely caused by conflicting information about your orientation and position in space that your brain receives from the visual vs. other senses.
From what I've seen in the video, they only want to go to prototype stage at this point in time, and they appear to already have some individual prototypes (no doubt manually assembled, etc.) that they have shown to people to convince them.
Yes, ideas are cheap. Which is why successful kickstarters show more than just the idea, they demonstrate you can pull it off, by showing an early version, a prototype, or whatever you have.
There are many, many kickstarter projects that don't reach their funding goals.
As usual, the answer is "no" to every headline that asks a question.
Why? Well, it's from MS and it's not yet on version 3. No point wasting anything on it. Also, it's from MS and without fail, everyone who has ever gotten into bed with MS has been fucked. They're like the Casanova of the IT world.
We've had a close encounter with such a black hole just recently, and you wonder if it exists?
Look, my country is currently putting billions of Euros into bailout funds all around. A few years ago, they were cutting social security to save a couple millions. The real story here has been missed by the mainstream media completely - that without so much as blinking, our politicians have raised the amount of money they're throwing around by an order of magnitude (or three, if you speak as an engineer). Had you asked a few years ago for a few millions for some purpose everyone agreed upon was a good thing, they would've discussed it for weeks or months and then said they don't have the money. Then the so-called financial crisis hit and amounts several thousand times as much were available with emergency decrees within days.
And they wonder why we consider them liars, frauds and scum of the earth.
Statistics (and marketing people are serious on statistics, trust me) show that advertisement does work - about half the time.
Everyone in marketing knows that half of the money you throw at marketing could just as well be burned. The problem is that you never know beforehand which half. So they keep doing it. Some concepts get finally dropped because they almost never work, and some are kept because they work often. Sadly, some of the ones that work fairly often are also the most obnoxious.
Are you retarded or have you been living under a rock for the past two decades?
I've been a gamer all my life, and I've been writing computer games for around 25 years. I've been having an eye on the games industry/scene for about as long.
There were two great times for small indy developers - one was the early years, when graphics and sound where so limited and people didn't expect that much and a one-person project or a small team could bring out a full game that rivaled everything else on the market. Mostly, think C64 times. Think computer games magazines printing the hexcodes of entire (small) games that you could type down and run on your computer. Those times.
The other time is now. Since a couple years, hobbyists have tools at their disposal that make it possible to compete again. You can get Unity3D for free or for just over a thousand Euros. Other engines are affordable, too. You have Cheetah or Blender or other 3D software for your models, and free or affordable software for textures, graphics, sound effects, music. And you have a vast Internet where you can find fee or affordable assets, with access being made ever easier by the likes of the Unity Asset Store. And finally, integration between all of these components has finally reached a level where things can realistically be accomplished. Because sure you could buy 3D models from various sites for 10+ years - but format differences and a whole bundle of unknowns made actually using them in your projects so much work that it really wasn't worth it. And finally, thanks to Apple, Steam and others you have a shot at distribution even as a small-time developer. Because having a website is only one part of the equation.
Today is a great time to be around when you're a small game developer. "Homebrewn is dead" - are you fucking kidding me, or are you pushing an agenda around that is so dead and wrong, it has a funny smell all around it?
We don't have to wait. We already know that they don't. This time, however, we don't even have to fight over that, as MS Surface isn't even competing with the iPad. It's targeting a different segment of the same market, but very few people who buy iPads would even consider the MS tablet.
You know, the same way that a Mercedes E and a VW Beetle don't really compete with each other even though both are cars.
Ok, so first, if the crime doesn't happen, how do you know you prevented it? Maybe it just didn't happen.
The real world is slightly complicated, so it really depends.
In some cases, the guy who went shopping with his shotgun in hand is a pretty good indicator, even if after noticing the nearby cops he just buys a beer.
In other cases, like property crimes, you can wait until a predicted crime happens and arrest the criminal on the spot.
In many cases, statistics will provide the answer - if you double patrols in some area and crime rate drops considerably, you can check for other effects (say, unemployment in the area dropping) and, after correcting for them, assume that what's left is at least partially caused by the patrols.
Actually, I completely agree with that one, because the last thing I want to see done is giving smokers anything for smoking, because you want as much disincentives as you can get.
And for the same reason, in this case the money should go to the artists, because you want incentives for them to create more stuff.
Yes, it is. But not in the way that it is usually taught. Mathematics is one of those fields that are more than vital, and yet we haven't figured out how to teach it properly. I'm talking about math, not doing calculations. We have pocket calculators and apps for that.
Math, including Algebra, isn't about being able to add 15+38 in your head, it's about understanding what the numbers mean when the evening news tell you something about crime rates or the economy.
The debate consists entirely on one side bringing up irrelevant and minor points and demanding that they be refuted in detail. This gives them time to come up with the next batch of irrelevant details
Which is pretty much the principle that pseudo-scientists, scammers, religious and other people are following as well.
The thing is that the human mind does not work rationally or scientifically, but it does defend what it has decided upon as truth - sometimes to the death.
The real issue here is neither meteorological nor political, it is psychological. And I claim that if we find a cure to religion, we've also found our solution to climate-change denial and Bushism.
So any change to american (and to a lesser degree, other western) energy usage will be disproportionately larger than in many other places. For example, the average human in India uses 5% of the amount of energy that the average american uses. If all of India were to halve their energy usage, it would have about the same impact than americans reducing theirs by 10%.
The claim that this will be a bad thing for humanity as a whole.
Nobody claims that. As always, there will be some that profit - most likely those who already do. The 1% won't have any trouble - like another poster said - to build a new mansion on higher grounds and install more powerful A/C units.
We do, however, already know the impact of bad weather on large parts of the human population. Those with neither mansions nor A/C. We know from the agricultural sciences and anthropology that billions of people rely on fairly narrow climate conditions for their crops and thus food and that especially less advanced agriculture does not adapt quickly. We do know from geography that many millions of people live in areas that will be flooded if water levels rise even moderately. We do know from history that war and genocide have always been the results if entire people get displaced by natural or other disasters.
So far, everything in the theories presented by the world-wide scientific community has turned out to be true, as you yourself admit. And yet you are fighting a retreat battle on the rest of the scepticism. I am all for scepticism - but there is a point where the burden of proof turns around, where it is the ones claiming the opposite who need to prove their point.
Where is that point for you? How much more evidence do you need to see before you agree that those who claim everything will be fine are the ones who need to support their claim with some evidence?
The Apple II was neither a smartphone, nor a tablet, nor a games console - and do you know what all of those have in common? No serious developer would consider actually writing his software one them, due to form factor, peripherals, screen size and basically everything else.
You don't need a seperate computer to write software for a Mac - that would be the proper comparison. You also don't need to participate in the developer program if you don't want to distribute it via the App Store. And no filtering, either.
There are parts of your criticism that are valid. You shouldn't waste them by putting them into a ridiculous argument that won't be taken seriously.
It's a service for people to express whatever the fuck goes on in their mind,
I pity them if what goes on in their mind fits into 140 characters. Oh, wait - it often doesn't. That's why people have invented all those shortcuts and tricks. Instead of, you know, simply lifting a completely bullshit character limitation.
If you don't understand the world, have you considered the possibility that you may be a retard?
Not everyone who is different from the mainstream is dumber.
Broadcasting to everyone you know about something that affects only some of them is spamming, plain and simple. I thought every modern phone supported SMS to multiple recipients.
I've never understood what the whole Twitter fad is all about. For SMS messages, at least the length limit has a technical purpose. For artistic reasons, extreme limits sometimes work as well. But for expressing thoughts or anything?
It's a cute idea gone horribly wrong, in my eyes. But apparently, in a world where ADD is cool, it's exactly what the monkeys want.
If anything, Twitter is living reminder that I don't understand the world anymore. I simply don't get it, and I don't understand how the company can be worth more than, say, the pub down the street.
...Facebook will finally be good for something - curing us of this stupid fixation on stock prices. Ever since the dot-com bubble, we (or at least the evening news) have been following the various stock prices and indices as if they meant something for the real world, which more and more they don't. Not that they ever really did.
The problem is, of course, that as soon as people start believing they do, that changes.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been wishing for the death of DirectX for many years, and it's not happened, so I'm not holding my breath this time.
If there's one thing that MS is experts in, it is in creating lock-ins. So whether Armageddon or the death of DirectX come first, let's just say I wouldn't make huge bets.
Agreed completely, however... ...I used to work in a field fairly close. We weren't passing laws, but essentially we were doing regulations. Here's the thing: If you have a rule that says only amendments that are related can be added, the trolls will simply move to discussing you to death on what exactly "related" means. While you cut down on the obvious bullshit, you add a lot of conflict to the non-obvious and for the actual useful - the same guys who file this nonsense amendments all the time will doubt that your own very closely related amendment actually is related, just to piss you off, delay the process and make everyone hate a law they don't want to see passed.
The original thinking might have been that it's easier to deal with non-related amendments than it is to deal with that kind of bullshit all the time.
I actually think this one is promising, for two reasons.
One, it has a narrow focus on gaming. Narrow focus means it can concentrate on getting one thing done right, and gaming means its use case is something you can just stop doing when it becomes uncomfortable. It's not like sitting still and looking at a screen for hours would be specifically healthy.
Two, many of the problems are in areas where we've expanded our knowledge and abilities recently. Yeah, screens are still below the human resolution, but keep in mind that this is only within a small focus area, and the peripheral vision is much lower-resolution. I don't (yet) know how they handle the FOV of 110Â, but if they do it right, they provide a higher resolution in the center, and from the video it seems that could be the case. And the other is motion/head tracking, which has improved constantly over the years, and is important to avoid motion-sickness, which is largely caused by conflicting information about your orientation and position in space that your brain receives from the visual vs. other senses.
From what I've seen in the video, they only want to go to prototype stage at this point in time, and they appear to already have some individual prototypes (no doubt manually assembled, etc.) that they have shown to people to convince them.
Yes, ideas are cheap. Which is why successful kickstarters show more than just the idea, they demonstrate you can pull it off, by showing an early version, a prototype, or whatever you have.
There are many, many kickstarter projects that don't reach their funding goals.
or it could be the other way around.
(credits to Tim Minchin)
As usual, the answer is "no" to every headline that asks a question.
Why? Well, it's from MS and it's not yet on version 3. No point wasting anything on it. Also, it's from MS and without fail, everyone who has ever gotten into bed with MS has been fucked. They're like the Casanova of the IT world.
We've had a close encounter with such a black hole just recently, and you wonder if it exists?
Look, my country is currently putting billions of Euros into bailout funds all around. A few years ago, they were cutting social security to save a couple millions. The real story here has been missed by the mainstream media completely - that without so much as blinking, our politicians have raised the amount of money they're throwing around by an order of magnitude (or three, if you speak as an engineer). Had you asked a few years ago for a few millions for some purpose everyone agreed upon was a good thing, they would've discussed it for weeks or months and then said they don't have the money. Then the so-called financial crisis hit and amounts several thousand times as much were available with emergency decrees within days.
And they wonder why we consider them liars, frauds and scum of the earth.
'The intention was to say that science is as important as a shares rating on Wall Street,'
If not more, but that would've been too much to ask. With that one sentence, that guy who I've not heard about before, has put himself well up there.
I think the same, but sadly, we are the majority.
Statistics (and marketing people are serious on statistics, trust me) show that advertisement does work - about half the time.
Everyone in marketing knows that half of the money you throw at marketing could just as well be burned. The problem is that you never know beforehand which half. So they keep doing it. Some concepts get finally dropped because they almost never work, and some are kept because they work often.
Sadly, some of the ones that work fairly often are also the most obnoxious.
Are you retarded or have you been living under a rock for the past two decades?
I've been a gamer all my life, and I've been writing computer games for around 25 years. I've been having an eye on the games industry/scene for about as long.
There were two great times for small indy developers - one was the early years, when graphics and sound where so limited and people didn't expect that much and a one-person project or a small team could bring out a full game that rivaled everything else on the market. Mostly, think C64 times. Think computer games magazines printing the hexcodes of entire (small) games that you could type down and run on your computer. Those times.
The other time is now. Since a couple years, hobbyists have tools at their disposal that make it possible to compete again. You can get Unity3D for free or for just over a thousand Euros. Other engines are affordable, too. You have Cheetah or Blender or other 3D software for your models, and free or affordable software for textures, graphics, sound effects, music. And you have a vast Internet where you can find fee or affordable assets, with access being made ever easier by the likes of the Unity Asset Store. And finally, integration between all of these components has finally reached a level where things can realistically be accomplished. Because sure you could buy 3D models from various sites for 10+ years - but format differences and a whole bundle of unknowns made actually using them in your projects so much work that it really wasn't worth it.
And finally, thanks to Apple, Steam and others you have a shot at distribution even as a small-time developer. Because having a website is only one part of the equation.
Today is a great time to be around when you're a small game developer. "Homebrewn is dead" - are you fucking kidding me, or are you pushing an agenda around that is so dead and wrong, it has a funny smell all around it?
We don't have to wait. We already know that they don't. This time, however, we don't even have to fight over that, as MS Surface isn't even competing with the iPad. It's targeting a different segment of the same market, but very few people who buy iPads would even consider the MS tablet.
You know, the same way that a Mercedes E and a VW Beetle don't really compete with each other even though both are cars.
You forgot to tell what management did after his announcement. Ground the fleet?
Ok, so first, if the crime doesn't happen, how do you know you prevented it? Maybe it just didn't happen.
The real world is slightly complicated, so it really depends.
In some cases, the guy who went shopping with his shotgun in hand is a pretty good indicator, even if after noticing the nearby cops he just buys a beer.
In other cases, like property crimes, you can wait until a predicted crime happens and arrest the criminal on the spot.
In many cases, statistics will provide the answer - if you double patrols in some area and crime rate drops considerably, you can check for other effects (say, unemployment in the area dropping) and, after correcting for them, assume that what's left is at least partially caused by the patrols.
And how many of those artists do you think are going to risk their careers by standing up and complaining about it?
One would be enough. If the complaint isn't some whining on his blog, but a criminal complaint and a solid civil lawsuit.
Actually, I completely agree with that one, because the last thing I want to see done is giving smokers anything for smoking, because you want as much disincentives as you can get.
And for the same reason, in this case the money should go to the artists, because you want incentives for them to create more stuff.
Yes, it is. But not in the way that it is usually taught. Mathematics is one of those fields that are more than vital, and yet we haven't figured out how to teach it properly. I'm talking about math, not doing calculations. We have pocket calculators and apps for that.
Math, including Algebra, isn't about being able to add 15+38 in your head, it's about understanding what the numbers mean when the evening news tell you something about crime rates or the economy.
The debate consists entirely on one side bringing up irrelevant and minor points and demanding that they be refuted in detail. This gives them time to come up with the next batch of irrelevant details
Which is pretty much the principle that pseudo-scientists, scammers, religious and other people are following as well.
The thing is that the human mind does not work rationally or scientifically, but it does defend what it has decided upon as truth - sometimes to the death.
The real issue here is neither meteorological nor political, it is psychological. And I claim that if we find a cure to religion, we've also found our solution to climate-change denial and Bushism.
The problem with this logic is that America is only 5% of the world.
Yes, but it uses 20% of the world's energy.
http://www.worldpopulationbalance.org/population_energy/
So any change to american (and to a lesser degree, other western) energy usage will be disproportionately larger than in many other places. For example, the average human in India uses 5% of the amount of energy that the average american uses. If all of India were to halve their energy usage, it would have about the same impact than americans reducing theirs by 10%.
The claim that this will be a bad thing for humanity as a whole.
Nobody claims that. As always, there will be some that profit - most likely those who already do. The 1% won't have any trouble - like another poster said - to build a new mansion on higher grounds and install more powerful A/C units.
We do, however, already know the impact of bad weather on large parts of the human population. Those with neither mansions nor A/C. We know from the agricultural sciences and anthropology that billions of people rely on fairly narrow climate conditions for their crops and thus food and that especially less advanced agriculture does not adapt quickly. We do know from geography that many millions of people live in areas that will be flooded if water levels rise even moderately. We do know from history that war and genocide have always been the results if entire people get displaced by natural or other disasters.
So far, everything in the theories presented by the world-wide scientific community has turned out to be true, as you yourself admit. And yet you are fighting a retreat battle on the rest of the scepticism. I am all for scepticism - but there is a point where the burden of proof turns around, where it is the ones claiming the opposite who need to prove their point.
Where is that point for you? How much more evidence do you need to see before you agree that those who claim everything will be fine are the ones who need to support their claim with some evidence?
The Apple II was neither a smartphone, nor a tablet, nor a games console - and do you know what all of those have in common? No serious developer would consider actually writing his software one them, due to form factor, peripherals, screen size and basically everything else.
You don't need a seperate computer to write software for a Mac - that would be the proper comparison. You also don't need to participate in the developer program if you don't want to distribute it via the App Store. And no filtering, either.
There are parts of your criticism that are valid. You shouldn't waste them by putting them into a ridiculous argument that won't be taken seriously.
It's a service for people to express whatever the fuck goes on in their mind,
I pity them if what goes on in their mind fits into 140 characters. Oh, wait - it often doesn't. That's why people have invented all those shortcuts and tricks. Instead of, you know, simply lifting a completely bullshit character limitation.
If you don't understand the world, have you considered the possibility that you may be a retard?
Not everyone who is different from the mainstream is dumber.
Broadcasting to everyone you know about something that affects only some of them is spamming, plain and simple. I thought every modern phone supported SMS to multiple recipients.
Why do you assume that the "or" in your first sentence has to be an XOR ?
With all of their cash, they can do both - and they should.
Finally a like mind!
I've never understood what the whole Twitter fad is all about. For SMS messages, at least the length limit has a technical purpose. For artistic reasons, extreme limits sometimes work as well. But for expressing thoughts or anything?
It's a cute idea gone horribly wrong, in my eyes. But apparently, in a world where ADD is cool, it's exactly what the monkeys want.
If anything, Twitter is living reminder that I don't understand the world anymore. I simply don't get it, and I don't understand how the company can be worth more than, say, the pub down the street.
...Facebook will finally be good for something - curing us of this stupid fixation on stock prices. Ever since the dot-com bubble, we (or at least the evening news) have been following the various stock prices and indices as if they meant something for the real world, which more and more they don't. Not that they ever really did.
The problem is, of course, that as soon as people start believing they do, that changes.