Re:The explanation is obvious
on
Terminal Chaos
·
· Score: 1
Train service needs to be restructured. Your plane wouldn't go very quick either if it had to stop at every podunk town along the way. What we need are express service trains between large cities - you can bet your ass that if the train gunned it straight from Seattle to Portland (with maybe a stop or two along the way for pickup) it will beat the plane there (accounting for checkin, security time, etc.).
Ya know, regulations don't sound so bad after all...
Yes, they do, because not all of us travel for leisure, nor are we all rich, aristocratic businessmen. Some of us are just trying to get home to see family without destroying our wallets.
I for one would much rather see tiered services - first class still competes very much on services, and it shows - first class passengers have more amenities than ever before. If that's what you're after, great, buy a first class ticket. I will gladly starve/freeze/cramp my way across the continent for cheap.
This isn't to rag on OpenMoko's accomplishments - much hats off to being open, but they don't stand a chance in the mass market unless they have as slick a UI as iPhone. This goes for all the other cell phone manufacturers too.
... and goes doubly for Motorola, whose cell phone UI is not only un-slick, but downright painful like eye-gouging.
It beats being unemployed? I know it's not much of a consolation, but it's clearly still the lesser of two evils, and is probably still worth celebration.
How many games get played 10 times over, through and through? Also, how interested are advertisers in hitting 100,000 people 10 times each, as opposed to hitting 1,000,000 unique individuals?
Lets see... If I go and buy something from a store, do they follow me home? Look at what I am using it for?
Straw man. This is an entirely different situation - you don't have a Duplicomatic 3000 in your basement that can make infinite copies of the stuff you buy at the store for free. If you did, stores may in fact be inclined to follow you home...
I also have had one of the tags go off that the cashier didn't remove for some reason, they didn't say over the loudspeaker stop thief nor did they handcuff me and call out the police.
Nor does copy protection. Last I checked I've never had the cops show up, or my computer blare sirens, for failing a copy protection check. All I've seen is a fairly benign error, and in the vast majority of cases customer service has always been accommodating and helpful. Wait, that's exactly like the store experience. Whoops. You also might not know this, but when that alarm at the store goes off, you are automatically presumed to be a thief until proven otherwise - next time try walking away from that alarm and see what happens.
1 - TBS (I'm sorry, PeachTreeTV) has been getting into the habit of interrupting shows with ads lately. I don't mean commercial breaks - I mean HUGE things that take up half the screen while the show is *running*. This annoys me (and everyone I know) to no end. In-game product placement is closer to *that* than it is to traditional commercial breaks (which you know about and are expecting). I wonder if games with commercial breaks work?
2 - How much does the average TV episode take to produce? $500K? How much revenue can that be expected to make? A popular show commands millions per advertising minute when first aired, and will continue to generate a considerable sum when re-run. Not to mention the inevitable DVD revenues, which is not a sum to be scoffed at. Keep in mind that shows that attract 2-3 million viewers per episode regularly get canceled. So think about how many "copies" of the show must "sell" for it to be worthwhile to produce the show? Now consider that the average game's budget is *orders of magnitude* above this... Can there ever be enough eyes on the ads for anybody to be willing to pay the ridiculous sums required to make these games free (as in beer)?
Think about it. A show can grab, say, 3 million people per episode (a conservative estimate), and many times that is not even enough to break even on the show - further re-runs and DVD sales are required for that. Now, most games do not even sell over 100,000 copies! That's a whole order of magnitude off, and then some. So until we have enough gamers in the world that a good game can capture 10-15 million eyes, we will never see major free, ad-supported games.
I wrote a letter to my MP a while back, telling him that his party's technology policies have been sorely disappointing, and that unless they shape up, they cannot expect my vote in the future. I got a nice reply back from my MP, being quite ambivalent (it's ok, he used to be the Minister of Fisheries, I don't expect him to be totally on the up and up about tech).
The surprising thing is, I got a nice letter from Jim Prentice on Friday, apparently my letter was forwarded to him. In it he extolled the virtues of competition, and his confidence that the free market will give Canadian consumers high-quality services at competitive prices.
Apparently Mr. Prentice hasn't paid a phone or internet bill for quite some time, or he'd know about the sad state of affairs the free market has brought us.
The problem is also that... in other programming fields, the type of stress game devs face would be worth large bonuses, high salaries, and time off/overtime pay. The fact that the industry refuses to do this is the main reason why they fail.
Having done a degree in London (I say, wot wot?!), I know when I was looking into CS degrees around various institutions, almost none offered anything even close to gaming programming.
... If you ever see a CS degree on "game programming", run very far away. It's generally well known in the industry that those schools don't teach anything, and as a result they're actually *less* likely to get hired into a real game dev job than someone from a traditional CS program.
The problem is really not that schools don't offer game programming degrees, it's that:
1 - Reputable schools do not want to sully their reputation by offering yet another game development "degree" that "trains" idiots who can't code their way out of a wet paper bag.
2 - Game programming is *no different* than any other form of programming requiring specialization. That guy programming massively distributed databases for blue chip companies has just as much specialized knowledge as the dude optimizing OpenGL underneath a massive 3D engine.
Not to mention that every reputable CS program will contain courses on networking and graphics, which are the two big topics in game programming. Take those, and play with your own projects in your spare time, and you'll be as qualified as anyone when you come out. No amount of "game college" will do this for you. In my experience, the only type of people who go into game dev "degrees" are the types who can't code, aren't interested in actual coding, and are more interested in playing with a "build your own game!" kit.
IMHO the problem the game industry faces is that "traditional" dev fields are paying many times more now, sometimes triple or quadruple what game studios are willing to pay. Why should I pour hundreds of hours of my own time into learning the ins and outs of OpenGL, and make $60K, when I can put that time into distributed computing and make $150K at some financial company? The industry needs to step the pay scale *way* up if they want to attract the talent they need.
Supply and demand, supply and demand. Game dev is a "glamor" job (though I have no idea why, haven't seen the pits of it myself). The problem is also that people know very little about game development in general, and it becomes a blank slate for them to pin up their dreams.
You have no idea how many aspiring game programmers I meet who think they will get to decide on gameplay, or have some hand in directing cinematics, or all kinds of other "cool" things that aren't their job at all.
So in the end the industry is flooded with candidates, most of whom are grossly underqualified (big dreamers with no code chops), but there's never a shortage of people who are willing to give it a go, and burn out horribly a year later. This keeps wages down.
The problem I see in the game industry is the attitude that one has to work for the love of the game. While certainly I think all game devs (or devs in general) ought to care about what they're doing, IMHO it shouldn't be the overwhelming priority. With many shops I get the impression that if your life doesn't revolve around game development, you don't belong.
I have no idea why this idea is not more widespead.
Because you're *reversing entropy*? So... instead of looking for a way to power cars with our nuclear electricity, we're looking for ways to further obfuscate the energy and efficiency by using electricity to power *massive* CO2 capture plants (which will take a f---ton of energy to run by themselves), and then add more energy in a lossy reaction to try and re-form chemical fuel?
No thanks, my money is still on electric cars, eventually.
The technology is really not there yet. Look at the Tesla Roadster - a performance car, sure, but I bet the majority of the price tag is in the batteries, not the drivetrain. Our batteries decay rapidly, and cost way too much to be replaced on a regular basis. Pure-electric cars that run off batteries (as opposed to say, electrified rail) are simply not economic at this point. We need a real breakthrough in battery longetivity, weight, energy density, and cost.
Be prepared to never release, then? All software have bugs, it's a fact of life. Good development practice can minimize this, but never eliminate entirely. Not to mention that FF3 already went through 2 RC's prior to this "gold" release, so one cannot say that they haven't gone through the proper quality assurance routines.
I actually agree with CD check protection... It is a slight inconvenience for the user, but not so inconvenient that I would really mind. It also offers a reasonable protection against casual (i.e. not-so-computer-literate) piracy, which is really the best any copy protection scheme can ever hope for. Anything more extreme than CD checking/CD keys, IMHO, is overkill. You will never stop the hardcore pirates - if you've stopped little Johnny from simply burning a copy for his buddy, you've already extracted enough protection as you can expect.
The idea is to encourage impulse buys. Once you're an Aamazon customer, they want you to come back often to check out their offerings, and when something catches your eye they want to minimize the barrier between them and your money. The idea is to make buying *stuff* as addictive, as, say, buying songs off iTunes (which is *also* a 1-click service).
No, you can't. If you think "traits of a species changes over time" is sufficient explanation to describe evolution, you really need to read up. Having *read* The Origin of Species I would have a great deal of trouble summarizing the book in 4 pages, or even doing the theory justice in that space. What you *can* get is an overly-simplified view, which while appropriate for the layman, is completely inappropriate for what is supposed to be an in-depth investigation.
You would think for that price they'd give you a nicer fan. This reminds me of my old Toshiba laptop - fans were as loud as small jet engines. I was very pleasantly surprised by my new laptop (MacBook Pro), which is whisper quiet, and even when going full tilt you can only hear some wind from the fans, and not the fan motor itself. Awesome. Makes me think that nVidia cheaped out on the fan...
Blah blah, more trolling. Try developing games or visualization apps sometime. You will come to appreciate how ridiculously superior (albeit closed) DirectX is compared to OpenGL. Open source apologists tend to defend OpenGL's shittiness despite all evidence to the contrary, but from an objective, developer-ease point of view, there's simply no comparison.
There are also plenty of cards that ship with crappy OpenGL drivers, increasingly moreso thanks to the decline in popularity of OpenGL. DirectX is fairly well defined, and is one of those few products where I honestly believe that MS won the market share fair and square.
Precisely. This is something that can be solved by simply throwing more transistors in. Their biggest challenge is probably power and heat, not architecture.
Not to mention that "programs" on GPUs are ridiculously simple compared to something on a general purpose CPU. Next time you write a shader, try branching (i.e. if, else), your shader will slow to a relative crawl.
I don't think a for loop ought to be documented as "loop from i to j with increments of one", that observation is immediately obvious to anyone looking at the code. What one ought to be referring to is the *purpose* of the loop, like "iterate through returned database rows"...
Slashdot Mirror
Train service needs to be restructured. Your plane wouldn't go very quick either if it had to stop at every podunk town along the way. What we need are express service trains between large cities - you can bet your ass that if the train gunned it straight from Seattle to Portland (with maybe a stop or two along the way for pickup) it will beat the plane there (accounting for checkin, security time, etc.).
Yes, they do, because not all of us travel for leisure, nor are we all rich, aristocratic businessmen. Some of us are just trying to get home to see family without destroying our wallets.
I for one would much rather see tiered services - first class still competes very much on services, and it shows - first class passengers have more amenities than ever before. If that's what you're after, great, buy a first class ticket. I will gladly starve/freeze/cramp my way across the continent for cheap.
Slick shiny UI: Priceless
This isn't to rag on OpenMoko's accomplishments - much hats off to being open, but they don't stand a chance in the mass market unless they have as slick a UI as iPhone. This goes for all the other cell phone manufacturers too.
... and goes doubly for Motorola, whose cell phone UI is not only un-slick, but downright painful like eye-gouging.
It beats being unemployed? I know it's not much of a consolation, but it's clearly still the lesser of two evils, and is probably still worth celebration.
I'd like the guy who modded me Flamebait to come out and justify that mod.
How many games get played 10 times over, through and through? Also, how interested are advertisers in hitting 100,000 people 10 times each, as opposed to hitting 1,000,000 unique individuals?
Wait, you want to go into *business* because you don't like *politics* and *unjustified hype*? Woaaah.
Way to spread more FUD.
Lets see... If I go and buy something from a store, do they follow me home? Look at what I am using it for?Straw man. This is an entirely different situation - you don't have a Duplicomatic 3000 in your basement that can make infinite copies of the stuff you buy at the store for free. If you did, stores may in fact be inclined to follow you home...
I also have had one of the tags go off that the cashier didn't remove for some reason, they didn't say over the loudspeaker stop thief nor did they handcuff me and call out the police.Nor does copy protection. Last I checked I've never had the cops show up, or my computer blare sirens, for failing a copy protection check. All I've seen is a fairly benign error, and in the vast majority of cases customer service has always been accommodating and helpful. Wait, that's exactly like the store experience. Whoops. You also might not know this, but when that alarm at the store goes off, you are automatically presumed to be a thief until proven otherwise - next time try walking away from that alarm and see what happens.
I see a few problems with your comparison...
1 - TBS (I'm sorry, PeachTreeTV) has been getting into the habit of interrupting shows with ads lately. I don't mean commercial breaks - I mean HUGE things that take up half the screen while the show is *running*. This annoys me (and everyone I know) to no end. In-game product placement is closer to *that* than it is to traditional commercial breaks (which you know about and are expecting). I wonder if games with commercial breaks work?
2 - How much does the average TV episode take to produce? $500K? How much revenue can that be expected to make? A popular show commands millions per advertising minute when first aired, and will continue to generate a considerable sum when re-run. Not to mention the inevitable DVD revenues, which is not a sum to be scoffed at. Keep in mind that shows that attract 2-3 million viewers per episode regularly get canceled. So think about how many "copies" of the show must "sell" for it to be worthwhile to produce the show? Now consider that the average game's budget is *orders of magnitude* above this... Can there ever be enough eyes on the ads for anybody to be willing to pay the ridiculous sums required to make these games free (as in beer)?
Think about it. A show can grab, say, 3 million people per episode (a conservative estimate), and many times that is not even enough to break even on the show - further re-runs and DVD sales are required for that. Now, most games do not even sell over 100,000 copies! That's a whole order of magnitude off, and then some. So until we have enough gamers in the world that a good game can capture 10-15 million eyes, we will never see major free, ad-supported games.
I wrote a letter to my MP a while back, telling him that his party's technology policies have been sorely disappointing, and that unless they shape up, they cannot expect my vote in the future. I got a nice reply back from my MP, being quite ambivalent (it's ok, he used to be the Minister of Fisheries, I don't expect him to be totally on the up and up about tech).
The surprising thing is, I got a nice letter from Jim Prentice on Friday, apparently my letter was forwarded to him. In it he extolled the virtues of competition, and his confidence that the free market will give Canadian consumers high-quality services at competitive prices.
Apparently Mr. Prentice hasn't paid a phone or internet bill for quite some time, or he'd know about the sad state of affairs the free market has brought us.
Now whether anyone in 300 years will know how to read the data...
The problem is also that... in other programming fields, the type of stress game devs face would be worth large bonuses, high salaries, and time off/overtime pay. The fact that the industry refuses to do this is the main reason why they fail.
... If you ever see a CS degree on "game programming", run very far away. It's generally well known in the industry that those schools don't teach anything, and as a result they're actually *less* likely to get hired into a real game dev job than someone from a traditional CS program.
The problem is really not that schools don't offer game programming degrees, it's that:
1 - Reputable schools do not want to sully their reputation by offering yet another game development "degree" that "trains" idiots who can't code their way out of a wet paper bag.
2 - Game programming is *no different* than any other form of programming requiring specialization. That guy programming massively distributed databases for blue chip companies has just as much specialized knowledge as the dude optimizing OpenGL underneath a massive 3D engine.
Not to mention that every reputable CS program will contain courses on networking and graphics, which are the two big topics in game programming. Take those, and play with your own projects in your spare time, and you'll be as qualified as anyone when you come out. No amount of "game college" will do this for you. In my experience, the only type of people who go into game dev "degrees" are the types who can't code, aren't interested in actual coding, and are more interested in playing with a "build your own game!" kit.
IMHO the problem the game industry faces is that "traditional" dev fields are paying many times more now, sometimes triple or quadruple what game studios are willing to pay. Why should I pour hundreds of hours of my own time into learning the ins and outs of OpenGL, and make $60K, when I can put that time into distributed computing and make $150K at some financial company? The industry needs to step the pay scale *way* up if they want to attract the talent they need.
Supply and demand, supply and demand. Game dev is a "glamor" job (though I have no idea why, haven't seen the pits of it myself). The problem is also that people know very little about game development in general, and it becomes a blank slate for them to pin up their dreams.
You have no idea how many aspiring game programmers I meet who think they will get to decide on gameplay, or have some hand in directing cinematics, or all kinds of other "cool" things that aren't their job at all.
So in the end the industry is flooded with candidates, most of whom are grossly underqualified (big dreamers with no code chops), but there's never a shortage of people who are willing to give it a go, and burn out horribly a year later. This keeps wages down.
The problem I see in the game industry is the attitude that one has to work for the love of the game. While certainly I think all game devs (or devs in general) ought to care about what they're doing, IMHO it shouldn't be the overwhelming priority. With many shops I get the impression that if your life doesn't revolve around game development, you don't belong.
Because you're *reversing entropy*? So... instead of looking for a way to power cars with our nuclear electricity, we're looking for ways to further obfuscate the energy and efficiency by using electricity to power *massive* CO2 capture plants (which will take a f---ton of energy to run by themselves), and then add more energy in a lossy reaction to try and re-form chemical fuel?
No thanks, my money is still on electric cars, eventually.
The technology is really not there yet. Look at the Tesla Roadster - a performance car, sure, but I bet the majority of the price tag is in the batteries, not the drivetrain. Our batteries decay rapidly, and cost way too much to be replaced on a regular basis. Pure-electric cars that run off batteries (as opposed to say, electrified rail) are simply not economic at this point. We need a real breakthrough in battery longetivity, weight, energy density, and cost.
Be prepared to never release, then? All software have bugs, it's a fact of life. Good development practice can minimize this, but never eliminate entirely. Not to mention that FF3 already went through 2 RC's prior to this "gold" release, so one cannot say that they haven't gone through the proper quality assurance routines.
And Macs... and Linux users who want to use the tarball...
I actually agree with CD check protection... It is a slight inconvenience for the user, but not so inconvenient that I would really mind. It also offers a reasonable protection against casual (i.e. not-so-computer-literate) piracy, which is really the best any copy protection scheme can ever hope for. Anything more extreme than CD checking/CD keys, IMHO, is overkill. You will never stop the hardcore pirates - if you've stopped little Johnny from simply burning a copy for his buddy, you've already extracted enough protection as you can expect.
The idea is to encourage impulse buys. Once you're an Aamazon customer, they want you to come back often to check out their offerings, and when something catches your eye they want to minimize the barrier between them and your money. The idea is to make buying *stuff* as addictive, as, say, buying songs off iTunes (which is *also* a 1-click service).
No, you can't. If you think "traits of a species changes over time" is sufficient explanation to describe evolution, you really need to read up. Having *read* The Origin of Species I would have a great deal of trouble summarizing the book in 4 pages, or even doing the theory justice in that space. What you *can* get is an overly-simplified view, which while appropriate for the layman, is completely inappropriate for what is supposed to be an in-depth investigation.
You would think for that price they'd give you a nicer fan. This reminds me of my old Toshiba laptop - fans were as loud as small jet engines. I was very pleasantly surprised by my new laptop (MacBook Pro), which is whisper quiet, and even when going full tilt you can only hear some wind from the fans, and not the fan motor itself. Awesome. Makes me think that nVidia cheaped out on the fan...
Blah blah, more trolling. Try developing games or visualization apps sometime. You will come to appreciate how ridiculously superior (albeit closed) DirectX is compared to OpenGL. Open source apologists tend to defend OpenGL's shittiness despite all evidence to the contrary, but from an objective, developer-ease point of view, there's simply no comparison.
There are also plenty of cards that ship with crappy OpenGL drivers, increasingly moreso thanks to the decline in popularity of OpenGL. DirectX is fairly well defined, and is one of those few products where I honestly believe that MS won the market share fair and square.
Precisely. This is something that can be solved by simply throwing more transistors in. Their biggest challenge is probably power and heat, not architecture.
Not to mention that "programs" on GPUs are ridiculously simple compared to something on a general purpose CPU. Next time you write a shader, try branching (i.e. if, else), your shader will slow to a relative crawl.
I don't think a for loop ought to be documented as "loop from i to j with increments of one", that observation is immediately obvious to anyone looking at the code. What one ought to be referring to is the *purpose* of the loop, like "iterate through returned database rows"...