And we do. It's called Selective Service, and I had to sign up when I turned 18, just like all male US citizens.
Not just citizens. Anyone living in the US who is male and between the ages of 18 and 26, even non-resident aliens on H-1B visas, has to sign up. And, ironically, it's actually more important to make sure you do sign up if you're one of those non-resident aliens, because they can and do check up on it if you ever want to apply for another visa, green card, citizenship etc.
Theoretically, even illegal immigrants are supposed to sign up! Go figure.
Doesn't work. The person being defamed/libelled is a third party, not the reader of the site. They could sue for libel without ever having read the site, or encountering your proposed disclaimer.
Am I the only one who thinks that all those people posting about how "this proves that profiling doesn't work and is pure concentrated evil" are the same people that practically come in their pants at the mere thought of Bayesian spam filtering, which works on more or less the same principle?
I would think differently about this if it was a FREE service, but it's not. I am paying to play these games online, I expect to do as I please.
Why should you expect to do as you please? If you're disrupting the service for others, they have every right to ban you - pay or no pay. If I buy a ticket to a movie, that doesn't give the right to act as a please in the theater - the management could quite reasonably throw me out if I distrupted the experience of other paying customers.
Indeed, one of the things you are paying for when you subscribe to Xbox Live is precisely that it is a controlled service. You are paying for a reasonable expectation that people are not going to cheat, or be consistently abusive. You know that when you sign up.
Don't be so sure. What would be the point? If you built a GL wrapper for Xbox, you'd have to have so many Xbox specific extensions in order to get the performance where it needs to be, that for practical purposes he might as well have just written to the existing API. I don't think John Carmack is religious about this, I think it's just that GL suits his current needs very well and he doesn't see any value in switching. If the sane thing to do for an Xbox port was to use the existing API, I wouldn't be surprised if he did just that.
Even if MS did provide some kind of GL-like wrapper for Xbox, just to appease John Carmack (which, honestly, I don't think is as big a deal as you're making out, given the different market in console games) they'd be unlikely to offer it to developers in general simply because they wouldn't want to chew up resources supporting the fucker.
You misread the quote, of course. He's saying that there is this feature that is exposed on both on the Xbox, and via OpenGL.
As an Xbox games developer, I can assure you that there is no OpenGL support on Xbox. I can also assure you that I'm happily using the feature he talks about via Direct3D.
Sure. I was obviously being flippant about the Mac, but the point remains that it's not really a commercially viable games platform right now. I was mainly wanted to repond to the dredging up of a 5 year old.plan file which is no longer an accurate representation of the state of things.
AFAIK the PS2 and GC both have proprietary graphics libraries (and in the PS2 case, not much of a library at all).
There's certainly a lot of sample GL code out there, but the bulk of it is on the basics, which is really pretty simple in either API. The complex stuff often revolves around vendor-specific extensions in GL, about which there is considerably less material widely available, certainly not significantly more than for Direct3D.
He posted that (now infamous).plan file I think 5 years ago. At the time, Direct3D was indeed a steaming pile to work with. The most recent versions are vastly easier to use. John Carmack still likes to use OpenGL (and why wouldn't he, since he has every hardware vendor in the industry willing to fine tune their GL drivers to his whims), but he has I believe gone on record as saying that Direct3D has improved significantly, and that many of the criticisms in that old.plan file are no longer valid.
The cross-platform one is interesting if you're in the games business, since of the commercially viable platforms (i.e. Windows PC and the consoles - even if both of the Mac owners buy your game you'll never recover your costs), OpenGL is supported on precisely one of them, whereas Direct3D is supported on two (PC and Xbox).
Enron of software? On what grounds? The article you linked to is pure bunk, and it's pretty easy to see why.
While it's true that if stock options were accounted for as expenditure, Microsoft would have posted a paper loss in some previous years, it's also true that when the stock fell, the same computation would have left them posting a phenomincal profit for precisely the same reason. These fluctuations are exactly why accounting stock options as expenses year-on-year doesn't make sense, and why it is not generally accepted accounting practice.
The undeniable fact is that somehow Microsoft has accumulated over $40 billion in liquid asset reserves. How did that happen if they took a loss every year? The contrast with Enron could not be more stark.
PS. I thought the reference to The Economist was particularly cute, since the article referred to concluded nothing like the taken out-of-context quote implied.
Sure, there are exceptions to every rule. But I'm guessing the original poster isn't a doctor on call, or he would have mentioned it loud and clear.
If there's a strong possiblity of emergency calls, but you just have to see that movie, then sit at the back in an aisle seat. However, the 95% case is people arranging their social lives in the middle of a movie that I paid good money to see. My social life is exciting, but I'm not so insecure that I can't wait until the end of the movie to pick up messages and return calls.
What are you going to do when it vibrates then, smart guy? Answer it and have a conversation in the middle of the movie? Perhaps stand up and disturb everyone in your row plus the people immediately behind you on your way to the exit?
Face it, if you're likely to receive a call that is so stupendously important that it couldn't wait until you pick up your messages, then perhaps you shouldn't have gone to the movies in the first place.
That'd be why a search for "paypal sucks [google.com]" on Google turns up 25,000 results, right?
Oh, that's a great measure of how much something sucks. Let's see...hmm, "Linux sucks" has over 208,000 hits. Geez, it must really suck major to get that many hits.
Scripting in Perl is fine, and I agree with the advice about not inventing Yet Another Scripting Language, but you definitely need to also allow people to supply binary plugins developed in their language of choice (typically C/C++). You're going to be chewing a lot of data in many cases - trust me, using an intepreted language to do non-trivial things to million-poly datasets puts a real kink in your productivity.
A fully-featured 3D animation package is pretty damn huge. What is your intended purpose in building your own, rather than using an existing package? I assume that it is simply for fun, or perhaps you have a more ambitious goal of creating an open source 3D modelling package that might be a replacement for Max, Maya et al?
If you are intending a serious replacement for professional packages, perhaps you need to talk to some of the users of those packages. I'm sure some game developers (just as myself) and animation folks lurk on Slashdot, but to get really great feedback you really ought to go to a more special purpose forum.
That said, some things I'd consider if you're planning a truly professional quality package are:
- Support and documentation. Especially really great documentation and samples. Plan a lot of time on this. Getting this piece right will pay for a lot of fuckups on the rest of the design.
- Extensibility. Every pro user I know uses an array of in-house extensions, for everything from custom data format importers and exporters to plugins for procedural geometry, custom shaders, special lighting models, and a whole slew of other things. Make everything scriptable, overrideable, and customisable. Consider writing the bulk of your standard features using the same toolkit people will use to write plugins, because then they serve as sample apps.
- Consider providing compatibility modes for people migrating from other pro packages. Artists get very set in their ways. Unless you have a truly revolutionary and more productive UI, follow some of the existing conventions, or at least make it an option.
- Provide a batch processing mode, so that offline tools can invoke the power of your package without firing up the whole damn UI. In the games business, we have a lot of build process running on our artwork from assorted batch files, Perl scripts, and whathaveyou. I'm sure the same is true in other pro environments too.
Edge magazine, usually a pack of rabid Nintendo fanboys, rated Halo 10/10 (an accolade they've only given to I think 4 or 5 games ever) and called it game of the year. Halo also won many other game of the year awards. Indeed, I'd be surprised if any other game won more awards last year.
The games you mention were all great games, but I think Halo received at least as much critical acclaim.
My point still stands: if you think MS 'ruined' Bungie, and you're using Halo as your evidence, then you really need to lay off the crack-pipe.
Yeah, I've heard that before. But apart from vague innuendo on websites written by Mac fanboys, I've never really seen much evidence that Halo was ever going to be anything different. Besides which, who is to say that if any chance happened, it wasn't driven by Bungie, perhaps because they thought the changes might make for a better game?
Now, returning to the actual facts: By my reckoning, after MS bought Bungie the first product released was the most critically acclaimed title on any platform last year. You'll forgive me if I don't really see that as evidence for MS 'ruining' the company.
I'm not so sure. Working for a geek might not be the place you want to stay. Working for a good manager is where I want to be. Such a person might or might not be a geek (many geeks make truly woeful managers, because they're too wrapped up in technology to give a rip about things like people skills and helping folks plan their careers).
Also, although in the short term, your headhunter just wants to place you somewhere, in the long term a smart headhunter wants to take care of their reputation. If they get a reputation for placing people in the wrong jobs, pretty soon they won't get used any more. It's also quite usual for the headhunter to only get paid if you stay for, say, a year.
Watts is a measure of power, i.e. energy per unit time. So, to ask how long it takes to deliver 100KW is nonsensical. Did you perhaps mean, how long can this thing fire for continuously, i.e. how much energy can I fire at the target in a burst?
Of course, if you'd read the review (yeah, I know, it's a bit much to expect posters to read the article they are commenting on), you might have noticed that the question is about why software costs so much to produce.
Software costs so much to make because the skilled workers needed to produce it can charge a high price for their time and effort. So the question boils down to why all that time and effort is needed, and why such highly skilled people are needed to do it. Sounds like this book might offer some insight into that question.
Re:that doesn't mean they'll produce good games
on
Microsoft Buys Rare
·
· Score: 2
Right, but if rumours are to be believed, they got them later than they were expecting, even if they were the first outside of Nintendo.
Remember that Rare were basically Nintendo of America's puppy. I'm wondering if there was some internal politics between NoA and Nintendo of Japan which made the whole thing start to go south? (I have no evidence for that, just some unsubstantiated rumours and speculation.) Perhaps the owners were just getting disaffected with Nintendo and wanted to be sold to get out of that relationship? Nintendo doesn't exactly have a great reputation in the industry for how it deals with 3rd party developers, and if they'd started to treat Rare like any other 3rd party developer I could see how that might have pissed people off.
Like I say, that's all just speculation based on rumour, but it has a ring of truth to it. Just looking at the revenue figures, and the assets that MS would be acquiring, it doesn't really seem like they got screwed on the deal when you compare other company valuations to their revenue streams. Remember that when you buy a company, you get all their assets - maybe Rare has some liquid assets (I'd be surprised if it didn't have a few million in cash and investments squirreled away), which you really need to subtract from the headline figure before you know how much MS really 'paid'.
Re:that doesn't mean they'll produce good games
on
Microsoft Buys Rare
·
· Score: 2
True, there are running costs associated with buying Rare. On the other hand, they also have assets, which the $375M are partly buying. Those assets will still exist even if the company generates no revenue.
MS are in it for the long haul. Rare don't have to pay for themselves in the next year, or even the next five years in order for it to be a worthwhile purchase. Take a look at the PE ratios of most companies - they're often valued at something more on the order of 20 years worth of revenue (if not more, in many cases).
Re:that doesn't mean they'll produce good games
on
Microsoft Buys Rare
·
· Score: 2
It's true that it's lost the Nintendo licences, but Rare still has a number of valuable properties (e.g. Perfect Dark, Banjo Kazooie, Blast Corps). The poorer than expected results for the most recent titles have, according to rumour, partly been to do with Nintendo dropping the ball - from what I hear they've been more arms length with Rare recently, getting GameCube dev kits to them later than expected and generally not keeping them as close as they did in the N64 era. This might explain the staff defections - disaffaction with Nintendo, a problem that might just have gone away with the MS purchase.
I'd be surprised if the founders were to leave any time soon. If nothing else, I'm sure MS were smart enough to lock them in contractually, since when you buy a development company you're buying the people as much as the IP.
Making back that $375 could be a breeze if it's the catalyst that kick starts Xbox profitability. Even if that doesn't happen, they'll still make a modest chunk of it back over the lifetime of the console. And it's not like the company and it's brands don't have any value after that - it's still a good purchase even if they don't make back the purchase price on revenue, because they are also buying assets which have value.
Slashdot Mirror
Not just citizens. Anyone living in the US who is male and between the ages of 18 and 26, even non-resident aliens on H-1B visas, has to sign up. And, ironically, it's actually more important to make sure you do sign up if you're one of those non-resident aliens, because they can and do check up on it if you ever want to apply for another visa, green card, citizenship etc.
Theoretically, even illegal immigrants are supposed to sign up! Go figure.
Doesn't work. The person being defamed/libelled is a third party, not the reader of the site. They could sue for libel without ever having read the site, or encountering your proposed disclaimer.
Am I the only one who thinks that all those people posting about how "this proves that profiling doesn't work and is pure concentrated evil" are the same people that practically come in their pants at the mere thought of Bayesian spam filtering, which works on more or less the same principle?
1: They are if they might be cheating.
2: Read the post I was replying to. The poster was complaining about the possibiliy of being banned for being abusive to other subscribers.
Why should you expect to do as you please? If you're disrupting the service for others, they have every right to ban you - pay or no pay. If I buy a ticket to a movie, that doesn't give the right to act as a please in the theater - the management could quite reasonably throw me out if I distrupted the experience of other paying customers.
Indeed, one of the things you are paying for when you subscribe to Xbox Live is precisely that it is a controlled service. You are paying for a reasonable expectation that people are not going to cheat, or be consistently abusive. You know that when you sign up.
Even if MS did provide some kind of GL-like wrapper for Xbox, just to appease John Carmack (which, honestly, I don't think is as big a deal as you're making out, given the different market in console games) they'd be unlikely to offer it to developers in general simply because they wouldn't want to chew up resources supporting the fucker.
As an Xbox games developer, I can assure you that there is no OpenGL support on Xbox. I can also assure you that I'm happily using the feature he talks about via Direct3D.
AFAIK the PS2 and GC both have proprietary graphics libraries (and in the PS2 case, not much of a library at all).
There's certainly a lot of sample GL code out there, but the bulk of it is on the basics, which is really pretty simple in either API. The complex stuff often revolves around vendor-specific extensions in GL, about which there is considerably less material widely available, certainly not significantly more than for Direct3D.
The cross-platform one is interesting if you're in the games business, since of the commercially viable platforms (i.e. Windows PC and the consoles - even if both of the Mac owners buy your game you'll never recover your costs), OpenGL is supported on precisely one of them, whereas Direct3D is supported on two (PC and Xbox).
While it's true that if stock options were accounted for as expenditure, Microsoft would have posted a paper loss in some previous years, it's also true that when the stock fell, the same computation would have left them posting a phenomincal profit for precisely the same reason. These fluctuations are exactly why accounting stock options as expenses year-on-year doesn't make sense, and why it is not generally accepted accounting practice.
The undeniable fact is that somehow Microsoft has accumulated over $40 billion in liquid asset reserves. How did that happen if they took a loss every year? The contrast with Enron could not be more stark.
PS. I thought the reference to The Economist was particularly cute, since the article referred to concluded nothing like the taken out-of-context quote implied.
If there's a strong possiblity of emergency calls, but you just have to see that movie, then sit at the back in an aisle seat. However, the 95% case is people arranging their social lives in the middle of a movie that I paid good money to see. My social life is exciting, but I'm not so insecure that I can't wait until the end of the movie to pick up messages and return calls.
Face it, if you're likely to receive a call that is so stupendously important that it couldn't wait until you pick up your messages, then perhaps you shouldn't have gone to the movies in the first place.
Oh, that's a great measure of how much something sucks. Let's see...hmm, "Linux sucks" has over 208,000 hits. Geez, it must really suck major to get that many hits.
Scripting in Perl is fine, and I agree with the advice about not inventing Yet Another Scripting Language, but you definitely need to also allow people to supply binary plugins developed in their language of choice (typically C/C++). You're going to be chewing a lot of data in many cases - trust me, using an intepreted language to do non-trivial things to million-poly datasets puts a real kink in your productivity.
If you are intending a serious replacement for professional packages, perhaps you need to talk to some of the users of those packages. I'm sure some game developers (just as myself) and animation folks lurk on Slashdot, but to get really great feedback you really ought to go to a more special purpose forum.
That said, some things I'd consider if you're planning a truly professional quality package are:
- Support and documentation. Especially really great documentation and samples. Plan a lot of time on this. Getting this piece right will pay for a lot of fuckups on the rest of the design.
- Extensibility. Every pro user I know uses an array of in-house extensions, for everything from custom data format importers and exporters to plugins for procedural geometry, custom shaders, special lighting models, and a whole slew of other things. Make everything scriptable, overrideable, and customisable. Consider writing the bulk of your standard features using the same toolkit people will use to write plugins, because then they serve as sample apps.
- Consider providing compatibility modes for people migrating from other pro packages. Artists get very set in their ways. Unless you have a truly revolutionary and more productive UI, follow some of the existing conventions, or at least make it an option.
- Provide a batch processing mode, so that offline tools can invoke the power of your package without firing up the whole damn UI. In the games business, we have a lot of build process running on our artwork from assorted batch files, Perl scripts, and whathaveyou. I'm sure the same is true in other pro environments too.
The games you mention were all great games, but I think Halo received at least as much critical acclaim.
My point still stands: if you think MS 'ruined' Bungie, and you're using Halo as your evidence, then you really need to lay off the crack-pipe.
Now, returning to the actual facts: By my reckoning, after MS bought Bungie the first product released was the most critically acclaimed title on any platform last year. You'll forgive me if I don't really see that as evidence for MS 'ruining' the company.
I don't think there's much evidence that MS has "ruined" Ensemble or Bungie. But don't let the facts get in the way of your rant.
Also, although in the short term, your headhunter just wants to place you somewhere, in the long term a smart headhunter wants to take care of their reputation. If they get a reputation for placing people in the wrong jobs, pretty soon they won't get used any more. It's also quite usual for the headhunter to only get paid if you stay for, say, a year.
Watts is a measure of power, i.e. energy per unit time. So, to ask how long it takes to deliver 100KW is nonsensical. Did you perhaps mean, how long can this thing fire for continuously, i.e. how much energy can I fire at the target in a burst?
You are 100% correct. They are two different concepts. Which was exactly my point, if you read my post.
Software costs so much to make because the skilled workers needed to produce it can charge a high price for their time and effort. So the question boils down to why all that time and effort is needed, and why such highly skilled people are needed to do it. Sounds like this book might offer some insight into that question.
Remember that Rare were basically Nintendo of America's puppy. I'm wondering if there was some internal politics between NoA and Nintendo of Japan which made the whole thing start to go south? (I have no evidence for that, just some unsubstantiated rumours and speculation.) Perhaps the owners were just getting disaffected with Nintendo and wanted to be sold to get out of that relationship? Nintendo doesn't exactly have a great reputation in the industry for how it deals with 3rd party developers, and if they'd started to treat Rare like any other 3rd party developer I could see how that might have pissed people off.
Like I say, that's all just speculation based on rumour, but it has a ring of truth to it. Just looking at the revenue figures, and the assets that MS would be acquiring, it doesn't really seem like they got screwed on the deal when you compare other company valuations to their revenue streams. Remember that when you buy a company, you get all their assets - maybe Rare has some liquid assets (I'd be surprised if it didn't have a few million in cash and investments squirreled away), which you really need to subtract from the headline figure before you know how much MS really 'paid'.
MS are in it for the long haul. Rare don't have to pay for themselves in the next year, or even the next five years in order for it to be a worthwhile purchase. Take a look at the PE ratios of most companies - they're often valued at something more on the order of 20 years worth of revenue (if not more, in many cases).
I'd be surprised if the founders were to leave any time soon. If nothing else, I'm sure MS were smart enough to lock them in contractually, since when you buy a development company you're buying the people as much as the IP.
Making back that $375 could be a breeze if it's the catalyst that kick starts Xbox profitability. Even if that doesn't happen, they'll still make a modest chunk of it back over the lifetime of the console. And it's not like the company and it's brands don't have any value after that - it's still a good purchase even if they don't make back the purchase price on revenue, because they are also buying assets which have value.