Sure, tape-out may be cheaper with one chip line, but we aren't talking about chips where the feature is there in silicon but intentionally disabled (say, for the other more expensive variant). We're talking about a feature that the chips and systems are advertised as having, which doesn't work as it is intended to because the driver stack is broken. Where the vendor specifically says '....supports OpenGL ES x.x', but then you find it sort of does but not really and it's broken and won't ever be fixed.
It's even more frustrating because there's a whole open-source community that would be willing to do the work of writing the drivers even, but then of course the vendors won't give them the data they need because of IP concerns. It just really sucks.
OpenGL was never an advertised feature of the C.H.I.P as far as I can tell. Economies of scale mean that it's cheaper to reuse a tablet SoC and just ignore the GPU entirely than it is to use a chip where all the functionality is available. The GPU probably works fine in its intended application, low-end Android tablets.
The utterly stupid thing is that the hype is what killed the game. Of course, then I guess they wouldn't have been able to charge AAA price for it and get away with it :/
I'm a fan of the space sim / massive universe concept and pretty much ignored most of the NMS hype, so I had no expectations going in. What I found when I did go in was an immediately recognizable game that I'd describe as Elite + Noctis with modern graphics. Which is fine, really. Particularly, anyone that loved playing Noctis would love playing NMS.
The problem is that price tag and the hype though. The game just doesn't have the staying power. I'd feel a bit better about the price tag if the studio communicated what they're doing more. I don't mind paying that price for a game in and of itself - games are expensive to make and I kinda hate the race-to-the-bottom that gives us things like freemium. However at this point, NMS feels abandoned by the studio and that's disappointing.
Jim Sterling did two excellent videos exploring the gaming hype culture and what everyone's roles were in this mess (the studio, Sony, the games press at large and the gaming public). They're worth watching in order for anyone that hasn't seen them:
"When I was discharged from the hospital late the next day, the cabdriver asked me, “Where do I take you?” I couldn’t remember the name of my street. I handed him the discharge paperwork with my address on it, arrived home and slept for a long while."
How does someone who just had a stroke get discharged from hospital the next day, to a taxi?
I felt invincible at that age and I did not feel the need to have insurance really; in NL insurance is mandatory but I had the cheapest of the cheapest. After a major event like a stroke, you usually cannot move, ever, from your insurance (at least not 'up'). Also, you cannot get income protection insurance after that, which, of course, now you will see the use of.
I wish I had forked out the cash for international health insurance, the largest package, before I had a stroke, but I did not as I felt nothing would happen to me. Now that I live in another country and I travel a lot, I get bitten by that naivity a lot. I would recommend, if you are healthy and have enough $ to take an international health insurance package as you will never know what happens.
When my mum suffered a stroke, she was hospitalised for 7 months and had a team of occupational/speech/physiotherapists around here helping her recover as much as possible (which wasn't much, to be fair).
But socialised medicine is evil, and the NHS death panels could've taken her.
Not all strokes are equal. For a minor ischemic stroke it's normal to be discharged after three days or so. There isn't any reason to stay longer, really, since they'll treat it with medication.
Your mother probably had a hemorrhagic stroke, which is much more serious. She probably had surgery, too?
I'm not really sure why he was discharged the next day, but it might not be unreasonable depending on the exact diagnosis. Or maybe he refused to stay - some people do that.
So many people need to have something like this personally slap them in the face before they realize how bad the healthcare system is in the US. Maybe some can learn from this instead.
Well isnt the alternative is to stay in the hospital longer and increase the costs? Granted I have no idea what the conversation or recommendations from the medical staff were.
Don't know the status with the author, but my general experience is that the better the insurance you have, the longer they will keep you. If you are self pay and they can't milk you for money, then they'll get you out of there pretty quick.
Actually, if you get hospitalized in America you are assigned a Social Worker who makes sure you will be OK at home and helps make arrangements if necessary.
Yes, to my mother. The social workers ask any family members to step outside the room so they can speak to the patient (to check if there's abuse/mistreatment at home). They also check that you have all necessary equipment (wheelchair/shower chair/a way to go up and down in a multi-story home). They check if there are any assistance programs you can apply to.
AFAIK Android 6.0 and up lets you 'Format SD as internal storage' and from then on it's well, internal storage. I remember messing around with it on my Nexus Player awhile ago. In that particular case though, it did NOT handle unexpected power-downs at all well. I suspect it was a bug with remounting the encrypted filesystem on the card when booted back up next (where a Linux box would normally run fsck on it and then remount). I ended up doing some digging and filing a bug but never really getting motivated enough to stick with it.
FYI at least Samsung seem to be realizing their mistake as their latest models have the microSD card slot again after having abandoned it for some time, so it does seem like it's back.
I also have to concur with what others have said here - I've done my fair share of Raspberry Pi and ODROID-XU4 system image tinkering and come to the conclusion that microSD cards suck big time as a general purpose read/write storage device. I wouldn't feel comfortable having my phone's internal storage running off one actually.
Thanks, I'll give it a try. Data loss isn't really a concern because I mainly want it for stuff I don't want and stuff I can easily replace (audio books, google music cache, etc).
This is what happens when the concepts of security, DRM and commercial restriction get entangled.
This reminds me of the PlayStation 3. It remained an un-hacked console for so long and the theory goes that the people who wanted to tinker with it could do so without being forced to fight on the same side as the bad guys, because Sony allowed 'Other OS'. When Sony closed off 'Other OS', this gave incentive for people to actually try and jailbreak the system [1].
Yet now the people that just wanted to tinker had to take the same route that people who just wanted to pirate would have to take. By locking the platform down further, Sony only succeeded in merging the two camps (benign tinkerers and pirates). I think there's a lot of validity in this theory.
It's a tough choice. As an iOS user I've long since come to the same acceptance as you - that the added security is worth the extra restrictions. Yet it doesn't have to be this way. Protecting your platform from hackers shouldn't be the same as protecting your platform from SNES emulators or games with adult themes.
- If your code deals with values where the units of measure are especially important and where they may change for the same type of value in different contexts, PUT THE UNITS USED IN THE VARIABLE NAME!
I work primarily with systems that talk money values to other systems, some of which need values in decimal dollars (10.00 is $10.00) and some that need values in integer cents (1000 is $10.00).
Throughout our codebase this is often referred to helpfully as 'Amount', unfortunately :( So much easier when you can just look at the variable.... 'AmountCents' -- this naming convention alone would prevent some bugs I've had to fix.
Which points to something deeper that I've come to realize. Your code speaks to you, in the sense that when you come back to your own code 6 months later, there's a certain amount of "I don't know what this is doing" that you can chalk up to just not having looked at it for 6 months, but there is also an amount where you have to say "no, actually I didn't write this code clearly at the time". When evaluating my own progress that's a big metric I use - on average, how am I understanding my own code later?
What I try and watch out for in myself is when I find myself not making something explicit in the code because of domain knowledge that I have. The 'Amount' example is a good one of this. The domain knowledge is that I know this particular system wants values in decimal dollars -- I mean it's totally OBVIOUS isn't it? Why would I bother writing 'Cents' at the end for something so obvious?
Yet, even referencing domain knowledge is a higher cognitive load than just reading 'Cents' in the variable name. Not to mention the next engineer that comes along -- it's likely they won't have that bit of 'obvious' domain knowledge.
I would vote both 'Code Complete' and 'Clean Code' as two must-read books for any programmer.
I think it's broader than just "designed for easy control on a console". There were other factors at play.
I think what actually set this type of design in motion can be traced back to that point in time when Half-Life came out and all of a sudden everybody seemed to criticize Quake (and indeed id Software in general) because their shooters lacked a story (actually, my recollection is a little fuzzy - games like Thief and System Shock were certainly exploring the 'story' space as well, I'm just not sure off the top of my head in what order the games arrived on the scene).
The realistic movement (head-bobbing, slowness, inertia, etc) seems like it's meant to convey a vague sense of what the physical impact of running would be, in the same way that camera shake is used to accentuate punches in a fighting game or a movie with fighting scenes. It's something that conveys momentum and mass.
It's an element to convey story and immersion. I feel like there's probably an axis here, where you have pure arcade games like Geometry Wars on one end and ultra-cinematic shooters like Battlefield 4 on the other. I'm really guessing here but I imagine Battlefield 4 (or let's say even the original Call of Duty, though I've only heard/read about it and never actually sat down to play it) wants you to actually feel the things that the soldier in the story is feeling. In some sense, it wants to be an interactive movie experience. As opposed to Geometry Wars and Doom, where the gameplay comes first and the story is nearly non-existent or very secondary.
I remember one of the biggest praises given to Call of Duty (EDIT: actually, reading further down, I think it was Soldier of Fortune that I was thinking of!) that it felt like you were in the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan. I can't help but think that must have been a huge contributor to the tone of console shooters that came afterwards.
actually, my recollection is a little fuzzy - games like Thief and System Shock
I think it might be, Ultima Underworld, Dark Forces, Marathon, many others were story-driven well before Half Life. So I don't think it's story that did it. The console aspect is something several designers have written about, including Romero, I just couldn't google my way back to the references.
I remember one of the biggest praises given to Call of Duty (EDIT: actually, reading further down, I think it was Soldier of Fortune that I was thinking of!)
CoD got MASSIVE praise for it's first 2 games though. They were genuinely atmospheric WW2 shooting games (and, IMO, a whole lot better than the dreck that followed).
So it could be both (MoH was also praised a LOT).
Soldier of Fortune was praised mostly for it's "gritty" story and the "realistic" bullet damage (shooting different areas of a character had different visual wound results and reactions).
Dark Forces is one I haven't thought of in awhile - such a great story-based FPS.
I probably didn't make it as clear as I meant to - I wasn't so much referring to "when story-based first-person games started being made" as much as I was meaning to refer to "that point in time when people started criticizing games like Quake for not having a story".
http://www.newsweek.com/crazy-genius-brand-guru-peter-arnell...