These developers you speak of are absolutely free to quit their secure jobs, go start a company, develop their own games and keep all the profits. They don't, of course, and that's why they don't get to show up with a cup in their hand when their company's 'AAA' hits it big.
Exactly right. And yeah, I've actually done just that. My last game took 5+ years with a dev team of over 200 on average. My new company is just me, building a game over the next two years, living off my savings. No matter how the AAA game I worked on did (except for some bonuses), it made no real difference to me, except for continued employment. I earned good money, but I certainly was never going to become rich off that salary. With my own company, I take all the risk but keep all the rewards.
All in all, I think it's a pretty fair system. You can either choose the relative security and stability of working for someone else, or you can embark on a high-risk operation of funding your own games, and with it get all the potential rewards.
In general, I think money is overrated as a motivator anyhow. I earned a healthy salary at my last job, but I really enjoyed the reasonable hours and friendly atmosphere of the company. The reason I started my own company was not because I dreamed of getting rich, but because I wanted to make my own games - chart my own future, so to speak. I figure I've got a 50/50 chance at best of even earning enough to finance my second game, but I figure I'd rather regret something I did than something I didn't.
You may also find it interesting that the artists at the game company I worked at had to work very hard to come up with good shaders that could make darker / black skin show up and look right. It's not just a matter of changing the RGB constants - humans are very perceptive when it comes to faces and skin coloration, and can tell when things "just look wrong", even if they don't precisely know what's wrong. I never learned all the details of what they had to do to get things looking right, but I'd imagine some of the technical challenges were somewhat analogous to the challenges in film you described, only they just happened to be constrained to a real-time digital world.
I find it amazing that you freely admit you're motivated by the desire to produce meaningless academic tripe that nobody else wants and to get paid for it (by taxpayers, right?), all while disparaging the work that others do (which people are willing to pay money for) as having "absolutely no utility", and therefore my motivations are irrelevant. Enjoy your ivory tower, and please, stay there.
The real question we should ask is "What is the social benefit of Nintendo keeping it's copyrights vs. the social loss of restring access to it's work ?"
Nintendo budgeted it's Mario development program so as to fully recoup it's costs in a few years of the console market and make a profit, which it did spectacularly well. So anyone looking to do the same can try, with full confidence that copyright will ensure their profitability. On the other hand, very few entities make business and creative decisions based on what will happen 70 years into the future.
Such long terms are not socially beneficial (because they don't induce more works to be created) but they are socially detrimental because they impede the free use of citizens own property, require public resources to enforce and deprive the public of a work that would have been in the public domain should copyright not existed.
So instead of an utilitarian compromise, "let's set copyrights just as long/short as necessary to maximize societal gain" we've ended up with this ludicrous "god given property right to profit indefinitely from your own ideas" which never existed throughout history and is actually harmful.
Here's the problem with your argument. For every megahit like Mario, there are hundreds of games which sold anywhere from pretty good to downright awful. It's the profits from the hits that cover the losses from the failures. You can't just look at a single game on its own and claimed "Ok, you've made enough money, so now we take that away from you".
Speaking from my own experience in the game development world (I'm a professional game programmer), the better the financial situation of the company, the more creative freedom the individual developers had. In companies where we were just barely making a profit, we were always up against tight publisher deadlines and really never had the time to innovate. In other, much more successful companies, we were largely given a free hand to come up with cool ideas for the games, because there wasn't so much financial pressure to kick the game out the door in such a hurry.
Granted, small sampling and anecdotal evidence, etc, and there were other significant differences between the companies' management teams, but I still think that financial success can be much more liberating in terms of creative freedom.
But why should you??? There is no silver lining to copyright. Its intentions aside, there is absolutely no proof that it spurs innovation or creativity, whichever industry you look in, whatever the term, and however you quantify the goods. And economists looked into this many times by now. So our best economics research tells us that the ONLY perceptible effect of copyright is censorship, which is a BREAK on creativity and innovation, and an infringement on our rights as humans, as outlined in the UDHR.
Could you clarify exactly what you mean? Are you suggesting that copyright be abolished? That is, if I released a new videogame, there would be no legal mechanism to prevent anyone from copying it across the net for free, or even selling it themselves? Sorry, just trying to understand where you're coming from.
I'll say this as an independent game developer who's currently living off my savings while developing new game and a new company: There's no way I'd spend two full years with zero income developing a new game if I knew it wasn't going to be protected with copyright and trademark law. I'm taking a huge financial risk with many years worth of my life savings. It's all going into a product which can be copied and downloaded quite easily (I won't use DRM), and I accept that. But at the very least, I'd like the government to acknowledge that I have an exclusive right to sell and distribute copies of my game to try to earn a living from my labors.
BTW, I do think software patents are absurd and need to be abolished. But I can't see how authors retaining control over their works is a bad thing for creativity. Like it or not, self-interest is a powerful motivator that shouldn't be dismissed.
It's not primarily game design which is driving the remakes. It's IP - Intellectual Properties. Brand recognition. THAT's what those games are capitalizing on. The gameplay (and designs) are completely different from game to game.
Apparently, about the time you stopped coding in C++ was the time I started professional C++ development (I'd been teaching myself for a few years before that).
You should take a look at what C++ 11 can do for C++ code. It's rather dramatic. Nowadays, I almost never use raw pointers or call new or delete, and follow RAII practices. Result? Memory management is nearly automatic (it feels almost like garbage collection), and leaks are pretty much forgotten. The class with an actual destructor in it is fairly rare in my codebase, since everything automatically cleans up after itself. It almost feels like coding in C#, just with nastier syntax.
Honestly, I'm enjoying working with C++ more than I ever have in my life. A lot of the tedium is gone, but the raw power and performance still remain. Also, with some real competition in the compiler space, Microsoft finally understands the importance of full compliance - they've announced that they're planning full C++11/14 compliance as an official goal. Here's hoping they'll stick to it, but they seems to be doing a reasonable job so far.
Windows 8 will succeed on tablet devices or those double sided laptops they advertise. It's faster than 7. No doubt 7 is a great product, 8 is looking forward to occupy touch screen interface niche where MS is lacking in presence.
Perhaps, but at the expense of their desktop OS? I know I'm going to be sticking with 7 until I'm not forced to deal with the Metro interface on my desktop machine. Metro actually seems pretty slick for tablets and phones, but it's absolutely ridiculous on a desktop machine without a touch interface.
Funny you mention that. I had told a colleague the other day that I predict this will be the same as Active Desktop. People will just want to turn it off / get it the hell out of the way so they can get some actual work done with their PCs. Unfortunately, it's going to be another set of APIs in Windows that will have to be maintained forever, and will turn the OS a bit schizophrenic in terms of it's presentation.
I'm actually really happy with Windows 7 - I really like the way it looks and performs. So, I don't think it's a matter of me simply not liking change, I think. I just can't see any use for this Metro stuff on a desktop. Sure, it makes perfect sense on tablets, but why try to pretend it's useful in situations where it obviously won't be?
Nature has absolutely no compunction about killing humans in large quantities regardless of whether we want to live with her or not. It seems like people who talk about "natural balance" perhaps don't consider (or don't care about) the fact that towns now exist in flood plains. While it's really nice in a 20/20 hindsight sort of way to say "well, you shouldn't have build your town there", it's not really practical to just pick up and move entire cities to the hills (which, btw, are subject to other "natural" catastrophes). You say damning rivers has negative consequences, but our entire civilization hinges on consuming large amounts of electricity. Unless you're willing to chuck it all (and some people are), there's no cleaner and safer way to produce large amounts of power.
The fact is, we're still learning as we go, and getting better at that sort of large-scale engineering. As per your example - you talk about forest fires like no one else has learned the lesson that minor, controlled burns are essential to the ecology. Allowing smaller, more frequent burns are now standard practice in many places (I'd guess except near populated areas). It's much harder to create massive environmentally-altering projects exactly because of all the lessons we've learned. And the fact is, we've certainly learned hard lessons about letting people and companies dump crap into rivers and lakes. There might be some holdout areas, but at least around where I live, there have been great improvements in water quality over the past few decades.
All that being said, this sounds pretty damn risky to me. The larger the potential affect, the more conservative we should be in what we're willing to risk.
Re:Hate to put a damper on the celebration
on
Diablo III Released
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· Score: 3, Insightful
At 7.76GB installed, that's one helluva a "dumb" MMO client. You are right of course, I'm just throwing that out there for everyone ponder. Video and music take up space, sure. But is there really that much texture data?
Executable code is tiny by comparison. All that data is textures, models, animation, and audio (sound effects, voice, and music). So, no, there's nothing to ponder, really.
Besides, it's much riskier driving your car to the mall, than the tiny risk of being shot by terrorists when you're there. Auto accidents kill 50,000 Americans every year (and 250,000 people worldwide). That's far more than have ever been killed by terrorists, but we do absolutely nothing about that.
Of course we do a lot about car safety. Are you kidding me? Traffic laws, speed limits, mandatory seatbelts laws, airbags, crumple zones, government mandated safety ratings, harsh DWI penalties, etc. But there's only so much you can reasonably do to protect people while still leaving that mode of transportation viable and cost-effective.
Besides, everyone understands that accidents happen, and can't realistically be 100% avoided or prevented. They're part of life, and while sad and horrible, it's so much more awful when someone deliberately takes away someone else's life. So, I understand what you're saying, but don't think you can really compare auto accidents and terrorism (or disease and terrorism). It's the vicious and deliberate act of terrorism that makes the deaths so much more shocking than an accident or death by illness.
And also, you're perhaps neglecting the "terror" part of terrorism. It's not really about the number of deaths... it's about the psychological impact they have. That's why bringing down a plane is probably more effective (terror-wise) than randomly shooting people in a mall - because people are already afraid of flying to some degree, and the fear of someone deliberately bringing down the plane only heightens that. Granted, the effect would be heightened at a shooting during the Christmas season as you mentioned. Ugh... I can't even bring myself to understand what sort of mindset it would take to do things like that.
Sounds familiar... is this a repost or did they sue other companies already? If the latter, what happened to those cases?
They already went after NCSoft, and it appeared the result of that was a settlement / dismissal of the case. The settlement is confidential, so we'll never really know what the real result was. Activision is one of my least-favorite companies, but I hope they tear Worlds.com a new one.
No, actually, Greenpeace can pull numbers out of their ass all day long, and few people challenge them on it, because "it's for a good cause", and "they're just trying to save the planet", etc. The whole "somewhere in the middle" has more relevance when you're talking about arguments with lots of grey areas. We're talking about simple numbers here. Greenpeace made a bunch of guesses on the numbers involved, and they've been called out on their very bad estimates and incorrect assumptions.
Apple has all the number they need for a very accurate reading on power usage. Unless you're going to accuse Apple of out and out falsifying those numbers (it would be an incredibly stupid thing to do, as one whistleblower would blow the lid on this), then I'm going to have to side with Apple here as being closer to "the truth".
I think you can only call this a "Streisand Effect" if no one knew about Mass Effect & Dragon Age and their various romantic options. If this were some no-name game that suddenly became well known to the world thanks to this bunch of busybodies, it might be apt. However, millions and millions of people have already played all these games, and this group won't affect that number in any way.
I have a feeling that the new generation of consoles will have the technical ability to lock out used games, but it will be up to the publisher/developer whether or not to actually utilize this feature. It's sort of hard to figure out how this will play out... we see EA certainly moving in this direction, with more functionality available out of the box if new than if used. But an outright block on used titles? I have a feeling customers may push back against something like that. To date, console-based DRM has been fairly unobtrusive. You buy the disc, throw it in, and play. This would be the first time a console-based DRM scheme went toe to toe against a common and expected usage scenario.
I think the only way that could be avoided is if an additional measure of convenience is gained to offset the loss (similar to Steam). For instance, one potential benefit of this system would be that we should no longer be required to put the disc in the drive to play. 100% hard drive installations would be really nice for your few favorite games. Or perhaps they need to start offering more competitive pricing at the lower-end of the spectrum to compete with the crazy deals Steam has.
...That being said, a friend's nephew had his Steam account hacked...
Hacked? That's a typical euphamism for "my PC is chock full of viruses and keyloggers thanks to the shady sites I visit and random shit I download and install, but I'm going to go ahead and blame Valve for losing my account."
Well of course. That's the point. But likening this to the equivalent of the mandatory removal of leaded gasoline and then saying "deal with it"?
Bullshit.
Stuff like this needs to be voted down in the free market by customers buying competitors' products. Oh wait, the free market only matters when it fattens CEO wallets. Customers don't count. Right.
-- BMO
I'm not sure why you mock "then don't buy it posts", and then proceed to tell everyone how it needs to be voted down by the free market? Granted, you included buying competitors products, but I'm under the assumption that people who post in this thread are actually interested in games and purchase them in some regular fashion...
That being said, yeah, totally agree with you. And btw, they don't give a shit about places like Slashdot - it's not really a gaming site... more a site for tech fans that also covers a few gaming stories that happen to coincide with Slashdot interests (i.e. anything DRM-related is ALWAYS picked up). They'd only start to care if the general gaming media and public started to vocally complain about it and also stopped buying their products.
All other languages are subsets of javascript so by really learning js then things like scheme, lisp and C aren't mysterious at all; I think this was a very good decision on Khan's part.
Uh... what? I have nothing against Javascript (and tend to agree it's a decent choice as a learning language), but since when is Java a superset of all other languages? And "there's just nothing you can't do easily with it"? No language can claim that. None.
Sorry to be contrary, but when people start claiming that there's one do-all-be-all language, I'm going to have to disagree. I'm a game developer, so of course we use C/C++ for our game where maximum performance is absolutely critical. However, we also write a lot of supporting code: we use C# for tools, Python for scripting and tool customization, Lua for our build server, and even a lightweight custom scripting language that's used by the game directly. Oh, yeah, and of course our web developers use a lot of Javascript.
Each of these languages has strengths and weaknesses, so we use what we feel is the most appropriate language for the task at hand. Picking a single language and sticking with it come hell or high water seems as foolish to me as a carpenter who refuses to use anything but his one favorite tool for all his tasks.
Most programmers don't fully grok multi-threading issues. Ask your typical programmer what a lock convoy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_convoy) is and you'll get a blank stare.
Hmm... I've been programming threaded systems for years, but hadn't heard that particular term. I'm not sure it's indicative of a lack of understanding, because I just nodded at the description and thought "ok, yeah, it's a specialized contention issue." If someone claimed to know how to write multithreaded code and couldn't explain what a race condition or deadlock was, or didn't understand what lock contention was, then I'd
That being said, I agree that many programmers don't fully appreciate how tricky it is to write correct and safe multi-threaded / thread-safe code. The problem is more that it's fairly simple to throw some long-running operation into a thread, but it's really, really difficult to write bug-free threaded code. I've found new programmers aren't scared of writing multithreaded code, and to me, that's just because they don't know enough to be scared of it.
Exactly, right. However, a correction (in terms of the audio part). It's great for decoding audio data (which admittedly is where the heavy lifting has to occur), but you can't put an entire audio engine on it's own thread, which has tons of complex state and branching.
I've always thought that Cell is not a bad idea necessarily, because when it's doing what it's designed to do, it's screamingly fast. However, you really need a more traditional symmetrical core to handle the bulk of the game-side processing.
Because developing for PC is even harder than Cell. Cell still has a known platform, where as PC opens up a whole new can of crazy. That said, I wish they would.
True in some fashion. PC games have to be much more scalable, and you have a ton of compatibility issues you have to deal with. On the other hands, for consoles, memory is ALWAYS a problem, and that's not an insignificant issue for games.
In particular, the PS3 is tricky because the Cell processor is quite fast at doing straight-up math operations on data that you can break up into small, discrete chunks. It was obviously designed first and foremost as a media processing chip, because that's the typical usage scenario for that sort of task. There are a finite number of tasks in game development that can be solved with that sort of processing model. As you can imagine, the data models for games tend to be quite complex. Worse, for the PS3, it means writing very specialized code to do this instead of utilizing more general-purpose threaded code. The Xbox processor, while not as fast for pure math crunching or vector processing operations, tends to outperform the cell in terms of multithreaded scenarios that are more commonly found in actual games.
I'd be all for ditching the cell in favor of a symmetrical multi-processor / multi-core design. This is far, far more useful for game development. The obvious downside is that backward compatibility is essentially impossible at that point. I'd love to see them retain a single cell processor in the architecture for the raw number crunching power as well as backward compatibility, and add a primary multi-core processor to handle the general-processing load. This wouldn't be unprecedented - this was precisely how the PS2 worked. The original hardware for the PS1 was included in the PS2, and was used primarily for managing the input devices, as well as a few other specialized tasks when a second hardware thread was needed.
Wil's character may have been annoying during the show, but he's a pretty cool guy. I can probably tolerate Wesley a bit better the second time around with that perspective.
Yep. How lovely that our government is finding more ways to look out for us (at our expense, mind you), when people are hurting financially, and the feds are spending money at a rate that will bankrupt the next generation.
I'm obviously not opposed to the idea of equipping cars with safety features, but it just seems like a bad time to introduce more auto regulations that will make things less affordable for people (you know, the recession and all?). In a few years time, the cost will drop to ridiculously low levels to install these, and they'll become standardized anyhow. Why not just wait for tech and market forces to push this into place naturally? Those that really want to be extra safe can purchase a vehicle with these options.
And if any of you say "But think of the children!", I'm seriously going to laugh at you for being so damned hypocritical.
Slashdot Mirror
These developers you speak of are absolutely free to quit their secure jobs, go start a company, develop their own games and keep all the profits. They don't, of course, and that's why they don't get to show up with a cup in their hand when their company's 'AAA' hits it big.
Exactly right. And yeah, I've actually done just that. My last game took 5+ years with a dev team of over 200 on average. My new company is just me, building a game over the next two years, living off my savings. No matter how the AAA game I worked on did (except for some bonuses), it made no real difference to me, except for continued employment. I earned good money, but I certainly was never going to become rich off that salary. With my own company, I take all the risk but keep all the rewards.
All in all, I think it's a pretty fair system. You can either choose the relative security and stability of working for someone else, or you can embark on a high-risk operation of funding your own games, and with it get all the potential rewards.
In general, I think money is overrated as a motivator anyhow. I earned a healthy salary at my last job, but I really enjoyed the reasonable hours and friendly atmosphere of the company. The reason I started my own company was not because I dreamed of getting rich, but because I wanted to make my own games - chart my own future, so to speak. I figure I've got a 50/50 chance at best of even earning enough to finance my second game, but I figure I'd rather regret something I did than something I didn't.
Thanks for an entertaining and informative post!
You may also find it interesting that the artists at the game company I worked at had to work very hard to come up with good shaders that could make darker / black skin show up and look right. It's not just a matter of changing the RGB constants - humans are very perceptive when it comes to faces and skin coloration, and can tell when things "just look wrong", even if they don't precisely know what's wrong. I never learned all the details of what they had to do to get things looking right, but I'd imagine some of the technical challenges were somewhat analogous to the challenges in film you described, only they just happened to be constrained to a real-time digital world.
I find it amazing that you freely admit you're motivated by the desire to produce meaningless academic tripe that nobody else wants and to get paid for it (by taxpayers, right?), all while disparaging the work that others do (which people are willing to pay money for) as having "absolutely no utility", and therefore my motivations are irrelevant. Enjoy your ivory tower, and please, stay there.
The real question we should ask is "What is the social benefit of Nintendo keeping it's copyrights vs. the social loss of restring access to it's work ?"
Nintendo budgeted it's Mario development program so as to fully recoup it's costs in a few years of the console market and make a profit, which it did spectacularly well. So anyone looking to do the same can try, with full confidence that copyright will ensure their profitability. On the other hand, very few entities make business and creative decisions based on what will happen 70 years into the future.
Such long terms are not socially beneficial (because they don't induce more works to be created) but they are socially detrimental because they impede the free use of citizens own property, require public resources to enforce and deprive the public of a work that would have been in the public domain should copyright not existed.
So instead of an utilitarian compromise, "let's set copyrights just as long/short as necessary to maximize societal gain" we've ended up with this ludicrous "god given property right to profit indefinitely from your own ideas" which never existed throughout history and is actually harmful.
Here's the problem with your argument. For every megahit like Mario, there are hundreds of games which sold anywhere from pretty good to downright awful. It's the profits from the hits that cover the losses from the failures. You can't just look at a single game on its own and claimed "Ok, you've made enough money, so now we take that away from you".
Speaking from my own experience in the game development world (I'm a professional game programmer), the better the financial situation of the company, the more creative freedom the individual developers had. In companies where we were just barely making a profit, we were always up against tight publisher deadlines and really never had the time to innovate. In other, much more successful companies, we were largely given a free hand to come up with cool ideas for the games, because there wasn't so much financial pressure to kick the game out the door in such a hurry.
Granted, small sampling and anecdotal evidence, etc, and there were other significant differences between the companies' management teams, but I still think that financial success can be much more liberating in terms of creative freedom.
But why should you??? There is no silver lining to copyright. Its intentions aside, there is absolutely no proof
that it spurs innovation or creativity, whichever industry you look in, whatever the term, and however you quantify
the goods. And economists looked into this
many times by now. So our best economics research tells us that the ONLY perceptible effect of copyright is censorship,
which is a BREAK on creativity and innovation, and an infringement on our rights as humans, as outlined in the UDHR.
Could you clarify exactly what you mean? Are you suggesting that copyright be abolished? That is, if I released a new videogame, there would be no legal mechanism to prevent anyone from copying it across the net for free, or even selling it themselves? Sorry, just trying to understand where you're coming from.
I'll say this as an independent game developer who's currently living off my savings while developing new game and a new company: There's no way I'd spend two full years with zero income developing a new game if I knew it wasn't going to be protected with copyright and trademark law. I'm taking a huge financial risk with many years worth of my life savings. It's all going into a product which can be copied and downloaded quite easily (I won't use DRM), and I accept that. But at the very least, I'd like the government to acknowledge that I have an exclusive right to sell and distribute copies of my game to try to earn a living from my labors.
BTW, I do think software patents are absurd and need to be abolished. But I can't see how authors retaining control over their works is a bad thing for creativity. Like it or not, self-interest is a powerful motivator that shouldn't be dismissed.
It's not primarily game design which is driving the remakes. It's IP - Intellectual Properties. Brand recognition. THAT's what those games are capitalizing on. The gameplay (and designs) are completely different from game to game.
Apparently, about the time you stopped coding in C++ was the time I started professional C++ development (I'd been teaching myself for a few years before that).
You should take a look at what C++ 11 can do for C++ code. It's rather dramatic. Nowadays, I almost never use raw pointers or call new or delete, and follow RAII practices. Result? Memory management is nearly automatic (it feels almost like garbage collection), and leaks are pretty much forgotten. The class with an actual destructor in it is fairly rare in my codebase, since everything automatically cleans up after itself. It almost feels like coding in C#, just with nastier syntax.
Honestly, I'm enjoying working with C++ more than I ever have in my life. A lot of the tedium is gone, but the raw power and performance still remain. Also, with some real competition in the compiler space, Microsoft finally understands the importance of full compliance - they've announced that they're planning full C++11/14 compliance as an official goal. Here's hoping they'll stick to it, but they seems to be doing a reasonable job so far.
Windows 8 will succeed on tablet devices or those double sided laptops they advertise. It's faster than 7. No doubt 7 is a great product, 8 is looking forward to occupy touch screen interface niche where MS is lacking in presence.
Perhaps, but at the expense of their desktop OS? I know I'm going to be sticking with 7 until I'm not forced to deal with the Metro interface on my desktop machine. Metro actually seems pretty slick for tablets and phones, but it's absolutely ridiculous on a desktop machine without a touch interface.
Funny you mention that. I had told a colleague the other day that I predict this will be the same as Active Desktop. People will just want to turn it off / get it the hell out of the way so they can get some actual work done with their PCs. Unfortunately, it's going to be another set of APIs in Windows that will have to be maintained forever, and will turn the OS a bit schizophrenic in terms of it's presentation.
I'm actually really happy with Windows 7 - I really like the way it looks and performs. So, I don't think it's a matter of me simply not liking change, I think. I just can't see any use for this Metro stuff on a desktop. Sure, it makes perfect sense on tablets, but why try to pretend it's useful in situations where it obviously won't be?
Meh. I just don't get this at all.
Nature has absolutely no compunction about killing humans in large quantities regardless of whether we want to live with her or not. It seems like people who talk about "natural balance" perhaps don't consider (or don't care about) the fact that towns now exist in flood plains. While it's really nice in a 20/20 hindsight sort of way to say "well, you shouldn't have build your town there", it's not really practical to just pick up and move entire cities to the hills (which, btw, are subject to other "natural" catastrophes). You say damning rivers has negative consequences, but our entire civilization hinges on consuming large amounts of electricity. Unless you're willing to chuck it all (and some people are), there's no cleaner and safer way to produce large amounts of power.
The fact is, we're still learning as we go, and getting better at that sort of large-scale engineering. As per your example - you talk about forest fires like no one else has learned the lesson that minor, controlled burns are essential to the ecology. Allowing smaller, more frequent burns are now standard practice in many places (I'd guess except near populated areas). It's much harder to create massive environmentally-altering projects exactly because of all the lessons we've learned. And the fact is, we've certainly learned hard lessons about letting people and companies dump crap into rivers and lakes. There might be some holdout areas, but at least around where I live, there have been great improvements in water quality over the past few decades.
All that being said, this sounds pretty damn risky to me. The larger the potential affect, the more conservative we should be in what we're willing to risk.
At 7.76GB installed, that's one helluva a "dumb" MMO client. You are right of course, I'm just throwing that out there for everyone ponder. Video and music take up space, sure. But is there really that much texture data?
Executable code is tiny by comparison. All that data is textures, models, animation, and audio (sound effects, voice, and music). So, no, there's nothing to ponder, really.
Well, sheezh, yo don't have to be an azz abot it.
Hggs and kizzes,
a Yank.
Besides, it's much riskier driving your car to the mall, than the tiny risk of being shot by terrorists when you're there. Auto accidents kill 50,000 Americans every year (and 250,000 people worldwide). That's far more than have ever been killed by terrorists, but we do absolutely nothing about that.
Of course we do a lot about car safety. Are you kidding me? Traffic laws, speed limits, mandatory seatbelts laws, airbags, crumple zones, government mandated safety ratings, harsh DWI penalties, etc. But there's only so much you can reasonably do to protect people while still leaving that mode of transportation viable and cost-effective.
Besides, everyone understands that accidents happen, and can't realistically be 100% avoided or prevented. They're part of life, and while sad and horrible, it's so much more awful when someone deliberately takes away someone else's life. So, I understand what you're saying, but don't think you can really compare auto accidents and terrorism (or disease and terrorism). It's the vicious and deliberate act of terrorism that makes the deaths so much more shocking than an accident or death by illness.
And also, you're perhaps neglecting the "terror" part of terrorism. It's not really about the number of deaths... it's about the psychological impact they have. That's why bringing down a plane is probably more effective (terror-wise) than randomly shooting people in a mall - because people are already afraid of flying to some degree, and the fear of someone deliberately bringing down the plane only heightens that. Granted, the effect would be heightened at a shooting during the Christmas season as you mentioned. Ugh... I can't even bring myself to understand what sort of mindset it would take to do things like that.
Sounds familiar... is this a repost or did they sue other companies already? If the latter, what happened to those cases?
They already went after NCSoft, and it appeared the result of that was a settlement / dismissal of the case. The settlement is confidential, so we'll never really know what the real result was. Activision is one of my least-favorite companies, but I hope they tear Worlds.com a new one.
http://massively.joystiq.com/2010/04/27/worlds-com-vs-ncsoft-lawsuit-settled/
No, actually, Greenpeace can pull numbers out of their ass all day long, and few people challenge them on it, because "it's for a good cause", and "they're just trying to save the planet", etc. The whole "somewhere in the middle" has more relevance when you're talking about arguments with lots of grey areas. We're talking about simple numbers here. Greenpeace made a bunch of guesses on the numbers involved, and they've been called out on their very bad estimates and incorrect assumptions.
Apple has all the number they need for a very accurate reading on power usage. Unless you're going to accuse Apple of out and out falsifying those numbers (it would be an incredibly stupid thing to do, as one whistleblower would blow the lid on this), then I'm going to have to side with Apple here as being closer to "the truth".
I think you can only call this a "Streisand Effect" if no one knew about Mass Effect & Dragon Age and their various romantic options. If this were some no-name game that suddenly became well known to the world thanks to this bunch of busybodies, it might be apt. However, millions and millions of people have already played all these games, and this group won't affect that number in any way.
I have a feeling that the new generation of consoles will have the technical ability to lock out used games, but it will be up to the publisher/developer whether or not to actually utilize this feature. It's sort of hard to figure out how this will play out... we see EA certainly moving in this direction, with more functionality available out of the box if new than if used. But an outright block on used titles? I have a feeling customers may push back against something like that. To date, console-based DRM has been fairly unobtrusive. You buy the disc, throw it in, and play. This would be the first time a console-based DRM scheme went toe to toe against a common and expected usage scenario.
I think the only way that could be avoided is if an additional measure of convenience is gained to offset the loss (similar to Steam). For instance, one potential benefit of this system would be that we should no longer be required to put the disc in the drive to play. 100% hard drive installations would be really nice for your few favorite games. Or perhaps they need to start offering more competitive pricing at the lower-end of the spectrum to compete with the crazy deals Steam has.
...That being said, a friend's nephew had his Steam account hacked...
Hacked? That's a typical euphamism for "my PC is chock full of viruses and keyloggers thanks to the shady sites I visit and random shit I download and install, but I'm going to go ahead and blame Valve for losing my account."
So much corporate cock sucking in this thread.
"Herp derp, don't buy it then"
Well of course. That's the point. But likening this to the equivalent of the mandatory removal of leaded gasoline and then saying "deal with it"?
Bullshit.
Stuff like this needs to be voted down in the free market by customers buying competitors' products. Oh wait, the free market only matters when it fattens CEO wallets. Customers don't count. Right.
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BMO
I'm not sure why you mock "then don't buy it posts", and then proceed to tell everyone how it needs to be voted down by the free market? Granted, you included buying competitors products, but I'm under the assumption that people who post in this thread are actually interested in games and purchase them in some regular fashion...
That being said, yeah, totally agree with you. And btw, they don't give a shit about places like Slashdot - it's not really a gaming site... more a site for tech fans that also covers a few gaming stories that happen to coincide with Slashdot interests (i.e. anything DRM-related is ALWAYS picked up). They'd only start to care if the general gaming media and public started to vocally complain about it and also stopped buying their products.
All other languages are subsets of javascript so by really learning js then things like scheme, lisp and C aren't mysterious at all; I think this was a very good decision on Khan's part.
Uh... what? I have nothing against Javascript (and tend to agree it's a decent choice as a learning language), but since when is Java a superset of all other languages? And "there's just nothing you can't do easily with it"? No language can claim that. None.
Sorry to be contrary, but when people start claiming that there's one do-all-be-all language, I'm going to have to disagree. I'm a game developer, so of course we use C/C++ for our game where maximum performance is absolutely critical. However, we also write a lot of supporting code: we use C# for tools, Python for scripting and tool customization, Lua for our build server, and even a lightweight custom scripting language that's used by the game directly. Oh, yeah, and of course our web developers use a lot of Javascript.
Each of these languages has strengths and weaknesses, so we use what we feel is the most appropriate language for the task at hand. Picking a single language and sticking with it come hell or high water seems as foolish to me as a carpenter who refuses to use anything but his one favorite tool for all his tasks.
Most programmers don't fully grok multi-threading issues. Ask your typical programmer what a lock convoy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_convoy) is and you'll get a blank stare.
Hmm... I've been programming threaded systems for years, but hadn't heard that particular term. I'm not sure it's indicative of a lack of understanding, because I just nodded at the description and thought "ok, yeah, it's a specialized contention issue." If someone claimed to know how to write multithreaded code and couldn't explain what a race condition or deadlock was, or didn't understand what lock contention was, then I'd
That being said, I agree that many programmers don't fully appreciate how tricky it is to write correct and safe multi-threaded / thread-safe code. The problem is more that it's fairly simple to throw some long-running operation into a thread, but it's really, really difficult to write bug-free threaded code. I've found new programmers aren't scared of writing multithreaded code, and to me, that's just because they don't know enough to be scared of it.
Exactly, right. However, a correction (in terms of the audio part). It's great for decoding audio data (which admittedly is where the heavy lifting has to occur), but you can't put an entire audio engine on it's own thread, which has tons of complex state and branching.
I've always thought that Cell is not a bad idea necessarily, because when it's doing what it's designed to do, it's screamingly fast. However, you really need a more traditional symmetrical core to handle the bulk of the game-side processing.
Because developing for PC is even harder than Cell. Cell still has a known platform, where as PC opens up a whole new can of crazy. That said, I wish they would.
True in some fashion. PC games have to be much more scalable, and you have a ton of compatibility issues you have to deal with. On the other hands, for consoles, memory is ALWAYS a problem, and that's not an insignificant issue for games.
In particular, the PS3 is tricky because the Cell processor is quite fast at doing straight-up math operations on data that you can break up into small, discrete chunks. It was obviously designed first and foremost as a media processing chip, because that's the typical usage scenario for that sort of task. There are a finite number of tasks in game development that can be solved with that sort of processing model. As you can imagine, the data models for games tend to be quite complex. Worse, for the PS3, it means writing very specialized code to do this instead of utilizing more general-purpose threaded code. The Xbox processor, while not as fast for pure math crunching or vector processing operations, tends to outperform the cell in terms of multithreaded scenarios that are more commonly found in actual games.
I'd be all for ditching the cell in favor of a symmetrical multi-processor / multi-core design. This is far, far more useful for game development. The obvious downside is that backward compatibility is essentially impossible at that point. I'd love to see them retain a single cell processor in the architecture for the raw number crunching power as well as backward compatibility, and add a primary multi-core processor to handle the general-processing load. This wouldn't be unprecedented - this was precisely how the PS2 worked. The original hardware for the PS1 was included in the PS2, and was used primarily for managing the input devices, as well as a few other specialized tasks when a second hardware thread was needed.
Make that because it has Wil Wheaton in it!
Wil's character may have been annoying during the show, but he's a pretty cool guy. I can probably tolerate Wesley a bit better the second time around with that perspective.
Yep. How lovely that our government is finding more ways to look out for us (at our expense, mind you), when people are hurting financially, and the feds are spending money at a rate that will bankrupt the next generation.
I'm obviously not opposed to the idea of equipping cars with safety features, but it just seems like a bad time to introduce more auto regulations that will make things less affordable for people (you know, the recession and all?). In a few years time, the cost will drop to ridiculously low levels to install these, and they'll become standardized anyhow. Why not just wait for tech and market forces to push this into place naturally? Those that really want to be extra safe can purchase a vehicle with these options.
And if any of you say "But think of the children!", I'm seriously going to laugh at you for being so damned hypocritical.