It's like someone wanted to embrace continuous integration but forgot the part about being able to quickly and easily roll back from your own source repositories when a mistake is made. Oops.
Rather than calling government a "business", I think perhaps it's a bit more accurate to say that both businesses and governments share a common ancestry - they're both massive bureaucratic organizations, filled with people who wish to acquire and use power for their own benefit. In both cases, this means a natural tendency toward expanding their scope of responsibilities in order to build fiefdoms wherever possible, hiring underlings to boss around, and building very deep organizational charts which are massively inefficient, but with lots of mini-empire-building opportunities all the way down the ranks.
This isn't to say that there aren't good and decent people working in these organizations - most of them probably are, but in these sort of hierarchical structures, all you need is one asshole above you in the ranks to effectively negate all of your good intentions by issuing horrible directives and setting asinine rules and regulations.
Actually, it was Apple who qualified the changes. They claim it would take a handful of engineers spending four to six weeks, or something thereabouts. So, I guess for Apple that's relatively "minor". For a one-programmer shop like mine, that's fairly significant. Depends on your perspective, I guess.
My feeling is that the FBI saw that their chances in court were not looking great, so decided to accept the outside offers (NSA?) for cracking the phone that had in fact been available to them all this time. The excuse that they no longer need to crack the phone also allows them to back down without losing face.
I know it goes against Slashdot tradition and all, but maybe try reading TFA first:
Scholl, 35, isn’t the obvious choice to run a fledgling, high-risk aerospace company. He’s a boyish coder and amateur pilot who spent five years at Amazon.com, working on things like automated ad systems, before starting a mobile shopping app maker called Kima Labs. Groupon bought Kima in 2012, leaving him with money in his pocket and a yearning to build something more meaningful than coupon software.
By your argument, we shouldn't be using our current e-mail protocols for anything requiring security of any sort, and I absolutely agree, but that's not the reality of the world we live in. Everyone has need of a secure messaging protocol on occasion, not just commercial institutions. What happens when you reset your password to nearly any web site that requires a secure login? Yep, you get sent a reset code or link by e-mail, right in the clear, which is used to authenticate that you're the owner of that account. What open, universal, secure messaging alternative do we have for this sort of thing? There's clearly a need for it.
If we now understand how to do a better job of securing e-mail and why doing so is a good thing, is there a reason not to? I'm afraid I just don't really understand your apparent opposition to a more secure e-mail protocol. Did you fervently oppose HTTPS as well, accusing people of "blaming HTTP" for trying to do things with it that it was never designed to do? This seems rather analogous to me.
The current e-mail protocols were designed at a time when everybody on the internet was expected to play nice. It could use an upgrade for today's significantly more hostile environment. There's really no reason we shouldn't have an upgraded protocol with more security and better authentication built in.
Nothing against the brilliant minds that created some of these early protocols, but they simply couldn't foresee some of the modern security and privacy issues the current internet has to deal with. We've also learned a thing or two about encryption and secure protocols in the last few decades, and upgraded protocols accordingly, right? I think it's a good time to try to introduce an upgraded e-mail standard. Whether it takes hold or not is a question, but with some of the big names apparently behind it, I don't see why not.
BTW, if you're going to reject out of hand a proposal for a new standard because of the names of the companies involved, then you're not thinking things through clearly. This would be an open standard, meaning it's possible for security specialists to vet and declare the protocol safe and secure, just like we do with TLS and other modern protocols. It seems like it would be rather tricky to hide secret backdoors in an open standard.
This seems like it could be done fairly easily in software right inside even consumer-grade routers, and would at least help in mitigating some of the security threats of these devices. These routers already offer "guest networks" on most newer models, so this seems like the next logical step. Just create a simple way at router setup/configuration time to create an "IoT network" as well which is isolated from anything else on the router for safety.
It's not exactly bricking the device - it just won't connect to Amazon anymore, and it can be updated via USB at any time to restore that functionality. Anything you've already downloaded would still be available for reading as always. An AC below claims it's a certificate store update, which makes a lot of sense to me, especially how SHA-1 is being depreciated everywhere. That would explain the talk about new "standards."
Yep, I can't even find the bizarro connector for my version 1 Kindle, and it just sat unpowered for years. I have a latest gen Kindle which has already been updated. I can't ever imagine even using my old Kindle - I'd instead just use my old iPad if it came to that. This just reminded me to unregister it from my account and toss it in the trash.
Keep in mind that even were it not to connect, you can still upgrade the firmware manually over USB, from what I understand, so it's not like it would be bricked forever. I'd guess there are some technical reasons why they don't leave the online upgrade capabilities in place longer though, because it's certainly not as though Amazon couldn't afford to leave a few extra servers running.
Just to be clear... this is not Pale Moon writing their own web browser. This is Pale Moon reforking from a newer Firefox branch and reimplementing the features that distinguishes them from Firefox. So, the article and summary says "from scratch", which is misleading because it's not "from scratch" as most people understand the term (writing a new browser yourself from the ground up), it's modifying the newly branched Firefox code, adding their own new features or stripping out crap from Firefox. It's the Pale Moon features only that would have to be rewritten "from scratch".
Joel's advice doesn't account for this scenario, in which you're building new code on top of an existing forked codebase that is lagging behind modern web standards. There are only two choices: Moon Child can try to integrate massive amounts of Mozilla developer changes back into an older fork (impossible, really), or he can refork and redo his own changes. Given that undoubtedly Firefox's changes have been far more numerous and substantial, it probably makes sense to re-fork and rewrite the Pale Moon code.
Honestly, I'm not sure how this is really sustainable, as the same thing is bound to happen again in the future. And I've never figured out how anyone can be assured that Pale Moon is at all secure, either. I have a sneaking suspicion it's "secure" in the same way Macs (and Linux, actually) used to be secure - too small a target for anyone to bother with. I mean, I love the guts of these guys trying this, but... well, I wish them the best.
I also really hate whenever someone trots out this article of Joel's and presents it as gospel, because while it's a good rule of thumb, it's foolish to view any particular development rule as 100% inviolable. I've personally been involved in several highly successful near or partial complete rewrites of very large codebases. I'd say it's certainly a good default position to take - you'd need to convince me before tossing code and starting over. But there are times when doing so would actually be more damaging and end up compromising your new design too much in order to maintain compatibility. Often, it's far better to simply put in a compatibility shim, leave the old code behind, and build a new module next to it, switching over when backward compatibility is needed and slowly depreciating required dependencies.
Oh, no doubt I agree that eventually cars will not even require a licensed driver at some point in the future. Heck, I'm not even really debating the issue of whether or not their car *should* be designated road worthy. I just think it was wildly optimistic of Google to think that their version 1.0 driverless cars could look like this, given the practical and regulatory hurdles they'll be facing.
Every other autonomous car manufacturer is taking a much saner approach of integrating these systems so that they work more like a cruise control system. Google, on the other hand, is going the "Segway" route, and for as much hype as that little device had, it was really a step too far beyond what most people really wanted, and ended up a market disappointment.
True, but animation in realtime cutscenes is pretty much all mo-capped custom animations these days, and the player is typically not interacting with the game while the cutscene is running. So, I think doing custom animation work is not really "cheating", per-se. Some games, including ones I worked on, used to do really horrible cutscenes (by today's standards) using scripts that direct characters around using pre-set animations, but no AAA games do that these days, thank goodness.
This shows what a horrible idea it was for Google to remove the standard driver controls from their car design.
First, it gives absolutely no backup when the inevitable failure occurs and the car doesn't know WTF to do. For example how exactly are you supposed to direct the car to a specific parking spot inside a garage?
Second, it was stupid simply from a regulatory point of view. Yeah, no kidding regulators are not going to be thrilled about letting version 1.0 of an autonomous vehicle on the road without any manual controls. That feels like common sense to me.
While I'm confident that engineers will eventually create extremely robust and reliable systems, I can't imagine what leads Google to think they can actually solve EVERY problem an autonomous car will run into with the very first version. Where exactly does that extraordinary self-confidence (hubris?) come from? It feels like part of this is form over function, an annoyingly prevalent trend in the software world recently. That is, designers felt the damn thing didn't look futuristic enough if it still had a steering wheel and petals. Traditional car companies know that they can only get away with this on their concept cars - not their production models.
My bet is that Google is going to have to backpedal on this and add manual driver controls to their design before all is said and done, but I guess we'll see.
That's a way of looking at it. But generally speaking, as a nation, we don't let markets do whatever they wish, right? Because in many cases, markets don't do what's humane or just for the population at large, and especially not for individuals. For instance, market forces don't care about whether a company pollutes the environment, or whether a person is injured or defrauded, so we pass laws to protect consumers related to safety, fraud, and many other fectors. Markets may dictate that someone is worth only $4.00 an hour, but as a society, we feel that there should be a minimum wage. Minimum wages are, of course, completely antithetical to market forces, which is why it would be stupid to try to raise standards of living by simply passing a law to increase minimum wages to some absurd level.
Unlike many here, I'm actually a pretty strong proponent of capitalism / market forces / whatever you want to call it, but I also believe it needs to be balanced against a system of rules and laws that protect people against the crueler Darwinian forces of capitalism as well. Countries have borders in order to protect their citizens. Part of that protection is purely physical, but it's also partly legal and economic protection as well - not in the sense that you would typically use the word "economic protectionism" (punitive tariffs, for example), but I don't think it's unreasonable for the US to ensure our job markets are not unnaturally diluted. Remember, this is intentionally subverting an existing law which grants an exception to our standard rules. There's zero reason we need to allow that at the behest of corporate interests.
And no, I don't believe there's any problem in the US looking out for US worker's own interest first, especially when no other country is reciprocating in kind to this absurd generousness to their skilled workers.
We need to make sure users of the H1B program can't skirt the intent of the law, which they're absolutely doing right now by outsourcing to specialist contractors who hire nothing but H1Bs. They're simply using this program to drive down IT wages, rather than using it as a mechanism to bring in labor for jobs that can't be filled domestically. That loophole needs to be closed, and more importantly, enforced.
Of course, understanding the fix at a conceptual level is easy, but as with many things in life, actually getting it done is going to be rather difficult. More to the point, the fix *in practice* tends to be a lot more complicated than a fix *in theory*, if I'm being brutally honest here, because lawyers, lawmakers, and loopholes, and the CEOs who direct them.
It's not a lot different than the entire software patent issue. Most programmers can pretty clearly see what a disaster it is for everyone except patent pool participants and patent trolls, but getting those types of patents invalidated has proven to be a real challenge in actual practice.
It's partly that, and it's partly just the fact that commodity game development hardware has simply gotten that insanely good. These game engines all use the exact same low-level APIs and hardware. There's nothing inherently special about one rendering engine vs another other, despite what they'd have you believe.
Interestingly enough, contrary to what most users believe, the runtime rendering engine is actually a surprisingly small part of what a game engine does. A game engine's most important feature is probably the tools and general asset pipeline - the ability to import, convert, and control game assets in an efficient matter. Plus, there are dozens of other critical tools and runtime subsystems, without any of which a game is simply not happening. But it's a lot sexier to talk about the rendering engine, because that's what users see, I suppose. Typical users or the press would go to sleep if you prattle on about your efficient asset production pipeline.
Also, among the reasons cinematics (even if real-time rendered) can look so much better when specifically targeted like this: * No worries about scaling assets down for lower-end GPUs and CPUs, which requires overhead even on higher-end machines * No worries about pesky things like physics, collision, pathfinding, AI, and all other gameplay code... just animation, rendering, and audio * Occlusion, LODs, and visuals for both models and environments can be pre-baked. It's a lot harder to do this in real-time, since generally the camera can point anywhere at any time, and many games support different times of day, weather environments, etc.
I don't mean to pooh-pooh the film. It looked nice, but I'd be a little surprised if GDC attendees, at least the professional devs, were "wowed". It sounds more like the press and fans were wowed, which was really the point. Professionals, while they enjoy eye candy and rendering tricks as much as anyone, know there's a hell of a lot more to making a game than creating a cinematic demo.
You shouldn't have to justify your higher salary based on your nationality (or apparently feel horrifically guilty about your "hereditary privilege". Christ, the PC crowd has really gotten to you). These corporations enjoy the privilege of being located in the US, a safe and prosperous democratic republic. As such, there is some inherent overhead in the form of higher taxes and wages because, to put it simply, they're located on prime real estate. There are all sorts of accounting tricks to help with the former, and H1Bs are helping with the latter. It's not hard to understand the proper fix... it's just rather difficult to actually DO it. Fixing the laws to make sure our own populace isn't unfairly undercut by foreign labor won't likely be easy, because cheap labor benefits a lot of powerful people.
Also, importing cheap foreign labor isn't exactly a new phenomenon in the US. As far as I can tell, it's just new to the middle class.
What's hilarious to me is how so many of these same people panicking now don't give two shits about illegals flooding in from our southern borders and depressing the low-skilled jobs market (yay! cheap nannies, housekeepers, and gardeners!), but are now howling because the exact same thing is happening to THEIR jobs. The only exception that these foreign workers are sanctioned by the US H1B program rather than simply being ignored by our policy makers at the top.
Democrats and Republicans, I'm sad to say, appear to be equally complicit in doing jack shit to address the H1B abuse. The Democrats and Republicans realize that the illegals from the south are likely to be future Democrat constituents, which is really why that issue is contested so bitterly. It has nothing to do with "Republican racism" or "Democrat benevolence", just self-interest on both sides. But it's not nearly as clear-cut who cares about mostly moderate to liberal middle-class-to-rich, white, privileged male IT workers affected by H1Bs. My guess is that we're not going to elicit a lot of sympathy when we don't bother standing up for blue-collar workers suffering the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
It's like someone wanted to embrace continuous integration but forgot the part about being able to quickly and easily roll back from your own source repositories when a mistake is made. Oops.
Rather than calling government a "business", I think perhaps it's a bit more accurate to say that both businesses and governments share a common ancestry - they're both massive bureaucratic organizations, filled with people who wish to acquire and use power for their own benefit. In both cases, this means a natural tendency toward expanding their scope of responsibilities in order to build fiefdoms wherever possible, hiring underlings to boss around, and building very deep organizational charts which are massively inefficient, but with lots of mini-empire-building opportunities all the way down the ranks.
This isn't to say that there aren't good and decent people working in these organizations - most of them probably are, but in these sort of hierarchical structures, all you need is one asshole above you in the ranks to effectively negate all of your good intentions by issuing horrible directives and setting asinine rules and regulations.
Sure, why not give the government the power to ban thought and speech you don't approve of? I can't see any way that could possibly go wrong.
Actually, it was Apple who qualified the changes. They claim it would take a handful of engineers spending four to six weeks, or something thereabouts. So, I guess for Apple that's relatively "minor". For a one-programmer shop like mine, that's fairly significant. Depends on your perspective, I guess.
My feeling is that the FBI saw that their chances in court were not looking great, so decided to accept the outside offers (NSA?) for cracking the phone that had in fact been available to them all this time. The excuse that they no longer need to crack the phone also allows them to back down without losing face.
I know it goes against Slashdot tradition and all, but maybe try reading TFA first:
Scholl, 35, isn’t the obvious choice to run a fledgling, high-risk aerospace company. He’s a boyish coder and amateur pilot who spent five years at Amazon.com, working on things like automated ad systems, before starting a mobile shopping app maker called Kima Labs. Groupon bought Kima in 2012, leaving him with money in his pocket and a yearning to build something more meaningful than coupon software.
In business, this is known as a "win-win". I agree... it's terrible when everybody is happy, right?
In case you hadn't heard, Apple recently switched CEOs. Maybe the company has slightly different priorities with a different person in charge?
You don't like SMTP don't use it! Go make your own protocol
/facepalm. That's what we're discussing here.
Worst... name.. ever... for an aerospace company. Just one more data point in a very large set proving that geeks have no naming sense.
By your argument, we shouldn't be using our current e-mail protocols for anything requiring security of any sort, and I absolutely agree, but that's not the reality of the world we live in. Everyone has need of a secure messaging protocol on occasion, not just commercial institutions. What happens when you reset your password to nearly any web site that requires a secure login? Yep, you get sent a reset code or link by e-mail, right in the clear, which is used to authenticate that you're the owner of that account. What open, universal, secure messaging alternative do we have for this sort of thing? There's clearly a need for it.
If we now understand how to do a better job of securing e-mail and why doing so is a good thing, is there a reason not to? I'm afraid I just don't really understand your apparent opposition to a more secure e-mail protocol. Did you fervently oppose HTTPS as well, accusing people of "blaming HTTP" for trying to do things with it that it was never designed to do? This seems rather analogous to me.
The current e-mail protocols were designed at a time when everybody on the internet was expected to play nice. It could use an upgrade for today's significantly more hostile environment. There's really no reason we shouldn't have an upgraded protocol with more security and better authentication built in.
Nothing against the brilliant minds that created some of these early protocols, but they simply couldn't foresee some of the modern security and privacy issues the current internet has to deal with. We've also learned a thing or two about encryption and secure protocols in the last few decades, and upgraded protocols accordingly, right? I think it's a good time to try to introduce an upgraded e-mail standard. Whether it takes hold or not is a question, but with some of the big names apparently behind it, I don't see why not.
BTW, if you're going to reject out of hand a proposal for a new standard because of the names of the companies involved, then you're not thinking things through clearly. This would be an open standard, meaning it's possible for security specialists to vet and declare the protocol safe and secure, just like we do with TLS and other modern protocols. It seems like it would be rather tricky to hide secret backdoors in an open standard.
This seems like it could be done fairly easily in software right inside even consumer-grade routers, and would at least help in mitigating some of the security threats of these devices. These routers already offer "guest networks" on most newer models, so this seems like the next logical step. Just create a simple way at router setup/configuration time to create an "IoT network" as well which is isolated from anything else on the router for safety.
It's not exactly bricking the device - it just won't connect to Amazon anymore, and it can be updated via USB at any time to restore that functionality. Anything you've already downloaded would still be available for reading as always. An AC below claims it's a certificate store update, which makes a lot of sense to me, especially how SHA-1 is being depreciated everywhere. That would explain the talk about new "standards."
Yep, I can't even find the bizarro connector for my version 1 Kindle, and it just sat unpowered for years. I have a latest gen Kindle which has already been updated. I can't ever imagine even using my old Kindle - I'd instead just use my old iPad if it came to that. This just reminded me to unregister it from my account and toss it in the trash.
Keep in mind that even were it not to connect, you can still upgrade the firmware manually over USB, from what I understand, so it's not like it would be bricked forever. I'd guess there are some technical reasons why they don't leave the online upgrade capabilities in place longer though, because it's certainly not as though Amazon couldn't afford to leave a few extra servers running.
And those labels are completely voluntary, driven by market forces, not by law.
sounds familiar
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/...
who needs another browser anyway?
Just to be clear... this is not Pale Moon writing their own web browser. This is Pale Moon reforking from a newer Firefox branch and reimplementing the features that distinguishes them from Firefox. So, the article and summary says "from scratch", which is misleading because it's not "from scratch" as most people understand the term (writing a new browser yourself from the ground up), it's modifying the newly branched Firefox code, adding their own new features or stripping out crap from Firefox. It's the Pale Moon features only that would have to be rewritten "from scratch".
Joel's advice doesn't account for this scenario, in which you're building new code on top of an existing forked codebase that is lagging behind modern web standards. There are only two choices: Moon Child can try to integrate massive amounts of Mozilla developer changes back into an older fork (impossible, really), or he can refork and redo his own changes. Given that undoubtedly Firefox's changes have been far more numerous and substantial, it probably makes sense to re-fork and rewrite the Pale Moon code.
Honestly, I'm not sure how this is really sustainable, as the same thing is bound to happen again in the future. And I've never figured out how anyone can be assured that Pale Moon is at all secure, either. I have a sneaking suspicion it's "secure" in the same way Macs (and Linux, actually) used to be secure - too small a target for anyone to bother with. I mean, I love the guts of these guys trying this, but... well, I wish them the best.
I also really hate whenever someone trots out this article of Joel's and presents it as gospel, because while it's a good rule of thumb, it's foolish to view any particular development rule as 100% inviolable. I've personally been involved in several highly successful near or partial complete rewrites of very large codebases. I'd say it's certainly a good default position to take - you'd need to convince me before tossing code and starting over. But there are times when doing so would actually be more damaging and end up compromising your new design too much in order to maintain compatibility. Often, it's far better to simply put in a compatibility shim, leave the old code behind, and build a new module next to it, switching over when backward compatibility is needed and slowly depreciating required dependencies.
This is the future. Pedestrians go in tubes, duh.
Ok, google, park next to the elevator/blue sedan/in spot 14A/etc...
"Now parking next to Ellen's gator/flew command/in pot for teen gay"
Wait, no... aaaaaaah!
Oh, no doubt I agree that eventually cars will not even require a licensed driver at some point in the future. Heck, I'm not even really debating the issue of whether or not their car *should* be designated road worthy. I just think it was wildly optimistic of Google to think that their version 1.0 driverless cars could look like this, given the practical and regulatory hurdles they'll be facing.
Every other autonomous car manufacturer is taking a much saner approach of integrating these systems so that they work more like a cruise control system. Google, on the other hand, is going the "Segway" route, and for as much hype as that little device had, it was really a step too far beyond what most people really wanted, and ended up a market disappointment.
True, but animation in realtime cutscenes is pretty much all mo-capped custom animations these days, and the player is typically not interacting with the game while the cutscene is running. So, I think doing custom animation work is not really "cheating", per-se. Some games, including ones I worked on, used to do really horrible cutscenes (by today's standards) using scripts that direct characters around using pre-set animations, but no AAA games do that these days, thank goodness.
This shows what a horrible idea it was for Google to remove the standard driver controls from their car design.
First, it gives absolutely no backup when the inevitable failure occurs and the car doesn't know WTF to do. For example how exactly are you supposed to direct the car to a specific parking spot inside a garage?
Second, it was stupid simply from a regulatory point of view. Yeah, no kidding regulators are not going to be thrilled about letting version 1.0 of an autonomous vehicle on the road without any manual controls. That feels like common sense to me.
While I'm confident that engineers will eventually create extremely robust and reliable systems, I can't imagine what leads Google to think they can actually solve EVERY problem an autonomous car will run into with the very first version. Where exactly does that extraordinary self-confidence (hubris?) come from? It feels like part of this is form over function, an annoyingly prevalent trend in the software world recently. That is, designers felt the damn thing didn't look futuristic enough if it still had a steering wheel and petals. Traditional car companies know that they can only get away with this on their concept cars - not their production models.
My bet is that Google is going to have to backpedal on this and add manual driver controls to their design before all is said and done, but I guess we'll see.
That's a way of looking at it. But generally speaking, as a nation, we don't let markets do whatever they wish, right? Because in many cases, markets don't do what's humane or just for the population at large, and especially not for individuals. For instance, market forces don't care about whether a company pollutes the environment, or whether a person is injured or defrauded, so we pass laws to protect consumers related to safety, fraud, and many other fectors. Markets may dictate that someone is worth only $4.00 an hour, but as a society, we feel that there should be a minimum wage. Minimum wages are, of course, completely antithetical to market forces, which is why it would be stupid to try to raise standards of living by simply passing a law to increase minimum wages to some absurd level.
Unlike many here, I'm actually a pretty strong proponent of capitalism / market forces / whatever you want to call it, but I also believe it needs to be balanced against a system of rules and laws that protect people against the crueler Darwinian forces of capitalism as well. Countries have borders in order to protect their citizens. Part of that protection is purely physical, but it's also partly legal and economic protection as well - not in the sense that you would typically use the word "economic protectionism" (punitive tariffs, for example), but I don't think it's unreasonable for the US to ensure our job markets are not unnaturally diluted. Remember, this is intentionally subverting an existing law which grants an exception to our standard rules. There's zero reason we need to allow that at the behest of corporate interests.
And no, I don't believe there's any problem in the US looking out for US worker's own interest first, especially when no other country is reciprocating in kind to this absurd generousness to their skilled workers.
We need to make sure users of the H1B program can't skirt the intent of the law, which they're absolutely doing right now by outsourcing to specialist contractors who hire nothing but H1Bs. They're simply using this program to drive down IT wages, rather than using it as a mechanism to bring in labor for jobs that can't be filled domestically. That loophole needs to be closed, and more importantly, enforced.
Of course, understanding the fix at a conceptual level is easy, but as with many things in life, actually getting it done is going to be rather difficult. More to the point, the fix *in practice* tends to be a lot more complicated than a fix *in theory*, if I'm being brutally honest here, because lawyers, lawmakers, and loopholes, and the CEOs who direct them.
It's not a lot different than the entire software patent issue. Most programmers can pretty clearly see what a disaster it is for everyone except patent pool participants and patent trolls, but getting those types of patents invalidated has proven to be a real challenge in actual practice.
It's partly that, and it's partly just the fact that commodity game development hardware has simply gotten that insanely good. These game engines all use the exact same low-level APIs and hardware. There's nothing inherently special about one rendering engine vs another other, despite what they'd have you believe.
Interestingly enough, contrary to what most users believe, the runtime rendering engine is actually a surprisingly small part of what a game engine does. A game engine's most important feature is probably the tools and general asset pipeline - the ability to import, convert, and control game assets in an efficient matter. Plus, there are dozens of other critical tools and runtime subsystems, without any of which a game is simply not happening. But it's a lot sexier to talk about the rendering engine, because that's what users see, I suppose. Typical users or the press would go to sleep if you prattle on about your efficient asset production pipeline.
Also, among the reasons cinematics (even if real-time rendered) can look so much better when specifically targeted like this:
* No worries about scaling assets down for lower-end GPUs and CPUs, which requires overhead even on higher-end machines
* No worries about pesky things like physics, collision, pathfinding, AI, and all other gameplay code... just animation, rendering, and audio
* Occlusion, LODs, and visuals for both models and environments can be pre-baked. It's a lot harder to do this in real-time, since generally the camera can point anywhere at any time, and many games support different times of day, weather environments, etc.
I don't mean to pooh-pooh the film. It looked nice, but I'd be a little surprised if GDC attendees, at least the professional devs, were "wowed". It sounds more like the press and fans were wowed, which was really the point. Professionals, while they enjoy eye candy and rendering tricks as much as anyone, know there's a hell of a lot more to making a game than creating a cinematic demo.
You shouldn't have to justify your higher salary based on your nationality (or apparently feel horrifically guilty about your "hereditary privilege". Christ, the PC crowd has really gotten to you). These corporations enjoy the privilege of being located in the US, a safe and prosperous democratic republic. As such, there is some inherent overhead in the form of higher taxes and wages because, to put it simply, they're located on prime real estate. There are all sorts of accounting tricks to help with the former, and H1Bs are helping with the latter. It's not hard to understand the proper fix... it's just rather difficult to actually DO it. Fixing the laws to make sure our own populace isn't unfairly undercut by foreign labor won't likely be easy, because cheap labor benefits a lot of powerful people.
Also, importing cheap foreign labor isn't exactly a new phenomenon in the US. As far as I can tell, it's just new to the middle class.
What's hilarious to me is how so many of these same people panicking now don't give two shits about illegals flooding in from our southern borders and depressing the low-skilled jobs market (yay! cheap nannies, housekeepers, and gardeners!), but are now howling because the exact same thing is happening to THEIR jobs. The only exception that these foreign workers are sanctioned by the US H1B program rather than simply being ignored by our policy makers at the top.
Democrats and Republicans, I'm sad to say, appear to be equally complicit in doing jack shit to address the H1B abuse. The Democrats and Republicans realize that the illegals from the south are likely to be future Democrat constituents, which is really why that issue is contested so bitterly. It has nothing to do with "Republican racism" or "Democrat benevolence", just self-interest on both sides. But it's not nearly as clear-cut who cares about mostly moderate to liberal middle-class-to-rich, white, privileged male IT workers affected by H1Bs. My guess is that we're not going to elicit a lot of sympathy when we don't bother standing up for blue-collar workers suffering the same thing.