They reinvest them to make more of the same thing.
Or, as is often the case, siphon the majority of it off to executive paychecks and then reinvest the minimum required to get an underpaid team to pull 80-hour weeks to make more of the same thing.
Moore's Law states a doubling in transistors (but we'll call it performance) at every 18 month interval, so:
72/18 = 4 Moore cycles
2^4 = 32
So in six years, Gordon Moore says we should have 32x the performance we have now.
But it's indeed interesting... Silicon was a much easier-to-predict medium in the 20th Century. And yet here we have these two mature, opposing approaches to silicon-based computing, represented by the CPU and the GPU, with some predicting unprecedented growth for one and stagnation for the other. What will happen? How will hard material and process limitations affect the development of these? Will something exotic like artifical diamond-based ICs disrupt the market? An exciting time is in store for the sector, no doubt.
This has to be pretty common. A very similar thing happened to me in high school. Some (presumably database-related) error caused a handful of 70-student classes, and I remember sitting with my gargantuan history class out in the student commons as they figured out how to re-parcel out the class rosters.
The kicker? This was ten years ago. Why is it still happening?
There are several APIs that I can't see any reason for Apple not to make public apart from simply wanting to get them right on the first try. Along with real-time bitmap data from the camera is the calendar. It's kind of silly that apps can't add an entry to your schedule right now, but I think it's only a matter of time until Apple has this stuff stable and ready to set loose with developers.
Given the rigors of the App Store approval process, there would have to be some kind of pretext to the app, like a "social AR friend locator." Perhaps then, from within the app's network, invite-only social networks could be built and expand, with users "recommending" other users to each other, then seeking them out. Users could post statuses, used in this case to say what they have in stock... Hey, real-life AR Dope Wars!
It is unfortunate, though, that even in business, the incentive of profit is outweighed by the incentive of short-term profit.
Upgrading infrastructure is a big investment over the long term, which makes sense to you and me, but to your average MBA, the question is "what's the ROI for the next two quarters?" and of course, the short-term ROI on a long-term investment is always poor.
So, the upgrades aren't made, and everyone goes on pretending nothing's going to go wrong (if it's not going to go wrong this quarter, there's no danger!) and nothing happens until the problem has been put off for so long that suddenly, it's right around the corner and it's obvious that catastrophe is the only possible result from continuing to ignore it. Then, even more money than would have gone into a phased upgrade goes into an emergency upgrade, patching things left and right, dealing with outages, and generally making a mess of things.
It's the way everything works, though, really -- matters of climate change, unsustainable financial practices -- so long as doomsday isn't tomorrow, no one cares.
Look, it's a tradeoff. If you think the loosely-documented Android is an easier development environment than the fastidiously-documented and streamlined Cocoa Touch environment, you're probably deluding yourself and modding people down out of insecurity. However, when it comes to publishing, the reverse is true -- Make an Android app that Google doesn't like and you'll probably have a lot better chance of it getting into users' hands than if you make an iPhone app Apple doesn't like.
Both can be improved. Google can move toward a consolidation of developer documentation and resources, and Apple can loosen up about its functionality prohibitions.
that buying a particular brand of anything somehow says something about who they are.
You are correct that buying a brand says nothing about who you are. But the substance of what you buy does indeed say quite a bit about your priorities. You seem to hold a greatly simplified view of the market and the forces that drive it: that all consumers buy only by brand and that none choose on merit. With the exception of you, obviously, the only one able to look past branding and make an educated decision.
But, it appears that brands do indeed matter to you! You make a dismissal of Apple products based merely upon their popularity and trendy branding, with no mention of any objective shortcomings. Has it occurred to you that a certain subset of Apple's customers actually buy their products for superior usability? That a Harley Davidson rider may have comparison shopped and chosen a Harley based on its mechanical qualities?
Brand identity is indeed one major force in the marketplace. But it's far from the only one.
This could happen in the future, but not this console generation. And, despite what seems to be going around at some forums, most definitely not for the PS3!
I can see how the PSPgo's dispensation with the PSP's optical drive could give one the impression that such a move might be possible for Sony's home console, but the difference is much greater than what meets the eye.
The PSPgo is not a revision of the PSP platform. Sony was made fun of for insisting that the Go will exist parallel to the PSP in the market, but the fact is, Sony is trying for a completely different kind of console experience with the PSPgo than they did with the PSP.
The PSP was conceived as a little, handheld Playstation. Same kind of games, same kind of gameplay, just smaller. The PSPgo, on the other hand, is Sony's (too late?) attempt to compete with both the DS and the iPod Touch. It's geared toward a completely different kind of game, not scaled-down versions of home console games, but games conceived from the ground up to be portable, things you pick up and play for a few minutes and then put away when your number is called at the DMV. Despite the shared software architecture, the PSPgo is not at all like the PSP.
So to launch a PS3 with no optical drive would be to target a different kind of game. While there are some disc-based PS3 titles that have been re-released as downloadable, they are a tiny minority, and given the way that platform exclusives tend to be very free with asset file size due to Blu-Ray's disc capacity, there's a pretty hard technical reason for that as well.
Over the course of this young century, the case you make will become all the more apparent to everyone else. I don't know what will happen in the middle of it, but by the end of the century, the Olympics, if they are still practiced, will be more akin to F1 racing than Hellenistic sport -- there will be a single human who pilots her body, but that body will bear the labor of a whole team of skilled engineers.
I spent a several weeks testing out various todo lists on the iPhone, and I won't be happy to change phones unless it has a todo list that meets the very specific criteria I developed.
I must not be the only one who has tried a handful of to-do list apps and yet not stayed with any of them. Care to share which one won you over?
If just one mission is tower defense, I think that leaves a good degree of potential for the rest of them.
I wouldn't worry much about mission variety here -- if the originality Blizzard has been cranking out for of World of Warcraft quests in the expansions is any indicator, they'll have their hands full experimenting with mission structures.
I had a hard time rooting for instead of rooting that we would just get shot. He was weak and pathetic, and only had courage while in the exo-suit, and even then, he was wishy-washy.
Wikus is a bureaucratic simpleton thrust into a situation far beyond his grasp. One of the major things I enjoyed about the film was watching the development of his character. With every plot twist, I had to wonder -- is he beginning to see? Does he understand now what he's been a part of? Is he beginning to get a better sense of life from the Prawns' point of view?
It was that constant character suspense -- do I want to root for Wikus yet or not? -- that was part of what made the movie such an edge-of-the-seat experience for me.
And I do the same thing on PS3. I've bought one or two titles at MSRP because I wanted to take part in the launch excitement, but with everything else I've just kept an eye out for price drops and picked up a preferred title when it hit my price range.
It's funny, because the PS3 was my first home console -- I'd been one of those elitist PC gamers for years before that, but as things like buggy shipping builds, Starforce copy protection, and way too much user configuration began to choke out the fun for PC gaming, I headed off to console land dreading the "oh hey it costs more for next gen" $60 pricetags. And yet, I haven't paid over half that so far this year.
Les Paul, as well as Robert Moog, Leon Theremin, and others created the tools that made 20th Century music a wonderfully alien thing, producing sounds without precedent in the history of music. This always leads me to wonder, though: Where will the next revolutionary sound come from? We can simulate nearly anything in software now, so what does that mean for the future of new instruments?
Actually, maybe we're already well into the world of the next sonic revolutionary: Andy Hildebrand, inventor of Auto-Tune. Although I'm not sure I'm ready for a world where the "Auto-Tune effect" is as popular as the twang of a Les Paul guitar.
My local, family-owned grocery store has never screwed me over!
Oh wait, they did stop carrying that one delicious brand of pita bread. And the express lane is always too busy. And there's that ugly, no-name DVD rental kiosk in the entryway with MS Paint graphics.
Trying to characterize the modern Sony in any meaningfully consistent way is an exercise in futility. Sony, like any major Japanese company, has always existed in a number of fairly distinct units or "silos," but in their present incarnation, they are spread across such a wide variety of markets that it's almost a coincidence they bear the same brand name.
Sony BMG, obviously, is the most consumer-unfriendly, as well as the least market-savvy. The rootkit debacle of four years ago has stayed with the tech community and poisoned its perception of the entire brand, but it's not really fair to conflate that with anything the VAIO division does -- VAIO is off in its own world from Sony BMG.
VAIO, as evidenced by this story, obviously has its own struggles, as does Sony Computer Entertainment, as does each Sony business unit in its own way. But they do not move as one.
Kotaku reports that the loading ads have vanished after popular uproar. Presumably the only remaining ones are just the usual trackside ones that actually make sense in a racing game.
Maybe it will be printed in margin, or perhaps the endnotes?
More importantly to me, at least, I hope the format is small enough to fit one per page, so that the page numbers match up. I'm not weird for knowing the strips by their numbers, right?
I think you might just have a case here for the ultimate retroactive boycott: the credit card issuer chargeback.
They sold you a game. Then they added a double-dip, "secondary monetization" to what you already paid for. I'd call up MasterCard and see if they've got your back on this.
Honestly, the studio or publisher that did this needs to get hit hard. Ads are for freeloaders, not for paying customers.
If the game were free, sure, ads would be completely permissible. But your standard $9.99 game on the PSN should be supported by the purchase price, and as you point out, Wipeout HD sells for double the usual amount, making it a premium PSN title. There is absolutely no excuse to "re-monetize" something like this, especially in such an intrusive way as increasing the load time for levels by an appreciable amount of time.
I think this may be one of those few cases where a credit card issuer chargeback is in order. They sold you something, then messed it up. Enough people do this, and you can be sure Sony will write a proscription of sleeper-ads into their new studio license agreement.
You're right on about the cable companies, but don't forget that your DSL provider would gladly do the same thing for your VOIP setup -- degrade your third-party voice service to the point where your only viable option is their first-party service.
Spot on. I've never been under any impression that (properly-prepared) organic food is healthier than non-organic, but by buying organic, you're supporting a sustainable practice that doesn't contribute to water table pollution, among other things.
If organics aren't in someone's budget, fine, but if you can spring for them, it's a good way to promote sustainable practices, and is a lot more direct than nebulous "carbon offsets."
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I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf mutes!
Or, as is often the case, siphon the majority of it off to executive paychecks and then reinvest the minimum required to get an underpaid team to pull 80-hour weeks to make more of the same thing.
6 years = 72 months
Moore's Law states a doubling in transistors (but we'll call it performance) at every 18 month interval, so:
72/18 = 4 Moore cycles
2^4 = 32
So in six years, Gordon Moore says we should have 32x the performance we have now.
But it's indeed interesting... Silicon was a much easier-to-predict medium in the 20th Century. And yet here we have these two mature, opposing approaches to silicon-based computing, represented by the CPU and the GPU, with some predicting unprecedented growth for one and stagnation for the other. What will happen? How will hard material and process limitations affect the development of these? Will something exotic like artifical diamond-based ICs disrupt the market? An exciting time is in store for the sector, no doubt.
This has to be pretty common. A very similar thing happened to me in high school. Some (presumably database-related) error caused a handful of 70-student classes, and I remember sitting with my gargantuan history class out in the student commons as they figured out how to re-parcel out the class rosters.
The kicker? This was ten years ago. Why is it still happening?
There are several APIs that I can't see any reason for Apple not to make public apart from simply wanting to get them right on the first try. Along with real-time bitmap data from the camera is the calendar. It's kind of silly that apps can't add an entry to your schedule right now, but I think it's only a matter of time until Apple has this stuff stable and ready to set loose with developers.
Given the rigors of the App Store approval process, there would have to be some kind of pretext to the app, like a "social AR friend locator." Perhaps then, from within the app's network, invite-only social networks could be built and expand, with users "recommending" other users to each other, then seeking them out. Users could post statuses, used in this case to say what they have in stock... Hey, real-life AR Dope Wars!
It is unfortunate, though, that even in business, the incentive of profit is outweighed by the incentive of short-term profit.
Upgrading infrastructure is a big investment over the long term, which makes sense to you and me, but to your average MBA, the question is "what's the ROI for the next two quarters?" and of course, the short-term ROI on a long-term investment is always poor.
So, the upgrades aren't made, and everyone goes on pretending nothing's going to go wrong (if it's not going to go wrong this quarter, there's no danger!) and nothing happens until the problem has been put off for so long that suddenly, it's right around the corner and it's obvious that catastrophe is the only possible result from continuing to ignore it. Then, even more money than would have gone into a phased upgrade goes into an emergency upgrade, patching things left and right, dealing with outages, and generally making a mess of things.
It's the way everything works, though, really -- matters of climate change, unsustainable financial practices -- so long as doomsday isn't tomorrow, no one cares.
Why is parent modded flamebait?
Look, it's a tradeoff. If you think the loosely-documented Android is an easier development environment than the fastidiously-documented and streamlined Cocoa Touch environment, you're probably deluding yourself and modding people down out of insecurity. However, when it comes to publishing, the reverse is true -- Make an Android app that Google doesn't like and you'll probably have a lot better chance of it getting into users' hands than if you make an iPhone app Apple doesn't like.
Both can be improved. Google can move toward a consolidation of developer documentation and resources, and Apple can loosen up about its functionality prohibitions.
You are correct that buying a brand says nothing about who you are. But the substance of what you buy does indeed say quite a bit about your priorities. You seem to hold a greatly simplified view of the market and the forces that drive it: that all consumers buy only by brand and that none choose on merit. With the exception of you, obviously, the only one able to look past branding and make an educated decision.
But, it appears that brands do indeed matter to you! You make a dismissal of Apple products based merely upon their popularity and trendy branding, with no mention of any objective shortcomings. Has it occurred to you that a certain subset of Apple's customers actually buy their products for superior usability? That a Harley Davidson rider may have comparison shopped and chosen a Harley based on its mechanical qualities?
Brand identity is indeed one major force in the marketplace. But it's far from the only one.
This could happen in the future, but not this console generation. And, despite what seems to be going around at some forums, most definitely not for the PS3!
I can see how the PSPgo's dispensation with the PSP's optical drive could give one the impression that such a move might be possible for Sony's home console, but the difference is much greater than what meets the eye.
The PSPgo is not a revision of the PSP platform. Sony was made fun of for insisting that the Go will exist parallel to the PSP in the market, but the fact is, Sony is trying for a completely different kind of console experience with the PSPgo than they did with the PSP.
The PSP was conceived as a little, handheld Playstation. Same kind of games, same kind of gameplay, just smaller. The PSPgo, on the other hand, is Sony's (too late?) attempt to compete with both the DS and the iPod Touch. It's geared toward a completely different kind of game, not scaled-down versions of home console games, but games conceived from the ground up to be portable, things you pick up and play for a few minutes and then put away when your number is called at the DMV. Despite the shared software architecture, the PSPgo is not at all like the PSP.
So to launch a PS3 with no optical drive would be to target a different kind of game. While there are some disc-based PS3 titles that have been re-released as downloadable, they are a tiny minority, and given the way that platform exclusives tend to be very free with asset file size due to Blu-Ray's disc capacity, there's a pretty hard technical reason for that as well.
Over the course of this young century, the case you make will become all the more apparent to everyone else. I don't know what will happen in the middle of it, but by the end of the century, the Olympics, if they are still practiced, will be more akin to F1 racing than Hellenistic sport -- there will be a single human who pilots her body, but that body will bear the labor of a whole team of skilled engineers.
I must not be the only one who has tried a handful of to-do list apps and yet not stayed with any of them. Care to share which one won you over?
If just one mission is tower defense, I think that leaves a good degree of potential for the rest of them.
I wouldn't worry much about mission variety here -- if the originality Blizzard has been cranking out for of World of Warcraft quests in the expansions is any indicator, they'll have their hands full experimenting with mission structures.
Wikus is a bureaucratic simpleton thrust into a situation far beyond his grasp. One of the major things I enjoyed about the film was watching the development of his character. With every plot twist, I had to wonder -- is he beginning to see? Does he understand now what he's been a part of? Is he beginning to get a better sense of life from the Prawns' point of view?
It was that constant character suspense -- do I want to root for Wikus yet or not? -- that was part of what made the movie such an edge-of-the-seat experience for me.
Well... It's still pretty good.
And I do the same thing on PS3. I've bought one or two titles at MSRP because I wanted to take part in the launch excitement, but with everything else I've just kept an eye out for price drops and picked up a preferred title when it hit my price range.
It's funny, because the PS3 was my first home console -- I'd been one of those elitist PC gamers for years before that, but as things like buggy shipping builds, Starforce copy protection, and way too much user configuration began to choke out the fun for PC gaming, I headed off to console land dreading the "oh hey it costs more for next gen" $60 pricetags. And yet, I haven't paid over half that so far this year.
Les Paul, as well as Robert Moog, Leon Theremin, and others created the tools that made 20th Century music a wonderfully alien thing, producing sounds without precedent in the history of music. This always leads me to wonder, though: Where will the next revolutionary sound come from? We can simulate nearly anything in software now, so what does that mean for the future of new instruments?
Actually, maybe we're already well into the world of the next sonic revolutionary: Andy Hildebrand, inventor of Auto-Tune. Although I'm not sure I'm ready for a world where the "Auto-Tune effect" is as popular as the twang of a Les Paul guitar.
My local, family-owned grocery store has never screwed me over!
Oh wait, they did stop carrying that one delicious brand of pita bread. And the express lane is always too busy. And there's that ugly, no-name DVD rental kiosk in the entryway with MS Paint graphics.
Never mind, they suck.
Trying to characterize the modern Sony in any meaningfully consistent way is an exercise in futility. Sony, like any major Japanese company, has always existed in a number of fairly distinct units or "silos," but in their present incarnation, they are spread across such a wide variety of markets that it's almost a coincidence they bear the same brand name.
Sony BMG, obviously, is the most consumer-unfriendly, as well as the least market-savvy. The rootkit debacle of four years ago has stayed with the tech community and poisoned its perception of the entire brand, but it's not really fair to conflate that with anything the VAIO division does -- VAIO is off in its own world from Sony BMG.
VAIO, as evidenced by this story, obviously has its own struggles, as does Sony Computer Entertainment, as does each Sony business unit in its own way. But they do not move as one.
Kotaku reports that the loading ads have vanished after popular uproar. Presumably the only remaining ones are just the usual trackside ones that actually make sense in a racing game.
Maybe it will be printed in margin, or perhaps the endnotes?
More importantly to me, at least, I hope the format is small enough to fit one per page, so that the page numbers match up. I'm not weird for knowing the strips by their numbers, right?
"Oops, you got an injection attack! 327!"
I think you might just have a case here for the ultimate retroactive boycott: the credit card issuer chargeback.
They sold you a game. Then they added a double-dip, "secondary monetization" to what you already paid for. I'd call up MasterCard and see if they've got your back on this.
Honestly, the studio or publisher that did this needs to get hit hard. Ads are for freeloaders, not for paying customers.
If the game were free, sure, ads would be completely permissible. But your standard $9.99 game on the PSN should be supported by the purchase price, and as you point out, Wipeout HD sells for double the usual amount, making it a premium PSN title. There is absolutely no excuse to "re-monetize" something like this, especially in such an intrusive way as increasing the load time for levels by an appreciable amount of time.
I think this may be one of those few cases where a credit card issuer chargeback is in order. They sold you something, then messed it up. Enough people do this, and you can be sure Sony will write a proscription of sleeper-ads into their new studio license agreement.
You're right on about the cable companies, but don't forget that your DSL provider would gladly do the same thing for your VOIP setup -- degrade your third-party voice service to the point where your only viable option is their first-party service.
Spot on. I've never been under any impression that (properly-prepared) organic food is healthier than non-organic, but by buying organic, you're supporting a sustainable practice that doesn't contribute to water table pollution, among other things.
If organics aren't in someone's budget, fine, but if you can spring for them, it's a good way to promote sustainable practices, and is a lot more direct than nebulous "carbon offsets."