4,887 karma · joined July 2, 2009
Distribution and application is generally the harder part of diff patching though and I suspect most early-access games prefer not to worry about it (though 40GB seems a bit further along than early access!)
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Deployment/P...
a) I think the title here is pretty good, better than the hyperbolic one the Inquirer used.
b) Your middle two paragraphs are spot on
c) Given the video, it's understandable people are focused on the "actor as a virtual character" previsualization part ('but Avatar did this two years ago!', 'our game engine does that!', yadda yadda). That's only a small part of it, and honestly one of the less interesting ones.
I don't see what you think is condescending though. There's not a lot of difference today in the skill-set of a CG artist and a games artist. Generally they're just working to different budgets. (I say that as someone who spent 15 years working on console games).
The painstaking days of game artists building models that use less than 100 verts and hand-painting 256x256 textures are gone. Now, both your CG and game-artist build super-high resolution models, probably starting with something like ZBrush, then decimate down to whatever they need with the highres asset used to generate normal or displacement maps.
Optimius Prime in the original Transformers movie used ~20x more polygons than a PS4/Xbone game would today for a similar character. That's pretty amazing when you think that the GPUs in those machines are already handily outmatched by PCs, and the performance gains Nividia/AMD bring with every hardware cycle.
That's a pretty big 'all'
There's zero chance of requiring studios to only use unionized VFX shops, so unionizing them will simply make them either less competitive (need to charge more to cover guaranteed benefits) or more prone to bankruptcy (cannot meet commitments to workers if there's a shortage of work)
The problem is not artists being screwed over pay & benefits, the problem is that most VFX shops are struggling to stay in the black, period. In part this is due to overseas competition and expensive bidding processes, but also shops taking on work at or below cost in an effort to keep people employed.
So if your app wasn't already called "Banking", you're not going to get appstore.com/banking.
Is the recovery partition literally a mirror image of the default install? That sounds ridiculous because the thing is basically a computer so could have a USB-restore, but I don't see how they get to 40GB+ otherwise.
<facetious>21GB of trials and time-limited software? </facetious>
For software that's been released but doesn't have a clear license (e.g. some "Pull to refresh" implementation on Github) it's often necessary to ask the author to sign some form of "no, I really won't sue you" release.
If it's discovered that some license was inadvertently violated (e.g. attribution) then it can be necessary to send a mea culpa to the licensor so they're not incensed if someone points the violation out to them later.
(IANAL, but I have done this dance before).
Just because a piece of code incurs hardware related performance issues does not mean it's "no longer close to the real machine". Cache misses? Reorder your data, or start inserting prefetch statements. Mispredicted branches? Issue a hint, or structure your code better.
Both of these are profile-guided optimizations. It's very difficult for compilers to optimize for access patterns that will only become clear in the context of execution, and often depend on your target spec machine.
Or not.
I think few people would consider border controls to be any of these things.
You were flagged somehow and that sucks, but if you don't like the immigration procedures of the US you are free to either a) live elsewhere or b) try to take action to change it (we are a democracy after all). On the other hand, venting on a blog isn't going to do anything but irk people who wish they were fortunate enough to hold a US green card, or come back to haunt you if this happens again and some cranky overworked agent google's you.
FWIW I'm a former, now naturalized, US green card holder and this happened to me twice in six years. It sucks, but I considered it a very small price to pay for being able to freely travel and work (or not work!) in this country.
I'm not sure what problem Apple were trying to fix.
If X has skills that could be of use that will already be recognized he'll be brought inside the gates when necessary. If he has some amazing insight that only happens when he learns about the project, well there's always version 2.
1) At a 3x salary you'll need to lose two other employees and sacrifice the redundancy, idea mix etc that you point out. Reducing the HR etc overhead by two employees is far less of a gain.
2) Their higher output is going to be at least partially due to more intensive work habits which may not be sustainable over the long run.
3) If they ever decide to move on you need to hire three replacements and hope they work out and can take over from your superstar without losing too much momentum (all without ever meeting the guy since its unlikely you'll find & hire them within his two week notice period).
Google is a search company. Owning the platform is Google’s way of making sure they own search. Google does not care about facilitating app sales because they can make 15-30x the money from search.
Google benefits from owning the platform because the Google suite of software (AppStore, Browser, Mail, Maps), bundled on almost every Android device, drives search traffic to Google and encourages users to stay within the Google ecosystem.
Most Android OEM's are effectively forced to carry this software (and meet 'compatibility requirements' such as Google being the default search engine) because without it their devices are far less compelling. Replacing an email client is a solvable problem, a maps alternative is something that could be licensed, but creating an entire AppStore replacements is unrealistic for most companies.
Unless you are Amazon.
If the Amazon AppStore becomes a major player in the Android app market, and OEM's choose to license it, thus forgoing the Google software suite (most of which is much easier to replace), Google will be in serious risk of losing their leverage over OEM's. They will not be able to ensure Android devices drive users to their services, and could even end up paying OEM's (a'la Mozilla) to have Google as the default search option on these devices.
Sadly that's far from unusual. Meek compliance is how most people (myself included) tend to behave when confronted by federal or state agencies, regardless of how their privacy is being invaded.
If more people raised a stink, the number of US citizens subjected to such a thing would rapidly drop. People would not be dragged from airplanes or into questioning at the slightest hint of suspicion from highly questionable sources. You want to see what's in my storage unit? No problem, go get a warrant. As an aside - if the author was mistaken about its contents they just lied to a federal agent which itself is a crime, regardless of any original innocence).
The real trade off with Quality is not profit but iteration speed. Every feature you include has a quality scale from 1-10. A '1' is going to be barely usable and will frustrate users, a '10' can take months to achieve and your feature or app may be irrelevant by the time it's done.
Picking the right value to hit will depend on your market, your users, and your resources.