The mesothelioma litigation network is amazing. My uncle was diagnosed with this cancer and literally within a day he started getting contacted out of the blue from lawyers on how to get compensation for his family. He had never contacted anybody.
They are like ambulance chasers except they have access to your medical records.
With the consoles all being networked now the only thing that makes those games so good on the PC is the mouse and keyboard.
Those games are also tend to have fairly complicated interfaces that would not compress well to a standard TV resolution but for HD sets it would be no problem.
Starcraft2 will be out in the semi-near future. It will be interesting to see the quality of the console ports for it.
I must agree. At one point these books were very meaningful to me. I would eagerly await each new arrival and plow through it in a day. By book 7 I was fairly concerned by the sheer number of characters being introduced who served almost no purpose. Path of Daggers had, at most, 4 useful chapters. I bought book 9 and I read about 2 chapters before shelving it and that is where I stand today.
I am sure I would have picked up the final 3-4 books and read them all once the series was completed but I guess that will never happen now. I am sure if I did though those books would be full of Aes Sedai I had never heard of, talking about people I could barely recall while traveling to some place that I would need to refer to a map to have any idea where it was.
I really liked the first few books but the WoT will still stand as the premier example of a writer who tastes success and then somehow 'graduates' from needing an editor. In Jordans case it appears the editor played a fairly critical role in determining the quality of the final product.
"No, RTFA. They patented floating-point frame buffers, which didn't exist before SGI invented them."
This statement is completely incorrect. Floating point point frame buffers have existed forever. Back in the day it was all done in software ofcourse. Essentially every pretty rendered image from the 90's or earlier that was not ray traced used them. The problem is that the initial 3d accelerators used integer based frame and zbuffers because they were cheaper and easier. SGI did not invent anything. They patented a hardware version of existing software methodology.
They are in fact patent trolls if they think this patent is valid.
1 Warcraft III : The Frozen Throne 2 The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion 3 The Sims 2 4 World of Warcraft 5 Dungeon Siege II: Broken World 6 Age of Empires III 7 Titan Quest (Shameless Diablo clone) 8 Prey (Generic FPS Game #2412) 9 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA3 part 3) 10 Counter-Strike: Source
World of Warcraft is the only 'new' game on there and that is still somewhat debateable.
Id is more responsible than anyone for the situation that they are in. They are poster children for boring clones that whose feature set is 90% new features on video cards instead of gameplay.
There is some interesting backstory to this whole deal.
In the late 90's an SDRAM standard was finally achieved for a chain of years. Previously to this the ram configurations were changing every single year.
On top of this the y2k craze had companies replacing PC's at a wildly accelerated rate causing SDRAM sales to go through the roof.
So many of these companies were making an absolute killing because they were using similar technologies for an extended period of time and everything they could make would get sold, so they all went into pure fabrication mode.
After y2k pc and dram sales tanked. Many of these manufacturers were producing WAY over market capacity and had the choice of A) closing fabs (tossing billion dollar investments) B) selling memory at market price which for some facilities was less than manufacturing cost. C) refusing to sell at market cost.
It is easy to say 'blah blah evil' but closing fabs and axing multiple thousands of jobs and losing billion dollar investments which slaughters your shareholders is not exactly a great option either.
Two sides to every story ofcourse. Micron though plays this as though they are little angels. The reason they are mad is that Korean and German companies would not fix at a point high enough for them to maintain profitability, so they ran to the US government instead.
I really wanted a PSP until I saw that the games were only 5$ less than the full versions. DS stuck true to the very attractive ~30$ pricepoint for games. Fancy hardware only goes so far on a tiny screen.
So clearly cost is a strong factor (duh) but it is still not a great comparison as this was nintendos market to begin with.
Personally I have none of the next gen consoles but will buy the Wii first solely because I have not bought an HDTV yet. The regular/hdtv crossover will have a non-trivial impact on the console wars and I think it is very hard to predict how things will unfold.
Rambus are NOT the good guys by any means. Much of their technology is items that they patented based off of collaborative industry works from trade conferences.
Essentially "Hey intel/micron/samsung lets talk about new volatile memory methodologies. Ok thanks for coming... runs to file patents"
Rambus are not semiconductor manufacturers, they are patent litigators and their patents are largely nonsense.
The shoe fitting fluoroscope was a common fixture in shoe stores during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. A typical unit, like the Adrian machine shown here, consisted of a vertical wooden cabinet with an opening near the bottom into which the feet were placed. When you looked through one of the three viewing ports on the top of the cabinet (e.g., one for the child being fitted, one for the child's parent, and the third for the shoe salesman or saleswoman), you would see a fluorescent image of the bones of the feet and the outline of the shoes.
The machines generally employed a 50 kv x-ray tube operating at 3 to 8 milliamps. When you put your feet in a shoe fitting fluoroscope, you were effectively standing on top of the x-ray tube. The only "shielding" between your feet and the tube was a one mm thick aluminum filter. Some units allowed the operator to select one of three different intensities: the highest intensity for men, the middle one for women and the lowest for children.
Naturally children loved this gadget and kids were getting months of radiation exposure every chance they could get! I know the list is all modern technology but this product is so magically horrid it should get honorary mention...
This sounds like the least user friendly option available to this problem.
So if a mod team wants to make their own map you either need to reuse one of these behemoth textures or find an artist that can wrap their head around the technology and create one themselves.
Procedurally generated textures are a hog and can be very hard to pull off but they still seem like a superior solution to this.
On the other side I am certain that level designers and artists working together can make some really great looking maps with this system. Modders will have a lot of trouble though.
The Nano got destroyed by suppliers not being able to provide product when the Nano oversold estimates. You will all remember how we were flooded with nano commercials at launch and then the commercials disappeared and so did the Nanos because Apple could not assemble any units to sell.
With this move Apple shifts from having a critical part supplied by a bit player to the part being supplied by one of the behemoths of the industry in Samsung.
Furthermore the Korean semiconductor companies are infatuated with marketshare. I am certain Samsung offered them a tempting deal as long as they were the singlesource.
Many linux distros are essentially hobby kits. A knowledgeable user can spend some time and make it perfect in their eyes. Once you get this desired setup everything else seems inferior. "How can that newb be happy with that out of the box trash that they put no work into."
You can find this similar sentiment in effectively every hobby imagineable. After market car modifications are a fine example. Some people love changing their cars appearance and performance. It is a hobby that they enjoy. Some people just want a car, not a hobby.
Also people change. In like 1995 I thought playing around with slackware was so awesome compared to DOS. I had that thing setup just perfect for what I needed it for, so using dos instead was a completely absurd notion to me. Nowadays I simply do not care and the idea of me spending time configuring my OS seems pointless.
In the end I think customizability is the real issue. To some people that is the entire appeal. To others it seems like work.
was hoping for some amusing rtfa posts but anyways.
Peoples wallets make their decisions for them. People have windows cause the computers come with it. Now people are buying their 3rd and 4th computers and want their old stuff to work.
MS will lose market share when someone else TAKES it, it will not go away on its own.
The idea that thousands of employees would leave because some survey says the brand name is poor is absurd to me. MS is making a killing and their quarterly profits year in and out are unreal.
Who cares about some brand recognition study? These people are all supposed to ditch their stock and steady income over an article on the web? Give me a break.
Last I checked Walmart sure has a lot of employees. Do any of you associate walmart with high quality?
I can not speak for your company but where I worked aside from a couple guys (conceptual artist/art director and maybe 1-2 modelers) the artists were all lumped in a collective art pool and did not belong to dev teams directly. Also they got overtime pay so it was apples and oranges to compare them.
I worked in the games industry in PC game development for about 5 years coming out of college.
Some good things.
I had my own office, there were pinball machines and game consoles in the break room, you could get pizza billed to the company delivered any time after hours etc.
Also I learned some very important things about software development. Things like designing self contained code that can not break/interfere with unrelated code. Also learning that just because an app is more or less code complete means very little in the overall completion of your product, the real work is just beginning when that project hits QA.
We had a QA lab inhouse and it was interesting to get perspective from interacting with those guys. Also the job made me better at testing my own code because if I did not test it well, I was just going to have 20 entries in the bug tracker when i got to work the next morning.
Now on to the bad things.
60 hour weeks were very common. When there are milestones or internal project reviews or E3 or some gamign conference require special builds it is more like 70-80 hours with no weekends. When you have a team of 8 programmers and on any given day 4 of you are still there at 9pm it psychologically does not seem so bad because everyone is going through it together. Likewise when you show up on a Sunday and you see all the familiar cars in the parking lot you do not feel as though you are getting 'screwed' on your weekend. It is kind of amazing what you can get used to but in the end it does feel like young single programmers pretty much are the fuel of the gaming industry. When they are tapped out there is always more fuel waiting to jump onboard.
Over time you realize all those perks are just lures to keep you at work as much as possible. When you are 22 some of these sacrifices are not so bad and you are constantly learning new things. When you move on to your second and third projects you start to realize that the problems are no longer new and being at work 60-70 hours a week for a salaried job is more annoying that it used to be. It is annoying things that change over time like hardware technology and machine API's relearning these things over and over every couple years is not intellectually rewarding it feels more like a chore.
You can make a good living in games but most places pay a fairly modest salary and then have project completion bonuses that can be VERY rewarding if the product does well. Unfortunately programmers are just one part of the equation on whether or not a project sells well but we ARE the only part that does 20+ hours of free overtime every week for a couple years. Unless your product does great it is entirely possible that you walk away with the equivalent of 5-10$ per hour of bonus money for all that OT you worked which is really a raw deal.
Ive been out of games for about 5 years now and would not consider going back. I do not regret my time there because I learned a great deal, but leaving the industry yields more money for fewer hours of easier work. Not a hard decision in retrospect.
Slashdot Mirror
The mesothelioma litigation network is amazing. My uncle was diagnosed with this cancer and literally within a day he started getting contacted out of the blue from lawyers on how to get compensation for his family. He had never contacted anybody. They are like ambulance chasers except they have access to your medical records.
With the consoles all being networked now the only thing that makes those games so good on the PC is the mouse and keyboard.
Those games are also tend to have fairly complicated interfaces that would not compress well to a standard TV resolution but for HD sets it would be no problem.
Starcraft2 will be out in the semi-near future. It will be interesting to see the quality of the console ports for it.
I must agree. At one point these books were very meaningful to me. I would eagerly await each new arrival and plow through it in a day. By book 7 I was fairly concerned by the sheer number of characters being introduced who served almost no purpose. Path of Daggers had, at most, 4 useful chapters. I bought book 9 and I read about 2 chapters before shelving it and that is where I stand today.
I am sure I would have picked up the final 3-4 books and read them all once the series was completed but I guess that will never happen now. I am sure if I did though those books would be full of Aes Sedai I had never heard of, talking about people I could barely recall while traveling to some place that I would need to refer to a map to have any idea where it was.
I really liked the first few books but the WoT will still stand as the premier example of a writer who tastes success and then somehow 'graduates' from needing an editor. In Jordans case it appears the editor played a fairly critical role in determining the quality of the final product.
"No, RTFA. They patented floating-point frame buffers, which didn't exist before SGI invented them."
This statement is completely incorrect. Floating point point frame buffers have existed forever. Back in the day it was all done in software ofcourse. Essentially every pretty rendered image from the 90's or earlier that was not ray traced used them. The problem is that the initial 3d accelerators used integer based frame and zbuffers because they were cheaper and easier. SGI did not invent anything. They patented a hardware version of existing software methodology.
They are in fact patent trolls if they think this patent is valid.
"...and opens the path for Microsoft and Internet Explorer 7 to regain marketshare."
This is a worthless mindset. The goal should be to release a good product that end users appreciate. Competition will make both products better.
[Taken from todays gamespot PC game rankings]
1 Warcraft III : The Frozen Throne
2 The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
3 The Sims 2
4 World of Warcraft
5 Dungeon Siege II: Broken World
6 Age of Empires III
7 Titan Quest (Shameless Diablo clone)
8 Prey (Generic FPS Game #2412)
9 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA3 part 3)
10 Counter-Strike: Source
World of Warcraft is the only 'new' game on there and that is still somewhat debateable.
Id is more responsible than anyone for the situation that they are in. They are poster children for boring clones that whose feature set is 90% new features on video cards instead of gameplay.
There is some interesting backstory to this whole deal.
In the late 90's an SDRAM standard was finally achieved for a chain of years. Previously to this the ram configurations were changing every single year.
On top of this the y2k craze had companies replacing PC's at a wildly accelerated rate causing SDRAM sales to go through the roof.
So many of these companies were making an absolute killing because they were using similar technologies for an extended period of time and everything they could make would get sold, so they all went into pure fabrication mode.
After y2k pc and dram sales tanked. Many of these manufacturers were producing WAY over market capacity and had the choice of
A) closing fabs (tossing billion dollar investments)
B) selling memory at market price which for some facilities was less than manufacturing cost.
C) refusing to sell at market cost.
It is easy to say 'blah blah evil' but closing fabs and axing multiple thousands of jobs and losing billion dollar investments which slaughters your shareholders is not exactly a great option either.
Two sides to every story ofcourse. Micron though plays this as though they are little angels. The reason they are mad is that Korean and German companies would not fix at a point high enough for them to maintain profitability, so they ran to the US government instead.
I really wanted a PSP until I saw that the games were only 5$ less than the full versions. DS stuck true to the very attractive ~30$ pricepoint for games. Fancy hardware only goes so far on a tiny screen.
So clearly cost is a strong factor (duh) but it is still not a great comparison as this was nintendos market to begin with.
Personally I have none of the next gen consoles but will buy the Wii first solely because I have not bought an HDTV yet. The regular/hdtv crossover will have a non-trivial impact on the console wars and I think it is very hard to predict how things will unfold.
Indeed.
Rambus are NOT the good guys by any means. Much of their technology is items that they patented based off of collaborative industry works from trade conferences.
Essentially "Hey intel/micron/samsung lets talk about new volatile memory methodologies. Ok thanks for coming... runs to file patents"
Rambus are not semiconductor manufacturers, they are patent litigators and their patents are largely nonsense.
good call. divx was so absurd.
The shoe fitting fluoroscope was a common fixture in shoe stores during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. A typical unit, like the Adrian machine shown here, consisted of a vertical wooden cabinet with an opening near the bottom into which the feet were placed. When you looked through one of the three viewing ports on the top of the cabinet (e.g., one for the child being fitted, one for the child's parent, and the third for the shoe salesman or saleswoman), you would see a fluorescent image of the bones of the feet and the outline of the shoes.
The machines generally employed a 50 kv x-ray tube operating at 3 to 8 milliamps. When you put your feet in a shoe fitting fluoroscope, you were effectively standing on top of the x-ray tube. The only "shielding" between your feet and the tube was a one mm thick aluminum filter. Some units allowed the operator to select one of three different intensities: the highest intensity for men, the middle one for women and the lowest for children.
Naturally children loved this gadget and kids were getting months of radiation exposure every chance they could get! I know the list is all modern technology but this product is so magically horrid it should get honorary mention...
Perhaps the overhyping has forever biased me but the segway has to be the most absurd tech product.
2k for a bizarre scooter that was supposed to change my life forever? huh?
This sounds like the least user friendly option available to this problem.
So if a mod team wants to make their own map you either need to reuse one of these behemoth textures or find an artist that can wrap their head around the technology and create one themselves.
Procedurally generated textures are a hog and can be very hard to pull off but they still seem like a superior solution to this.
On the other side I am certain that level designers and artists working together can make some really great looking maps with this system. Modders will have a lot of trouble though.
The Nano got destroyed by suppliers not being able to provide product when the Nano oversold estimates. You will all remember how we were flooded with nano commercials at launch and then the commercials disappeared and so did the Nanos because Apple could not assemble any units to sell.
With this move Apple shifts from having a critical part supplied by a bit player to the part being supplied by one of the behemoths of the industry in Samsung.
Furthermore the Korean semiconductor companies are infatuated with marketshare. I am certain Samsung offered them a tempting deal as long as they were the singlesource.
The snobbery is a side effect in my opinion.
Many linux distros are essentially hobby kits. A knowledgeable user can spend some time and make it perfect in their eyes. Once you get this desired setup everything else seems inferior. "How can that newb be happy with that out of the box trash that they put no work into."
You can find this similar sentiment in effectively every hobby imagineable. After market car modifications are a fine example. Some people love changing their cars appearance and performance. It is a hobby that they enjoy. Some people just want a car, not a hobby.
Also people change. In like 1995 I thought playing around with slackware was so awesome compared to DOS. I had that thing setup just perfect for what I needed it for, so using dos instead was a completely absurd notion to me. Nowadays I simply do not care and the idea of me spending time configuring my OS seems pointless.
In the end I think customizability is the real issue. To some people that is the entire appeal. To others it seems like work.
was hoping for some amusing rtfa posts but anyways.
Peoples wallets make their decisions for them. People have windows cause the computers come with it. Now people are buying their 3rd and 4th computers and want their old stuff to work.
MS will lose market share when someone else TAKES it, it will not go away on its own.
The idea that thousands of employees would leave because some survey says the brand name is poor is absurd to me. MS is making a killing and their quarterly profits year in and out are unreal.
Who cares about some brand recognition study? These people are all supposed to ditch their stock and steady income over an article on the web? Give me a break.
Last I checked Walmart sure has a lot of employees. Do any of you associate walmart with high quality?
I can not speak for your company but where I worked aside from a couple guys (conceptual artist/art director and maybe 1-2 modelers) the artists were all lumped in a collective art pool and did not belong to dev teams directly. Also they got overtime pay so it was apples and oranges to compare them.
I worked in the games industry in PC game development for about 5 years coming out of college. Some good things. I had my own office, there were pinball machines and game consoles in the break room, you could get pizza billed to the company delivered any time after hours etc. Also I learned some very important things about software development. Things like designing self contained code that can not break/interfere with unrelated code. Also learning that just because an app is more or less code complete means very little in the overall completion of your product, the real work is just beginning when that project hits QA. We had a QA lab inhouse and it was interesting to get perspective from interacting with those guys. Also the job made me better at testing my own code because if I did not test it well, I was just going to have 20 entries in the bug tracker when i got to work the next morning. Now on to the bad things. 60 hour weeks were very common. When there are milestones or internal project reviews or E3 or some gamign conference require special builds it is more like 70-80 hours with no weekends. When you have a team of 8 programmers and on any given day 4 of you are still there at 9pm it psychologically does not seem so bad because everyone is going through it together. Likewise when you show up on a Sunday and you see all the familiar cars in the parking lot you do not feel as though you are getting 'screwed' on your weekend. It is kind of amazing what you can get used to but in the end it does feel like young single programmers pretty much are the fuel of the gaming industry. When they are tapped out there is always more fuel waiting to jump onboard. Over time you realize all those perks are just lures to keep you at work as much as possible. When you are 22 some of these sacrifices are not so bad and you are constantly learning new things. When you move on to your second and third projects you start to realize that the problems are no longer new and being at work 60-70 hours a week for a salaried job is more annoying that it used to be. It is annoying things that change over time like hardware technology and machine API's relearning these things over and over every couple years is not intellectually rewarding it feels more like a chore. You can make a good living in games but most places pay a fairly modest salary and then have project completion bonuses that can be VERY rewarding if the product does well. Unfortunately programmers are just one part of the equation on whether or not a project sells well but we ARE the only part that does 20+ hours of free overtime every week for a couple years. Unless your product does great it is entirely possible that you walk away with the equivalent of 5-10$ per hour of bonus money for all that OT you worked which is really a raw deal. Ive been out of games for about 5 years now and would not consider going back. I do not regret my time there because I learned a great deal, but leaving the industry yields more money for fewer hours of easier work. Not a hard decision in retrospect.