Okay, okay, so call it opportunity cost then. We're just arguing semantics.

I guess Clerks was shot for like ~$23,000 and it was pretty professional cinematography. They had to shoot in B&W and most of the actors volunteered as well, though.

I think for a fan film made on a shoestring budget they looked very professional and well-done. Better than movies like The Gamers, which I hold up as pretty well done.

Do you know what goes into making a movie? I don't think you're being realistic at all. You want TV-show closed-set professionalism for $82,000?

No, he has a good point. The actual budget is far in excess of $82,000. $82,000 is just how much liquid cash they spent. The opportunity cost of the entire film is, as he stated, somewhere around $1 million or something.

Consider this. What if the people who volunteered their time instead just donated money?

If those people gave $1 million, which was then spent to hire other people to do what those people volunteered to do, the end result would be the exact same.
You'd have $82,000 left over to spend on the set, etc, having spent that $1 million dollars on acting, labor, etc.
Would the cost of THAT film be $82,000? No, it cost $1,082,000.

So because this money was donated, you're not counting it?
Or because the volunteers immideately "spent" the money on themselves, it doesn't count?
Its economics.

Wrong, actually, be careful. The product from MS is "Microsoft SQL Server"

"SQL Server" is just a generic name of which there are many, many implementations. Parent was spot on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_Server

Quote Wikipedia:
SQL Server may refer to:
Microsoft SQL Server, a relational database server from Microsoft
Sybase SQL Server, a relational database server developed by Sybase
SQL Server (magazine), a trade publication and web site owned by Penton Media
Any database server that implements the Structured Query Language

You want him to treat it like an old car engine, be willing to look inside instead of treating it like an ipod?

Then build one with him!

Its really not that hard. Computers are like Lego, you just learn this plugs into that. Learning which components are compatible (DDR2 vs DDR3 etc) can be a little complicated, but that's the only hard part. As long as you help him pick the components so they work together (or get a store employee to help you) and then you don't push on the components too hard, you really can't go wrong.

I got into computers at a really young age myself.

Buy an old motherboard, get a CPU that matches, and a basic videocard, a small cheap harddrive, and some RAM. Blammo, you're in business.

Now you can also have fun building the computer, and teach him what the components mean in the first place. Understanding the hardware makes understanding the software much easier.

They're in an awkward position.

They can continue to make bigger and better games for PC, and people want bigger and better games.

But the consoles are getting REALLY old now. Longer than any console lifetime before. But nobody wants to buy a new $500 PS4, so we'll hang on to PS3s for awhile longer. But that means accepting that your box just can't handle what the PC can.

So you get really crappy sub-par ports.

Or, alternatively, you can have a game that runs okay on console, and looks disappointing on PC.

NOPE. Its not the static development target at ALL that makes the difference. You're right that those games looked poop and they run better on the same hardware now, but you've completely failed to recognize the reason.

Those differences in quality from when X1800 was out? Those are differences in RENDERING ALGORITMS. Improvements to bump mapping, then parallax mapping, then displacement normal mapping, have progressively allowed more detail without costing more polygons. This is purely software, math, not hardware changes. Notice how people have gone back and modded Oblivion to add bloom and HDR and normal mapping, and it looks 100x better? That's not because of a "static target", you can change your hardware and Oblivion still looks and runs good with bloom and HDR.

What does help the consoles run better than an equivalent PC is that they don't have a big-ass OS running in the background to split resources with, and they don't let you run torrentz or whatever in the background. If you ran a PC on a slim, console OS, you'd get the same improvements.

You've just demonstrated a large ignorance of games, consoles, and hardware.

If gfx, storage, cpu, mem were the issue, we wouldn't be seeing Skyrim on PS3 at all.

Skyrim is already on PS3. This is purely adding a small DLC. There's no way that its memory or gfx or cpu limitations.

Maybe, MAAAAAYBE I could see an argument for RAM limitation being the limiting factor here, but I still feel like there'd be tons of workarounds. Most of the new content isn't stitched into the existing world, and I don't think they're that maxed out on RAM budget all the time, they could just cache to disk more, and the game already has to have to cache to disk. Most of the new areas are separated from the overworld, and so allow you to unload the overworld from memory to load the new areas.

Ever since Bioshock, I've been in love with the idea of an underwater city. I want to live in Rapture.

Yeah, IMO the best method (more or less what I did):

BASIC -> python / ruby / javascript / shell script -> Visual Basic -> Java/C# -> C++ -> C

Then you're free to try crazy things like smalltalk, obj-c, haskell, brainfuck, etc. on your own.

Smalltalk? Are you kidding? GTFO! Smalltalk is the ugliest thing in the world, ugggggh. Please don't force messaging on newbies, that shit is awkward as hell. Smalltalk is what lead to this annoying world we live in where you have to write so much obj-c. Uggggh.

At least Javascript is just simple C scripts.

But really, I'd start on Python, Ruby, C, or BASIC, depending upon your inclination.

Awesome. I'm going to make everyone I know watch these. Time to get rid of the "Programming is just typing!" school of thought. And maybe teach some people how to think in new ways.

Its definitely true. Can we just use government public education money to build facilities to enable kids to log on to Khan Academy? I think that'd be a huge improvement.

There's something to be said for being able to make changes and see the updates in real time. When you're first learning especially, and when its just the most basic of basics, that's huge.