This is precisely why I didn't go into the games industry- because I found jobs with better pay, better working conditions, better benefits, nicer working environment, better career prospects in run of the mill business software development instead.
Yet guess what? I still get to develop games- indie game development is far more fun a hobby anyway, because you get to control the direction of the games. I'd argue that for most game developers there's a better ratio of pay off to the amount of hours you put in too because if you do produce a decent indie game you can rake in the cash to nicely augment the wage from your full time job.
Even if you do get into the games industry in a company that respects their employees and treats them well, can you guarantee you'll be working on a game that interests you anyway? If not then are you really any better off than working on some database app that doesn't interest you either?
The number of people who get all your points from a) to e) is rediculously small. The number who get points a) to e) AND get to work on games that they enjoy and are interested in personally probably numbers in the hundreds out of hundreds of thousands of employees in the industry at best.
Perhaps the most salient point though is that if you get a normal business software development job, and write succesful indie games you can generally jump into the games industry at a higher payscale that warrants more respect and benefits from the outset too. So even if you are determined to go into the games industry no matter what then it's probably a better route in than to be thrown into the 80hr week low wage graduate slave pit anyway.
"As computers get faster games have got more and more complicated loading bigger and bigger textures, and terrain maps. This means there is no way in hell one could make crysis or similar even playable in.NET or Java."
What makes you think this? There's no reason.NET and Java apps can't perform to the same degree, and the amount of RAM available (and the differences in RAM available) nowadays means you're either paging or not paging, there's no real middle-case where you could just about page if only this app wasn't written in Java or.NET, that's just not the case anymore.
Most of the rendering related processing is of course offloaded onto the GPU now anyway, so the fact that.NET and Java do garbage collection which is the only place where you see a decrease in performance if you don't manage their performance well is irrelevant because this isn't performed on the GPU.
"Now in a computer with several gigabytes of RAM and several hundred megabyte dedicated graphics ram,.NET was telling me my arrays over a megabyte were too big to fit in memory (when loading a height map from a file, the c/c++ code behind the scenes can ignore.NETs limitations. Then even on that small area of terrain, the code was slow as hell to run. I'm now redoing it in native C++ (I wish I had done in the first place) and directx, and it's already running a lot faster, and I can actually generate sensibly large areas of terrain."
Huh? are you really pretending.NET can't handle arrays of over 1mb? If this is what you are claiming then obviously you actually have no real understanding or experience of.NET. It sounds like you wrote some bad code if you were having these sorts of problems. Simply saying the code is slow as hell to run is rather pointless too without understanding why it's slow to run. I could write some C++ code that's slower to run than.NET code, but I'm not sure exactly what that's supposed to demonstrate other than that it's possible to write bad code in any language.
Crysis didn't perform well in C++ relative to graphics quality either and didn't exactly look great anyway compared to some other games out at the time, so that's a poor example to use, but there's no reason the vast majority of games out nowadays couldn't run.NET or Java and be just as playable, the issue is as I say there's no real benefit to doing so because it's a lot of work to port everything over when half your code base including the core libraries you use are in C++ already.
"Very hard to find a main stream game that isn't written in C++. What with Ms pushing XNA and some other stuff like that there may start being a few more written in managed languages, but C++ still reigns supreme. Why? Speed."
Sorry, this simply isn't true. Both Java and.NET have been demonstrated as fast enough to write games, speed most certainly isn't the issue nowadays.
The first reason C++ is used is that C++ is still the only language that is easily ported between gaming platforms- it's the only common language for which tools exist across all consoles, handhelds, PC, Linux, and Mac.
Secondly, all the main gaming libraries, middleware, and company's existing codebases are still written in C++, DirectX, OpenGL and so forth. Sure managed languages have their bindings, but in many cases it's a little half arsed. Doing 3D in Java is a pain because you're generally depending on JNI, and when you have to resort to JNI you're losing many of the benefits of using a manged language in the first place. C# has XNA of course nowadays, but XNA is a little limited- even if you write your game in it, writing tools is a nightmare, because XNA doesn't interface well with Windows forms, WPF and that sort of thing- whilst you can get XNA to render and interact in this environments if you're using the content pipeline to load assets for your game it's not really suited to loading things dynamically such as loading building models into a world editor for example, there are ways around it but it's more trouble than it's worth. When it comes to, it's often just easier to build games in C++ because so much existing code is already out there for it.
Thirdly, there's the issue of skillsets, the fact is many game developers are just well versed in C++, it'll take a while to get people to change their minds, and it certainly wont happen when there's no real benefit as per points 2 and 3.
There are other points, but these are the main reasons why C++ dominates game development. Again though, it's certainly not a speed issue, there's very few games around nowadays that need to be written in C++ over some other more modern language to perform as they do.
I absolutely agree C++ is the language for writing games, and with good reason, but it's most certainly not because of speed in by far the majority of cases. Personally I'm of the mindset of the right tool for the job, I wouldn't use C++ to develop a general Windows app nowadays as it offers absolutely no benefit for that, but for games? It's certainly the best choice unless you have some specific reason to use another language because it's the only option- i.e. Java for a mobile platform, or C# with XNA for XBLIG.
C++ is certainly slowly losing the amount of places where it's the best choice over other languages, but seeing as it dominated pretty much every area of software development for a few decades, it'll be a long time before it's lost it's place as the best language for every particular job, if that ever even happens at all. It's still an important language, and every developer should know how to use it well IMO, even if they don't need to use it often because they mostly just do web development or general application development.
"Well, if you're ever tried playing those games on the Xbox, then tried to play those games on the PC you'll see why they're considered PC centric though it applies more to Mass Effect 2 then the first."
ME2 was even more focussed towards consoles than the first, hence why everything was that much more dumbed down. It was also primarily a 360 development, hence why pretty much every media release such as trailers demonstrated the 360 version rather than the PC version. Again, I wont disagree with Supreme Commander 2 though, although I see no real evidenec that Dragon Age was primarily PC focussed and then ported, it plays like any console exclusive game.
"What I mean is what I said. The Xbox is basically a PC, it runs direct X and.Net. This means that if you can get a game to run on the Xbox it's pretty trivial to get the game to run on most peoples PC's aswell, the only thing you have to do is remap the controls (which for some games is trivial, for some games a bit harder). This is why almost all Xbox 360 games are released on PC aswell, it's just so easy. (And why a lot of PC developers try to make their games more console friendly, I mean why not?)."
No, there's far more to it than that, optimisation is still a big deal and on the PC you still have to do far more optimisation. What you say is certainly true for XNA games, and the handful of XBox Live Arcade games that are built with XNA + the achievement extensions and so on for full XBLA release, but in general there's still far more to do than mere control remapping. For starters, you have to make sure everything is going to render okay on nVidia cards on the PC, but also none of the 360, Wii, or PS3 even use x86 or x64- the 360 has a 64 bit PPC CPU for example and there in itself is another problem- you can't really ignore 32bit on the PC, and so you have to ensure you cater for that too. This is of course to even get the games working, and before you start having to even cater to the different optimisation requirements of the PC- slower communication between communications due to the less game-focussed nature of x86/x64 hardware and the fact that PC users will expect to be able to install to disk (although this has improved since there is more of a burden to support this properly on the 360 too now).
As you can see, porting a game from even the 360- the console with the most easily portable APIs (the 360 is largely DX9 based) is a major deal. It gets even worse when you have to port from/to the PS3 and support a completely different processing paradigm (Cell).
Suggesting almost all 360 games are released on the PC is a long shot, this simply isn't true. Even major titles aren't - Halo games since Halo 2, Crackdown, Alan Wake I believe have not and will never have PC ports to give a few examples. That's not to say things aren't true the other way around of course, but again, the PC games that could be but aren't ported to consoles nearly always have vastly lower sales figures than console games that aren't ported to the PC, I suspect Starcraft II will be one of those exceptions though.
"Unfortunately for you, not being a PC gamer never noticed that the game quality of many PC developers games declined."
Actually, as I mentioned later in my post I've always been very much a PC gamer. I was heavily involved in the mod scene from Quake 1 through to Quake 3 including Half-Life but dropped away from it after that, partly because even then I felt the games coming out were deteriorating- even in id's games. Modding for the likes of Doom 3 for example was just a complete and utter waste of time IMO compared to Quake 1 which was absolutely fantastic to mod for. Regarding UT, that was actually a big deal for me, it's been so long since I played UT I can't remember much about it but I do remember the original UT or whatever being rather awesome, but then a later version was basically a complete rehash of it that dropped one of the game modes I liked most where you had to push forward- I think it was Assault or something. IIRC they even dropped some of the weapons, so effectively it was just a poor man's version of the original albeit with slightly shinier graphics.
I also agree that many console franchises are a waste of time now- perhaps the prime example that comes to mind is Need for Speed, it was pretty good for a while but after Most Wanted it just got utterly stupid, a yearly cash cow that was simply not fun. As I understand it the problem with the FF series was that the original developers went elsewhere and created Mistwalker studios- I played Blue Dragon and such and it was pretty fun but I was never a massive JRPG fan anyway so couldn't judge it against much of the rest.
But I still think there's a lot of worthy titles on consoles, and more so than on the PC. I made the mistake of purchasing Arma II on the PC thinking hey look a nice PC only military game this could be fun, but what a load of utter wank, it was just horrendous. Really the only PC games I've particularly enjoyed in recent years are Dawn of War II (but even then I hated having to deal with issues caused by Steam DRM shit), and some smaller indie games that were fun to play around with for a little while like Crayon Physics. I just find it easier nowadays to find a fun console game than a fun PC game by quite a long stretch. I'm not sure why we don't see games anything like some of the older classics now either- why aren't there any real games like Syndicate, Theme Park, Desert Strike, Cannon Fodder or that sort of thing? Those type of games seemed to just completely vanish and there's just nothing like them anymore- about the closest I saw to Theme Park was Thrillville but that's not the same thing, and Syndicate? Desert Strike? Cannon Fodder? There's not even anything close.
I think as you say it's partly because developers are failing to develop for others, but also I think perhaps a bigger issue is that modern publishers are so shit scared of trying anything new- apparently the Modern Warfare team had a hell of a struggle trying to convince Activision to let them try and build a CoD game that wasn't World War 2, to me that was a no brainer, and I said Vietnam too, and guess what? the new CoD is going to 'nam, but the execs at the studios apparently just can't see there are people crying out for these sorts of things.
It's just madness, if anything I think the most hope for decent new games is in fact with indies nowadays, and perhaps moving on from my original post that is a way forward for the PC industry? Indie led innovation.
"I mean if you look at Activision, the third biggest publisher in the world, out of the 7 franchies they plan to make hundreds of millions from each, 3 are PC exclusive (WoW, Diablo and Starcraft)."
Oh come now, you're referring specifically to Blizzard here, who have always been a primary PC developer, but they're unique in that stance, id Software and Valve are two of the other few remaining major studios that also still does this, but even they're heavily console focussed as well now with Valve putting effort itself into working with consoles now.
The sad thing is you were attacking my posts for using problematic statistics, of which I admitted I got wrong, and yet here you are in your last couple of posts picking and choosing- you cut the Wii out of your previous post, and then tried to split the consoles up, now you're cherry picking the publisher that only relatively recently picked up the largest PC house remaining. Don't you see why that's a bit hypocritical?
I'm not sure why you're suggesting Mass Effect is a PC port, do you have any evidence for that? I'm also pretty sure you're not correct about Dragon Age being a mere port too. By port I'm referring to the likes of Gears of War, The Saboteur, and GTA which were ported to the PC after the console versions were done and were clearly of much lower quality- if they're released for console and PC at the same time then that's rarely a port, because they've been developed specifically for both platforms at release. Mass Effect at least has always been been one of the 360's flagship titles hence why it was originally a 360 exclusive.
I'm not sure what you mean by classing the 360 as an underpowered PC, this is a little short sighted. Whilst spec-wise it might be lower than some people's PCs this ignores the fact that it's a unified architecture dedicated to gaming and doesn't suffer some of the inherent slow downs that the generic PC architecture causes. This is why despite being lower spec towards the end of their life, consoles still often manage to outperform PCs in terms of visuals and performance. Having to optimise on the PC is a nightmare too because there are so many different hardware combinations you have to optimise for, this often leads to PC games being generally much less optimised for the platform compared to the PS3/360 where optimisations are easy and effective as they're done for a specific fixed hardware set.
Can you provide a link please to where exactly you got those NPD estimates? You say you don't have a link to actual sales figures again, but that you got them from an NPD estimate- tell me, is that an estimate by them, or by yourself?
The point about VG Chartz figures is that they are at least based on a number of metrics that can give a rough impression of that market, but they're not going to be so wildly out that they're about 5x to high which is what you're suggesting.
However, again, it really doesn't matter at the end of the day, because the fact is PC game sales aren't doing well, and if you want to pretend otherwise fine, but it wont change that fact.
See, this is what I meant why I talk about people burying their heads in the sand.
Things like resorting to completely ignoring the statistics for the largest sellers of all with some obscure justification that it covers a different market. Or things like splitting the consoles apart and infering that somehow makes things better- it doesn't, the fact is the PC is competing with all these systems for games sales.
Many companies actually have stopped making AAA titles for the PC, that's precisely the point. Of those AAA titles that are still produced for it, how many are anything more than quickly made, poorly tested ports of the console versions?
Why are next to no new PC titles managing to break onto the list of top selling PC titles, why is it still full of games that are close to 10 years or more old often failing to break even 1 mill? Why is this true even for games that are ports of multi-million selling console titles?
You can discount the Wii, split the figures in any way you want, but it simply doesn't change these facts, and it certainly does nothing to try and improve the situation.
"Although I can't find annual sales figures for consoles in 2009 I have at least looked a bit harder than you to find some real figures: NPD sales figures for the US in 2009 show 22.6 million units sold for the Wii, 20.4 million units for the xbox360 and 8.7 million for the PS3."
Units of what exactly? I'm a little puzzled, you're suggesting you can't find annual sales figures, and then suggesting you have some annual sales figures and then separating them out and suggesting the PC sells more? This makes very little sense. Here's some real figures:
The right hand column contains the total software sales, as you can see, these destroy your assertion that PC sales are in any way close to console sales.
Apologies, I did get the MW2 number wrong, I took the worldwide figure. Despite that, even with a handful of titles for just the US market top 5 you've showed a disparity but factor in all titles, and then look at the disparity grow as you look at the global stats also then it's a bit of a stretch to say my original assertion that the PC marked is dwarfed by the console market was in any way off the mark, it really is, and by quite a large amount.
Regarding extra costs of console games going to manufacturers, what percentage of digital PC sales goes to the digital distributor in comparison?
Developing a PS3/360 version is in no way more costly than developing for the PC, particularly as most companies use middleware like the Unreal engine that handles the majority of this for them. Developing and testing for the PC is inherently more expensive due to the massive amount of ever changing hardware and software combinations devs may face. This is in fact one of the advantage of developing for fixed platforms.
Even though I made a mistake with the MW2 numbers, this doesn't mean my conclusions were off, even your own figures show a noticable disparity, and that's with a mere 5 titles.
But we're talking about a single game vs. the entire US games market. Even if you look at US only for the exact same period then you only require literally a handful of console games in the US to outsell the entire PC market. That's a big deal and no amount of disputing the relevance of a particular example metric will change that. I'll even give you another example that you simply can't dispute with complaints about invalid comparisons, Modern Warfare 2 in the US sold more (~14mill) on the 360 and PS3 in just a few months of 2009 than quarter of what the PC shifted of every game both digital and hard copy for the entire year, factor in sales of the likes of New Super Mario Brothers for a couple of months and you'll be at about a half- in less than 10 titles over just a few months consoles outsell the PC's entire years units, how bad do you think it looks when you take every console game across the entire year? It looks even worse when you factor in the much lower average price of PC games too.
At the end of the day however you cut it, the PC market is absolutely dwarfed by the console market and that's the fundamental problem with discussions about the health of the PC market- it's certainly a fair size yes, but also it's still absolutely dwarfed by the console market, and as such that is why it gets largely neglected by developers still. More importantly, it's why saying "things are fine and dandy in the PC gaming world" is akin to simply burying your head in the sand, and doing so will only make the problem much worse, ignoring it or pretending the problem doesn't exist wont make things better.
The problem is, I'm not convinced that the prediction is actually wrong, and this article despite what it says, seems to fail to demonstrate that.
To put the statistic they gave as an example into context, 21.3 million total PC games sold online in the largest market for games purchases is roughly around the same amount of units sold as for an individual game in roughly the same period- Super Mario Kart wii.
That figure doesn't help their case, if a single console game can outsell every PC game distributed online in a similar period in the largest market for games then I'd say PC gaming does in fact have a problem still.
Even if it's not declining, it's clearly a relatively small market, it doesn't look good when you factor in console sales of games beyond Super Mario Kart Wii like New Super Mario Brothers, Wii Fit, Call of Duty MW2, Uncharted 2 and all the rest.
I'm sure some people will jump on me for hating the PC, but that's stupid I don't, particularly right now as I'm sat like a kid at Christmas hoping my collectors edition of Starcraft II arrives tommorrow and I don't have to wait until next week, but I'm not convinced that pretending there isn't a problem, when there is clearly at least one problem- that the PC is, relatively, an extremely small market is the best way forward. As for whether there's a decline, it's hard to tell, but as I've pointed out previously, this list is a little disconcerting:
Most of the top selling PC games are years, many over a decade old now, newer PC games just aren't even breaking their way onto the list. If the PC games market is healthy then why aren't many modern games managing to do this? Particularly as there are more PCs in the world than there have ever been nowadays.
It's a sad state of affairs, but for whatever reason it's pretty easy to see why many companies focus on console platforms nowadays from a commercial perspective. Personally I wish I knew what the answer was, I don't really know how the state of PC gaming can be improved as much as I'd like it to be- I'd love nothing more than to have the glory days of PC gaming back when we saw the likes of Doom, Quake, Syndicate, Theme Park, Magic Carpet, the early C&C games and so forth, undoubtedly the PC has the most varied and innovative gaming history of any platform IMHO.
A lot of people in this discussion seem to not understand why Aspergers is relevant to the case.
People keep repeating this idea that Aspergers is no excuse for what he did, and that's true, no one has actually said it is a defence for what he did.
The reason Aspergers has entered the case is because of the effect of a US punishment given that condition in that US prisons are arguably much less capable of catering to people with this condition, such that someone with Aspergers runs a very high risk of committing suicide in US jails and the US jail system does not do enough to mitigate that. Effectively what is being said is that McKinnon may end up killing himself if given the brutal treatment of some US prisons and that frankly, what he did doesn't deserve what might effectively be a death penalty for him in this respect.
This is one of a few arguments- the other is that the US authorities want to give him a far greater punishment than the crime warrants (60 years, vs. the UK's 5 years).
In the UK we have not extradited terror preachers to their home countries because they risk what we deem unfair treatment and perhaps even the death penalty there so we have precedent of not extraditing people to places where they could be treated far outside the norms of our society.
Arguments about whether Aspergers is an excuse for doing this, or of jurisdiction are really irrelevant because that's not what is being argued by McKinnon's family and lawyers per-se. The focus is on the fairness of punishment coupled with that in the context of his condition, and whether the US will in fact give fair punishment in this context.
The fact is that McKinnon may have done wrong, but being put in a situation where he is pushed to suicide would be grossly unfair treatment for the crime and would be tantamount to a death sentence merely for logging into some unsecured US government computers.
I think few people believe he shouldn't be punished, although I believe there's fair argument that this uncertainty has dragged on so long that he's realistically been punished enough already, the issue is how hard he should be punished and whether the US can realistically give him a fair (non-politically motivated) trial and hence whether they can give him fair punishment. With the US' history regarding the likes of guantanamo over the last decade and the inflated costs being thrown around by the US government regarding this case, coupled with a track record of abysmal handling of computer crime related cases (Kevin Mitnick) the US has done itself no favour in demonstrating it's capable of ensuring fair justice for this case, hence the doubt from many British politicians and legal practitioners.
I hope this makes it a bit more clear where the debate is really centred- the quality of the US justice system regarding this sort of case.
For what it's worth, personally, I'd have absolutely no problem with the extradition if it were the case that we could be certain he'd get a fair trial and fair punishment in the US, but I do not believe that would happen, if anything largely because it's become so political with the likes of the Pentagon wanting to come down hard on him to save face for their incompetence, hence as it stands, unless the US can demonstrate otherwise, I am against his extradition. If the US could ensure fair justice, and was willing to also extradite equally to us (something else that's questionable right now with the extradition treaty) I think extradition at very least for the purposes of trial is not an unfair step.
Dude, you realise that you may have just inadvertantly invented one of the coolest things ever?
I mean think about it... take it out your pocket, use it as a yoyo for a bit, put it in, use it as a phone. You wouldn't need to carry a yoyo and a phone, you'd have both at once.
Eat that Steve Jobs, my phone doesn't have a fancy shiny antenna around the edge, no, it has string and it doubles as a yoyo.
This could be the greatest merger of "things" since the Spork. Bonus if it works as a video phone and you can make your boss dizzy as fuck by yoyoing him around the office when he calls you.
What about the long term ongoing leaks in Nigeria that are regularly the fault of US companies like Exxon Mobil? Those have been far more devastating to the areas effected due to the fact the US companies don't actually even clean those up at all in some cases. I think somehow the BP oil spill isn't even the biggest oil tragedy of the last decade in this context, let alone the biggest environmental disaster of the century.
Of course, perhaps the worst part is that when the locals take action against oil companies responsible, they get branded terrorists an al Qaeda sympathisers by the West. It couldn't possibly simply be because they're sick of the kind of pollution that's occuring on their land could it?
Americans are right to be annoyed, and BP were incompetent and wrong in allowing the spill to happen. But what fucks me off more than anything is a) the anti-British sentiment from Obama over the whole thing, b) the fact this anti-British sentiment has been taken further in an attempt to tear BP apart as a company by some people, c) the fact that America consumes such vast amounts of oil pushing the need for such dangerous deep sea drilling in the first place, and d) the hypocrisy of points a), b) and c) in the context of the fact US companies and the US in general if it's to be believed that the Iraq war was about oil, have been guilty of far, far worse when it comes to oil. It's the utter hypocrisy, the arrogance of it that stinks- a proper reaction should've been some god damn soul searching over whether perhaps such dependence on oil is such a good idea after all and realisation that not just BP, but BP's partners such as the Texas company that owns a massive share in the well, Haliburton and Transocean which was responsible for some of the shoddy work that caused the problem, and most importantly, America itself and it's thirst for oil and it's weak regulations that allowed this to happen- isn't the fact oil companies only by law have to pay up £75 million over things like this evidence enough that American legislation holding oil companies to account is woefully inadequate?
To be fair when someone gets murdered and the guy 5 doors down owned an 18 rated computer game or whatever then computer games get blamed so I see these kinds of stories as balancing it all out!
No seriously though, both types of stories are equally retarded.
I think the issue is that Apple is good at generating pre-release hype by having an extremely loyal (scarily so sometimes!) fanbase, and sometimes by controlled leaks or small snippets of authorised information.
Other companies feel the pressure of that, and attempt to do the same, but as they don't have fanbases quite so rabid as Apple's it comes out as a bit dull- much like this very Blackberry tablet announcement.
I guess Apple are just fortunate enough to have built an insanely loyal fanbase that get excited about the slightest tidbit of infomation, and are simply better doing their pre-release announcements in a way that stirs hype and discussion. As you say- when RIM announce one it doesn't have quite the same charm I suppose does it?
I'm not an Apple fan, far from it, I don't like them much at all, it seems barely a product release goes by without some fault in the product suggesting poor QA, and I don't like their policies at all on app development and the likes, I don't even agree Apple stuff is easy to use- I've found it an absolute pain in the arse to do some things the times I have had to use them. But despite all that, despite my distaste for Apple, each time they announce something new I do take a look, and do talk about it with colleagues and so forth, and love Apple or loathe Apple, it's really that that separates their marketing and announcements from the rest, they just no how to generate hype, and I believe the controversy some of their bad decisions make may even be a calculated part of that- because it ensures even their detractors are mentioning their products and keeping them in the public view, as they say, there aint no such thing as bad publicity I guess.
"I gotta assume that there's some way to develop applications for the Blackberry OS, but I can't ever remember anyone talking about it."
Oh I'm sure you have, it's called Java.
RIM does well with the Blackberry not because they try and build better devices per-se, but because their devices still to this day integrate better with corporate IT infrastructure than any other manufacturers do. Many people who haven't touched Blackberry Enterprise Server have heard of it and assume it's just a tool for interfacing Blackberrys with e-mail but it does more than that- it can convert attachments such as PDFs or Excel files into a format more readable on the device before pushing it to it, it provides corporate IM services, it allows you to manage security policies, you can push out bespoke businesses applications to your devices and so forth. The fact that you can effectively completely manage your company's mobile phones without the users having to bring them into the office (great for if you have mobile users like Salesmen) is a big deal that no other manufacturer has really got quite right yet.
Now that's not to say that I'm a fan of Blackberry devices, I'm not, I'm an Android fan who was previously a Nokia/S60 fan if anything, but at the end of the day there's good reason that RIM owns the business smartphone marketplace- because flashy user interfaces are less important than the ability to manage all your devices centrally and save a fortune on support costs and the likes.
For what it's worth I don't see this tablet being worthwhile either, but then I'm still not overly convinced about tablets in general, laptops with foldable or even detachable screens make much more sense as you get the benefits of both worlds then. With some of ASUS' thin form factors, or the MacBook Air form factor we've seen we can do thin laptops, if we can also just rotate the screens to turn it into a tablet so it can be used as a tablet or a laptop then flexible laptops like this still seem the smartest way forward, because at the end of the day tablets by themselves maybe convenient for a few things but are still crippled when it comes to many other things- this sort of flexible device would not be. We already have them in larger laptop form factors, it shouldn't be too much of a stretch to minituarise them now or soon.
Tablets have been coming out long before Apple made one so the idea that any tablet release now is a response to the iPad is just stupid. Tablets released now as much a response to the iPad than the iPad was to Microsoft's courier anouncement, or any of the millions of Windows tablets that have been commonly available to those who want one for at least a decade.
We did a trial using Windows XP tablets in 2003 in a few schools, they weren't so popular then simply because the hardware was a little too bulky- only around the initial advent of netbooks did general computing kit really become small enough to start doing devices like tablets properly.
Of course, we've even had laptops with screens that twist to allow you to turn it into a tablet for years now too, and they're certainly way ahead of tablets simply because they are so effectively dual function. They aren't really much bulkier and certainly aren't any heavier than the iPad, which is a suprisingly heavy device for it's size.
In the example of mass-graves, this has been used to automatically detect mass graves in the nations that were former Yugoslaiva (Serbia, Bosnia etc.). Whilst this technology hasn't been fitted onto autonomous UAVs yet there's a simple reason for that and it's certainly not that it isn't possible, but in fact because it's just that much cheaper to butcher an existing airframe like a C130 than it is to create a full blown UAV project to cater to this tech.
Regarding the difference between the AI used here and what you deem 'true' AI I'm not sure what you're referring to. If you're referring to strong AI, then no, we're nowhere near that even on super computers, let alone in aircraft. We don't really want AI that's capable of largely uncontrolled emergence flying aircraft, what happens when it decides to try and land on the freeway because it looks enough like a runway? It's better to stick to what we have and retain control either directly with pilots (remote or in the aircraft) or by predefined flight paths and ILS technology to make sure things go where they're supposed to go, and land where they're supposed to land, and leave things like neural nets for what they're good at- spotting patterns in feedback from Electro-optical MASINT kit and such, or using genetic algorithms to optimise airframe shapes in the first place.
I can relate to this, for some reason I allowed my girlfriends parents to be added to my Facebook friends list, the problem is that what's appropriate for my friends isn't appropriate for them.
Similarly things I talk about with colleagues at my old work place (the things we used to get up to) aren't appropriate for my new work colleagues after I start a new job and so forth.
The net effect is that I have to self censor, and not bother posting content to any of these groups.
There was a story the other day stating that Google intend to allow you to sign in to a desktop (presumably web) based version of the marketplace to remotely install apps on - kind of like you can use iTunes to install apps on your iPhone I guess.
I wouldn't be suprised if Google revamps the marketplace on the phone somewhat at the same time to be honest. It does seem to work quite well as high rated stuff tends to remain at the top and lower rated sinks to the bottom, but I agree, in the long run there will need to be slightly better categorisation of Android apps, particularly if this lot will be distributed via the marketplace!
"... and those hard-wired phones would have been just as useless in this case - a car accident. "...because car accidents can't possibly ever happen near buildings with phones in them?
"... and good luck calling 911 from outside your house to report that your house is on fire. "...and no one has any neighbours, ever, they all live in the middle of nowhere?
Hey don't get me wrong, I'm not excusing the fault in the phone if that's what it is, but come on, comments like that give the impression that not only have people lost the ability to use a land line, but have lost all logical thought functions too.
The fact is, we don't know where the accident happened, maybe it did happen in the middle of nowhere, but the GP had a good point- there are a lot of people who would rather complain about their phone not working than do the smart thing and ask to use someone elses. I think he was also getting at the point that even if they were in the middle of nowhere, even having to reboot the phone to make a call is a massive step forward from the era where we had no mobile phones. I mean, what the hell do people do when they witness a car accident in an area with no mobile coverage? Just drive on thinking there's nothing they can do because their cell doesn't work rather than go to the closest working phone?
For what it's worth, I'm intrigued to know if this really is a problem with the handset, or if it's a few rogue reports assuming it is, and believing that resetting has solved it when in fact it's nothing to do with that. The reason I say this is because I've had the same problem on land lines before, where I've had phone calls and the person at the other end couldn't hear me or vice versa. I've also had the same on pretty much every mobile I've ever used at some time or another too. In both cases it's not a hardware problem, it's a network problem, and so even if it is a fault in the handset this problem can certainly arise with any handset, although simply making the call again is usually all that's needed in this case- if the Eris problem really does only fix itself with a reboot then it probably is indeed a handset issue.
Mobile phones absolutely should be dependable, but the fact is, they're just not. Relying on them 100% rather than using common sense, is a bad thing.
The more he goes on the more I think you're probably right. He seems to be rambling on about how the Lib Dem's didn't get things entirely their own way, whilst completely ignoring the fact the the other coalition option- Labour, were offering even less concessions to the Lib Dems.
It'll be interesting to see what happens next election, but I suspect the real Lib Dem supporters will continue to vote Lib Dem, because the fact we actually have some Lib Dem policies being implemented for once is a step beyond what Lib Dem supporters have had in a long long time. It shows that the Lib Dems are in fact making progress beyond being simply the 3rd party, and it shows that perserverence in continuing to vote for the third party can in fact yield results. If everyone had bottled it and voted Tory/Labour we'd be in a far worse position right now.
Slashdot Mirror
"Especially since Google doesn't know my personal details."
That's what you think ;)
Well said.
This is precisely why I didn't go into the games industry- because I found jobs with better pay, better working conditions, better benefits, nicer working environment, better career prospects in run of the mill business software development instead.
Yet guess what? I still get to develop games- indie game development is far more fun a hobby anyway, because you get to control the direction of the games. I'd argue that for most game developers there's a better ratio of pay off to the amount of hours you put in too because if you do produce a decent indie game you can rake in the cash to nicely augment the wage from your full time job.
Even if you do get into the games industry in a company that respects their employees and treats them well, can you guarantee you'll be working on a game that interests you anyway? If not then are you really any better off than working on some database app that doesn't interest you either?
The number of people who get all your points from a) to e) is rediculously small. The number who get points a) to e) AND get to work on games that they enjoy and are interested in personally probably numbers in the hundreds out of hundreds of thousands of employees in the industry at best.
Perhaps the most salient point though is that if you get a normal business software development job, and write succesful indie games you can generally jump into the games industry at a higher payscale that warrants more respect and benefits from the outset too. So even if you are determined to go into the games industry no matter what then it's probably a better route in than to be thrown into the 80hr week low wage graduate slave pit anyway.
"As computers get faster games have got more and more complicated loading bigger and bigger textures, and terrain maps. This means there is no way in hell one could make crysis or similar even playable in .NET or Java."
What makes you think this? There's no reason .NET and Java apps can't perform to the same degree, and the amount of RAM available (and the differences in RAM available) nowadays means you're either paging or not paging, there's no real middle-case where you could just about page if only this app wasn't written in Java or .NET, that's just not the case anymore.
Most of the rendering related processing is of course offloaded onto the GPU now anyway, so the fact that .NET and Java do garbage collection which is the only place where you see a decrease in performance if you don't manage their performance well is irrelevant because this isn't performed on the GPU.
"Now in a computer with several gigabytes of RAM and several hundred megabyte dedicated graphics ram, .NET was telling me my arrays over a megabyte were too big to fit in memory (when loading a height map from a file, the c/c++ code behind the scenes can ignore .NETs limitations. Then even on that small area of terrain, the code was slow as hell to run. I'm now redoing it in native C++ (I wish I had done in the first place) and directx, and it's already running a lot faster, and I can actually generate sensibly large areas of terrain."
Huh? are you really pretending .NET can't handle arrays of over 1mb? If this is what you are claiming then obviously you actually have no real understanding or experience of .NET. It sounds like you wrote some bad code if you were having these sorts of problems. Simply saying the code is slow as hell to run is rather pointless too without understanding why it's slow to run. I could write some C++ code that's slower to run than .NET code, but I'm not sure exactly what that's supposed to demonstrate other than that it's possible to write bad code in any language.
Crysis didn't perform well in C++ relative to graphics quality either and didn't exactly look great anyway compared to some other games out at the time, so that's a poor example to use, but there's no reason the vast majority of games out nowadays couldn't run .NET or Java and be just as playable, the issue is as I say there's no real benefit to doing so because it's a lot of work to port everything over when half your code base including the core libraries you use are in C++ already.
"Very hard to find a main stream game that isn't written in C++. What with Ms pushing XNA and some other stuff like that there may start being a few more written in managed languages, but C++ still reigns supreme. Why? Speed."
Sorry, this simply isn't true. Both Java and .NET have been demonstrated as fast enough to write games, speed most certainly isn't the issue nowadays.
The first reason C++ is used is that C++ is still the only language that is easily ported between gaming platforms- it's the only common language for which tools exist across all consoles, handhelds, PC, Linux, and Mac.
Secondly, all the main gaming libraries, middleware, and company's existing codebases are still written in C++, DirectX, OpenGL and so forth. Sure managed languages have their bindings, but in many cases it's a little half arsed. Doing 3D in Java is a pain because you're generally depending on JNI, and when you have to resort to JNI you're losing many of the benefits of using a manged language in the first place. C# has XNA of course nowadays, but XNA is a little limited- even if you write your game in it, writing tools is a nightmare, because XNA doesn't interface well with Windows forms, WPF and that sort of thing- whilst you can get XNA to render and interact in this environments if you're using the content pipeline to load assets for your game it's not really suited to loading things dynamically such as loading building models into a world editor for example, there are ways around it but it's more trouble than it's worth. When it comes to, it's often just easier to build games in C++ because so much existing code is already out there for it.
Thirdly, there's the issue of skillsets, the fact is many game developers are just well versed in C++, it'll take a while to get people to change their minds, and it certainly wont happen when there's no real benefit as per points 2 and 3.
There are other points, but these are the main reasons why C++ dominates game development. Again though, it's certainly not a speed issue, there's very few games around nowadays that need to be written in C++ over some other more modern language to perform as they do.
I absolutely agree C++ is the language for writing games, and with good reason, but it's most certainly not because of speed in by far the majority of cases. Personally I'm of the mindset of the right tool for the job, I wouldn't use C++ to develop a general Windows app nowadays as it offers absolutely no benefit for that, but for games? It's certainly the best choice unless you have some specific reason to use another language because it's the only option- i.e. Java for a mobile platform, or C# with XNA for XBLIG.
C++ is certainly slowly losing the amount of places where it's the best choice over other languages, but seeing as it dominated pretty much every area of software development for a few decades, it'll be a long time before it's lost it's place as the best language for every particular job, if that ever even happens at all. It's still an important language, and every developer should know how to use it well IMO, even if they don't need to use it often because they mostly just do web development or general application development.
"Well, if you're ever tried playing those games on the Xbox, then tried to play those games on the PC you'll see why they're considered PC centric though it applies more to Mass Effect 2 then the first."
ME2 was even more focussed towards consoles than the first, hence why everything was that much more dumbed down. It was also primarily a 360 development, hence why pretty much every media release such as trailers demonstrated the 360 version rather than the PC version. Again, I wont disagree with Supreme Commander 2 though, although I see no real evidenec that Dragon Age was primarily PC focussed and then ported, it plays like any console exclusive game.
"What I mean is what I said. The Xbox is basically a PC, it runs direct X and .Net. This means that if you can get a game to run on the Xbox it's pretty trivial to get the game to run on most peoples PC's aswell, the only thing you have to do is remap the controls (which for some games is trivial, for some games a bit harder). This is why almost all Xbox 360 games are released on PC aswell, it's just so easy. (And why a lot of PC developers try to make their games more console friendly, I mean why not?)."
No, there's far more to it than that, optimisation is still a big deal and on the PC you still have to do far more optimisation. What you say is certainly true for XNA games, and the handful of XBox Live Arcade games that are built with XNA + the achievement extensions and so on for full XBLA release, but in general there's still far more to do than mere control remapping. For starters, you have to make sure everything is going to render okay on nVidia cards on the PC, but also none of the 360, Wii, or PS3 even use x86 or x64- the 360 has a 64 bit PPC CPU for example and there in itself is another problem- you can't really ignore 32bit on the PC, and so you have to ensure you cater for that too. This is of course to even get the games working, and before you start having to even cater to the different optimisation requirements of the PC- slower communication between communications due to the less game-focussed nature of x86/x64 hardware and the fact that PC users will expect to be able to install to disk (although this has improved since there is more of a burden to support this properly on the 360 too now).
As you can see, porting a game from even the 360- the console with the most easily portable APIs (the 360 is largely DX9 based) is a major deal. It gets even worse when you have to port from/to the PS3 and support a completely different processing paradigm (Cell).
Suggesting almost all 360 games are released on the PC is a long shot, this simply isn't true. Even major titles aren't - Halo games since Halo 2, Crackdown, Alan Wake I believe have not and will never have PC ports to give a few examples. That's not to say things aren't true the other way around of course, but again, the PC games that could be but aren't ported to consoles nearly always have vastly lower sales figures than console games that aren't ported to the PC, I suspect Starcraft II will be one of those exceptions though.
"Unfortunately for you, not being a PC gamer never noticed that the game quality of many PC developers games declined."
Actually, as I mentioned later in my post I've always been very much a PC gamer. I was heavily involved in the mod scene from Quake 1 through to Quake 3 including Half-Life but dropped away from it after that, partly because even then I felt the games coming out were deteriorating- even in id's games. Modding for the likes of Doom 3 for example was just a complete and utter waste of time IMO compared to Quake 1 which was absolutely fantastic to mod for. Regarding UT, that was actually a big deal for me, it's been so long since I played UT I can't remember much about it but I do remember the original UT or whatever being rather awesome, but then a later version was basically a complete rehash of it that dropped one of the game modes I liked most where you had to push forward- I think it was Assault or something. IIRC they even dropped some of the weapons, so effectively it was just a poor man's version of the original albeit with slightly shinier graphics.
I also agree that many console franchises are a waste of time now- perhaps the prime example that comes to mind is Need for Speed, it was pretty good for a while but after Most Wanted it just got utterly stupid, a yearly cash cow that was simply not fun. As I understand it the problem with the FF series was that the original developers went elsewhere and created Mistwalker studios- I played Blue Dragon and such and it was pretty fun but I was never a massive JRPG fan anyway so couldn't judge it against much of the rest.
But I still think there's a lot of worthy titles on consoles, and more so than on the PC. I made the mistake of purchasing Arma II on the PC thinking hey look a nice PC only military game this could be fun, but what a load of utter wank, it was just horrendous. Really the only PC games I've particularly enjoyed in recent years are Dawn of War II (but even then I hated having to deal with issues caused by Steam DRM shit), and some smaller indie games that were fun to play around with for a little while like Crayon Physics. I just find it easier nowadays to find a fun console game than a fun PC game by quite a long stretch. I'm not sure why we don't see games anything like some of the older classics now either- why aren't there any real games like Syndicate, Theme Park, Desert Strike, Cannon Fodder or that sort of thing? Those type of games seemed to just completely vanish and there's just nothing like them anymore- about the closest I saw to Theme Park was Thrillville but that's not the same thing, and Syndicate? Desert Strike? Cannon Fodder? There's not even anything close.
I think as you say it's partly because developers are failing to develop for others, but also I think perhaps a bigger issue is that modern publishers are so shit scared of trying anything new- apparently the Modern Warfare team had a hell of a struggle trying to convince Activision to let them try and build a CoD game that wasn't World War 2, to me that was a no brainer, and I said Vietnam too, and guess what? the new CoD is going to 'nam, but the execs at the studios apparently just can't see there are people crying out for these sorts of things.
It's just madness, if anything I think the most hope for decent new games is in fact with indies nowadays, and perhaps moving on from my original post that is a way forward for the PC industry? Indie led innovation.
"I mean if you look at Activision, the third biggest publisher in the world, out of the 7 franchies they plan to make hundreds of millions from each, 3 are PC exclusive (WoW, Diablo and Starcraft)."
Oh come now, you're referring specifically to Blizzard here, who have always been a primary PC developer, but they're unique in that stance, id Software and Valve are two of the other few remaining major studios that also still does this, but even they're heavily console focussed as well now with Valve putting effort itself into working with consoles now.
The sad thing is you were attacking my posts for using problematic statistics, of which I admitted I got wrong, and yet here you are in your last couple of posts picking and choosing- you cut the Wii out of your previous post, and then tried to split the consoles up, now you're cherry picking the publisher that only relatively recently picked up the largest PC house remaining. Don't you see why that's a bit hypocritical?
I'm not sure why you're suggesting Mass Effect is a PC port, do you have any evidence for that? I'm also pretty sure you're not correct about Dragon Age being a mere port too. By port I'm referring to the likes of Gears of War, The Saboteur, and GTA which were ported to the PC after the console versions were done and were clearly of much lower quality- if they're released for console and PC at the same time then that's rarely a port, because they've been developed specifically for both platforms at release. Mass Effect at least has always been been one of the 360's flagship titles hence why it was originally a 360 exclusive.
I'm not sure what you mean by classing the 360 as an underpowered PC, this is a little short sighted. Whilst spec-wise it might be lower than some people's PCs this ignores the fact that it's a unified architecture dedicated to gaming and doesn't suffer some of the inherent slow downs that the generic PC architecture causes. This is why despite being lower spec towards the end of their life, consoles still often manage to outperform PCs in terms of visuals and performance. Having to optimise on the PC is a nightmare too because there are so many different hardware combinations you have to optimise for, this often leads to PC games being generally much less optimised for the platform compared to the PS3/360 where optimisations are easy and effective as they're done for a specific fixed hardware set.
Can you provide a link please to where exactly you got those NPD estimates? You say you don't have a link to actual sales figures again, but that you got them from an NPD estimate- tell me, is that an estimate by them, or by yourself?
The point about VG Chartz figures is that they are at least based on a number of metrics that can give a rough impression of that market, but they're not going to be so wildly out that they're about 5x to high which is what you're suggesting.
However, again, it really doesn't matter at the end of the day, because the fact is PC game sales aren't doing well, and if you want to pretend otherwise fine, but it wont change that fact.
See, this is what I meant why I talk about people burying their heads in the sand.
Things like resorting to completely ignoring the statistics for the largest sellers of all with some obscure justification that it covers a different market. Or things like splitting the consoles apart and infering that somehow makes things better- it doesn't, the fact is the PC is competing with all these systems for games sales.
Many companies actually have stopped making AAA titles for the PC, that's precisely the point. Of those AAA titles that are still produced for it, how many are anything more than quickly made, poorly tested ports of the console versions?
Why are next to no new PC titles managing to break onto the list of top selling PC titles, why is it still full of games that are close to 10 years or more old often failing to break even 1 mill? Why is this true even for games that are ports of multi-million selling console titles?
You can discount the Wii, split the figures in any way you want, but it simply doesn't change these facts, and it certainly does nothing to try and improve the situation.
"Although I can't find annual sales figures for consoles in 2009 I have at least looked a bit harder than you to find some real figures: NPD sales figures for the US in 2009 show 22.6 million units sold for the Wii, 20.4 million units for the xbox360 and 8.7 million for the PS3."
Units of what exactly? I'm a little puzzled, you're suggesting you can't find annual sales figures, and then suggesting you have some annual sales figures and then separating them out and suggesting the PC sells more? This makes very little sense. Here's some real figures:
http://www.vgchartz.com/yearly.php?date=2010®=America&date=2009
The right hand column contains the total software sales, as you can see, these destroy your assertion that PC sales are in any way close to console sales.
Apologies, I did get the MW2 number wrong, I took the worldwide figure. Despite that, even with a handful of titles for just the US market top 5 you've showed a disparity but factor in all titles, and then look at the disparity grow as you look at the global stats also then it's a bit of a stretch to say my original assertion that the PC marked is dwarfed by the console market was in any way off the mark, it really is, and by quite a large amount.
Regarding extra costs of console games going to manufacturers, what percentage of digital PC sales goes to the digital distributor in comparison?
Developing a PS3/360 version is in no way more costly than developing for the PC, particularly as most companies use middleware like the Unreal engine that handles the majority of this for them. Developing and testing for the PC is inherently more expensive due to the massive amount of ever changing hardware and software combinations devs may face. This is in fact one of the advantage of developing for fixed platforms.
Even though I made a mistake with the MW2 numbers, this doesn't mean my conclusions were off, even your own figures show a noticable disparity, and that's with a mere 5 titles.
But we're talking about a single game vs. the entire US games market. Even if you look at US only for the exact same period then you only require literally a handful of console games in the US to outsell the entire PC market. That's a big deal and no amount of disputing the relevance of a particular example metric will change that. I'll even give you another example that you simply can't dispute with complaints about invalid comparisons, Modern Warfare 2 in the US sold more (~14mill) on the 360 and PS3 in just a few months of 2009 than quarter of what the PC shifted of every game both digital and hard copy for the entire year, factor in sales of the likes of New Super Mario Brothers for a couple of months and you'll be at about a half- in less than 10 titles over just a few months consoles outsell the PC's entire years units, how bad do you think it looks when you take every console game across the entire year? It looks even worse when you factor in the much lower average price of PC games too.
At the end of the day however you cut it, the PC market is absolutely dwarfed by the console market and that's the fundamental problem with discussions about the health of the PC market- it's certainly a fair size yes, but also it's still absolutely dwarfed by the console market, and as such that is why it gets largely neglected by developers still. More importantly, it's why saying "things are fine and dandy in the PC gaming world" is akin to simply burying your head in the sand, and doing so will only make the problem much worse, ignoring it or pretending the problem doesn't exist wont make things better.
The problem is, I'm not convinced that the prediction is actually wrong, and this article despite what it says, seems to fail to demonstrate that.
To put the statistic they gave as an example into context, 21.3 million total PC games sold online in the largest market for games purchases is roughly around the same amount of units sold as for an individual game in roughly the same period- Super Mario Kart wii.
That figure doesn't help their case, if a single console game can outsell every PC game distributed online in a similar period in the largest market for games then I'd say PC gaming does in fact have a problem still.
Even if it's not declining, it's clearly a relatively small market, it doesn't look good when you factor in console sales of games beyond Super Mario Kart Wii like New Super Mario Brothers, Wii Fit, Call of Duty MW2, Uncharted 2 and all the rest.
I'm sure some people will jump on me for hating the PC, but that's stupid I don't, particularly right now as I'm sat like a kid at Christmas hoping my collectors edition of Starcraft II arrives tommorrow and I don't have to wait until next week, but I'm not convinced that pretending there isn't a problem, when there is clearly at least one problem- that the PC is, relatively, an extremely small market is the best way forward. As for whether there's a decline, it's hard to tell, but as I've pointed out previously, this list is a little disconcerting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_video_games
Most of the top selling PC games are years, many over a decade old now, newer PC games just aren't even breaking their way onto the list. If the PC games market is healthy then why aren't many modern games managing to do this? Particularly as there are more PCs in the world than there have ever been nowadays.
It's a sad state of affairs, but for whatever reason it's pretty easy to see why many companies focus on console platforms nowadays from a commercial perspective. Personally I wish I knew what the answer was, I don't really know how the state of PC gaming can be improved as much as I'd like it to be- I'd love nothing more than to have the glory days of PC gaming back when we saw the likes of Doom, Quake, Syndicate, Theme Park, Magic Carpet, the early C&C games and so forth, undoubtedly the PC has the most varied and innovative gaming history of any platform IMHO.
A lot of people in this discussion seem to not understand why Aspergers is relevant to the case.
People keep repeating this idea that Aspergers is no excuse for what he did, and that's true, no one has actually said it is a defence for what he did.
The reason Aspergers has entered the case is because of the effect of a US punishment given that condition in that US prisons are arguably much less capable of catering to people with this condition, such that someone with Aspergers runs a very high risk of committing suicide in US jails and the US jail system does not do enough to mitigate that. Effectively what is being said is that McKinnon may end up killing himself if given the brutal treatment of some US prisons and that frankly, what he did doesn't deserve what might effectively be a death penalty for him in this respect.
This is one of a few arguments- the other is that the US authorities want to give him a far greater punishment than the crime warrants (60 years, vs. the UK's 5 years).
In the UK we have not extradited terror preachers to their home countries because they risk what we deem unfair treatment and perhaps even the death penalty there so we have precedent of not extraditing people to places where they could be treated far outside the norms of our society.
Arguments about whether Aspergers is an excuse for doing this, or of jurisdiction are really irrelevant because that's not what is being argued by McKinnon's family and lawyers per-se. The focus is on the fairness of punishment coupled with that in the context of his condition, and whether the US will in fact give fair punishment in this context.
The fact is that McKinnon may have done wrong, but being put in a situation where he is pushed to suicide would be grossly unfair treatment for the crime and would be tantamount to a death sentence merely for logging into some unsecured US government computers.
I think few people believe he shouldn't be punished, although I believe there's fair argument that this uncertainty has dragged on so long that he's realistically been punished enough already, the issue is how hard he should be punished and whether the US can realistically give him a fair (non-politically motivated) trial and hence whether they can give him fair punishment. With the US' history regarding the likes of guantanamo over the last decade and the inflated costs being thrown around by the US government regarding this case, coupled with a track record of abysmal handling of computer crime related cases (Kevin Mitnick) the US has done itself no favour in demonstrating it's capable of ensuring fair justice for this case, hence the doubt from many British politicians and legal practitioners.
I hope this makes it a bit more clear where the debate is really centred- the quality of the US justice system regarding this sort of case.
For what it's worth, personally, I'd have absolutely no problem with the extradition if it were the case that we could be certain he'd get a fair trial and fair punishment in the US, but I do not believe that would happen, if anything largely because it's become so political with the likes of the Pentagon wanting to come down hard on him to save face for their incompetence, hence as it stands, unless the US can demonstrate otherwise, I am against his extradition. If the US could ensure fair justice, and was willing to also extradite equally to us (something else that's questionable right now with the extradition treaty) I think extradition at very least for the purposes of trial is not an unfair step.
Hmm, a phone that doubles as a yoyo.
Dude, you realise that you may have just inadvertantly invented one of the coolest things ever?
I mean think about it... take it out your pocket, use it as a yoyo for a bit, put it in, use it as a phone. You wouldn't need to carry a yoyo and a phone, you'd have both at once.
Eat that Steve Jobs, my phone doesn't have a fancy shiny antenna around the edge, no, it has string and it doubles as a yoyo.
This could be the greatest merger of "things" since the Spork. Bonus if it works as a video phone and you can make your boss dizzy as fuck by yoyoing him around the office when he calls you.
What about the long term ongoing leaks in Nigeria that are regularly the fault of US companies like Exxon Mobil? Those have been far more devastating to the areas effected due to the fact the US companies don't actually even clean those up at all in some cases. I think somehow the BP oil spill isn't even the biggest oil tragedy of the last decade in this context, let alone the biggest environmental disaster of the century.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell
http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/nigerian-spills-make-valdez-look-like-drop-in-bucket/19483921
Of course, perhaps the worst part is that when the locals take action against oil companies responsible, they get branded terrorists an al Qaeda sympathisers by the West. It couldn't possibly simply be because they're sick of the kind of pollution that's occuring on their land could it?
Americans are right to be annoyed, and BP were incompetent and wrong in allowing the spill to happen. But what fucks me off more than anything is a) the anti-British sentiment from Obama over the whole thing, b) the fact this anti-British sentiment has been taken further in an attempt to tear BP apart as a company by some people, c) the fact that America consumes such vast amounts of oil pushing the need for such dangerous deep sea drilling in the first place, and d) the hypocrisy of points a), b) and c) in the context of the fact US companies and the US in general if it's to be believed that the Iraq war was about oil, have been guilty of far, far worse when it comes to oil. It's the utter hypocrisy, the arrogance of it that stinks- a proper reaction should've been some god damn soul searching over whether perhaps such dependence on oil is such a good idea after all and realisation that not just BP, but BP's partners such as the Texas company that owns a massive share in the well, Haliburton and Transocean which was responsible for some of the shoddy work that caused the problem, and most importantly, America itself and it's thirst for oil and it's weak regulations that allowed this to happen- isn't the fact oil companies only by law have to pay up £75 million over things like this evidence enough that American legislation holding oil companies to account is woefully inadequate?
To be fair when someone gets murdered and the guy 5 doors down owned an 18 rated computer game or whatever then computer games get blamed so I see these kinds of stories as balancing it all out!
No seriously though, both types of stories are equally retarded.
I think the issue is that Apple is good at generating pre-release hype by having an extremely loyal (scarily so sometimes!) fanbase, and sometimes by controlled leaks or small snippets of authorised information.
Other companies feel the pressure of that, and attempt to do the same, but as they don't have fanbases quite so rabid as Apple's it comes out as a bit dull- much like this very Blackberry tablet announcement.
I guess Apple are just fortunate enough to have built an insanely loyal fanbase that get excited about the slightest tidbit of infomation, and are simply better doing their pre-release announcements in a way that stirs hype and discussion. As you say- when RIM announce one it doesn't have quite the same charm I suppose does it?
I'm not an Apple fan, far from it, I don't like them much at all, it seems barely a product release goes by without some fault in the product suggesting poor QA, and I don't like their policies at all on app development and the likes, I don't even agree Apple stuff is easy to use- I've found it an absolute pain in the arse to do some things the times I have had to use them. But despite all that, despite my distaste for Apple, each time they announce something new I do take a look, and do talk about it with colleagues and so forth, and love Apple or loathe Apple, it's really that that separates their marketing and announcements from the rest, they just no how to generate hype, and I believe the controversy some of their bad decisions make may even be a calculated part of that- because it ensures even their detractors are mentioning their products and keeping them in the public view, as they say, there aint no such thing as bad publicity I guess.
"I gotta assume that there's some way to develop applications for the Blackberry OS, but I can't ever remember anyone talking about it."
Oh I'm sure you have, it's called Java.
RIM does well with the Blackberry not because they try and build better devices per-se, but because their devices still to this day integrate better with corporate IT infrastructure than any other manufacturers do. Many people who haven't touched Blackberry Enterprise Server have heard of it and assume it's just a tool for interfacing Blackberrys with e-mail but it does more than that- it can convert attachments such as PDFs or Excel files into a format more readable on the device before pushing it to it, it provides corporate IM services, it allows you to manage security policies, you can push out bespoke businesses applications to your devices and so forth. The fact that you can effectively completely manage your company's mobile phones without the users having to bring them into the office (great for if you have mobile users like Salesmen) is a big deal that no other manufacturer has really got quite right yet.
Now that's not to say that I'm a fan of Blackberry devices, I'm not, I'm an Android fan who was previously a Nokia/S60 fan if anything, but at the end of the day there's good reason that RIM owns the business smartphone marketplace- because flashy user interfaces are less important than the ability to manage all your devices centrally and save a fortune on support costs and the likes.
For what it's worth I don't see this tablet being worthwhile either, but then I'm still not overly convinced about tablets in general, laptops with foldable or even detachable screens make much more sense as you get the benefits of both worlds then. With some of ASUS' thin form factors, or the MacBook Air form factor we've seen we can do thin laptops, if we can also just rotate the screens to turn it into a tablet so it can be used as a tablet or a laptop then flexible laptops like this still seem the smartest way forward, because at the end of the day tablets by themselves maybe convenient for a few things but are still crippled when it comes to many other things- this sort of flexible device would not be. We already have them in larger laptop form factors, it shouldn't be too much of a stretch to minituarise them now or soon.
Tablets have been coming out long before Apple made one so the idea that any tablet release now is a response to the iPad is just stupid. Tablets released now as much a response to the iPad than the iPad was to Microsoft's courier anouncement, or any of the millions of Windows tablets that have been commonly available to those who want one for at least a decade.
We did a trial using Windows XP tablets in 2003 in a few schools, they weren't so popular then simply because the hardware was a little too bulky- only around the initial advent of netbooks did general computing kit really become small enough to start doing devices like tablets properly.
Of course, we've even had laptops with screens that twist to allow you to turn it into a tablet for years now too, and they're certainly way ahead of tablets simply because they are so effectively dual function. They aren't really much bulkier and certainly aren't any heavier than the iPad, which is a suprisingly heavy device for it's size.
Pretty much every passenger plane and UAV in the last decade or two has been able to automatically land itself.
Techniques do also exist to automatically spot certain things see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro-optical_MASINT#Applications
In the example of mass-graves, this has been used to automatically detect mass graves in the nations that were former Yugoslaiva (Serbia, Bosnia etc.). Whilst this technology hasn't been fitted onto autonomous UAVs yet there's a simple reason for that and it's certainly not that it isn't possible, but in fact because it's just that much cheaper to butcher an existing airframe like a C130 than it is to create a full blown UAV project to cater to this tech.
Regarding the difference between the AI used here and what you deem 'true' AI I'm not sure what you're referring to. If you're referring to strong AI, then no, we're nowhere near that even on super computers, let alone in aircraft. We don't really want AI that's capable of largely uncontrolled emergence flying aircraft, what happens when it decides to try and land on the freeway because it looks enough like a runway? It's better to stick to what we have and retain control either directly with pilots (remote or in the aircraft) or by predefined flight paths and ILS technology to make sure things go where they're supposed to go, and land where they're supposed to land, and leave things like neural nets for what they're good at- spotting patterns in feedback from Electro-optical MASINT kit and such, or using genetic algorithms to optimise airframe shapes in the first place.
I can relate to this, for some reason I allowed my girlfriends parents to be added to my Facebook friends list, the problem is that what's appropriate for my friends isn't appropriate for them.
Similarly things I talk about with colleagues at my old work place (the things we used to get up to) aren't appropriate for my new work colleagues after I start a new job and so forth.
The net effect is that I have to self censor, and not bother posting content to any of these groups.
There was a story the other day stating that Google intend to allow you to sign in to a desktop (presumably web) based version of the marketplace to remotely install apps on - kind of like you can use iTunes to install apps on your iPhone I guess.
I wouldn't be suprised if Google revamps the marketplace on the phone somewhat at the same time to be honest. It does seem to work quite well as high rated stuff tends to remain at the top and lower rated sinks to the bottom, but I agree, in the long run there will need to be slightly better categorisation of Android apps, particularly if this lot will be distributed via the marketplace!
"... and those hard-wired phones would have been just as useless in this case - a car accident. " ...because car accidents can't possibly ever happen near buildings with phones in them?
"... and good luck calling 911 from outside your house to report that your house is on fire. " ...and no one has any neighbours, ever, they all live in the middle of nowhere?
Hey don't get me wrong, I'm not excusing the fault in the phone if that's what it is, but come on, comments like that give the impression that not only have people lost the ability to use a land line, but have lost all logical thought functions too.
The fact is, we don't know where the accident happened, maybe it did happen in the middle of nowhere, but the GP had a good point- there are a lot of people who would rather complain about their phone not working than do the smart thing and ask to use someone elses. I think he was also getting at the point that even if they were in the middle of nowhere, even having to reboot the phone to make a call is a massive step forward from the era where we had no mobile phones. I mean, what the hell do people do when they witness a car accident in an area with no mobile coverage? Just drive on thinking there's nothing they can do because their cell doesn't work rather than go to the closest working phone?
For what it's worth, I'm intrigued to know if this really is a problem with the handset, or if it's a few rogue reports assuming it is, and believing that resetting has solved it when in fact it's nothing to do with that. The reason I say this is because I've had the same problem on land lines before, where I've had phone calls and the person at the other end couldn't hear me or vice versa. I've also had the same on pretty much every mobile I've ever used at some time or another too. In both cases it's not a hardware problem, it's a network problem, and so even if it is a fault in the handset this problem can certainly arise with any handset, although simply making the call again is usually all that's needed in this case- if the Eris problem really does only fix itself with a reboot then it probably is indeed a handset issue.
Mobile phones absolutely should be dependable, but the fact is, they're just not. Relying on them 100% rather than using common sense, is a bad thing.
The more he goes on the more I think you're probably right. He seems to be rambling on about how the Lib Dem's didn't get things entirely their own way, whilst completely ignoring the fact the the other coalition option- Labour, were offering even less concessions to the Lib Dems.
It'll be interesting to see what happens next election, but I suspect the real Lib Dem supporters will continue to vote Lib Dem, because the fact we actually have some Lib Dem policies being implemented for once is a step beyond what Lib Dem supporters have had in a long long time. It shows that the Lib Dems are in fact making progress beyond being simply the 3rd party, and it shows that perserverence in continuing to vote for the third party can in fact yield results. If everyone had bottled it and voted Tory/Labour we'd be in a far worse position right now.