It means "patient zero for this outbreak". Unlike some diseases, Ebola doesn't have a constant presence in the human species. Most of the time, there are no humans on the planet infected with Ebola (compare and contrast with the common cold, which exists in an endemic steady state among humans).

Ebola outbreaks begin when a human is exposed to the disease from a non-human source (bats have been suspected for decades, but it was tricky to pin down). So "patient zero" for an Ebola outbreak is the human who is the first to be infected (and who then goes on to infect others).

One of the big questions about Ebola outbreaks is why there aren't more of them. If bats are the carriers, then given how widespread bats are across Africa, why do outbreaks so isolated? Tracking down the patient zero for each outbreak is crucial if we're going to understand that (and understanding it could be the key to preventing future outbreaks).

It's not finger pointing. Knowing who your patient zero was is absolutely vital if you want to be able to reduce the likelihood of future outbreaks.

Ebola doesn't have a natural reservoir in the human population; it's too fast-acting and (with the exception of the Reston strain) deadly for that. It tends to have a similar effect on other primates as well. So identifying where the disease does live between outbreaks in the human population (likely in a species which experiences no or limited symptoms from infection) is critical, both for research purposes (the ability to keep an eye on the virus before its latest strain jumps into humans) or for educating people as to which particular pools of the animal population to stay away from.

If you go back through medical history - right back to bubonic plague having a natural reservoir in rats' fleas - identifying how a virus has been making the jump into humans has been the first stage in controlling it.

Certainly, as I've recently noted in more detail than I will repeat here in a journal entry, the big question that the new consoles have yet to answer is what, precisely, they are for.

If they're replaced, I don't think it will be tablets that replace them - touchscreen controls are just unsuitable for many types of game. It will be PCs; though they may not look anything like the traditional "beige box under a desk".

The economics of the games industry are rapidly killing platform exclusivity (games cost too much to develop and increasingly developers can't afford to artificially limit sales and platform owners can't afford to compensate them for doing so). Without platform-exclusive games and with cheap, small and easy to use gaming PCs that can sit under a TV running Steam's big picture mode or something similar, the traditional games console starts to look like an oddity.

And they really are guesses, because the nature of the industry is that one major hit can save a failing company overnight, while just a couple of expensive disasters can sink a successful company within a year.

EA probably have the potentia to be the highest-profile casualty. Despite their size and notoriety, they've not been doing brilliantly in financial terms for quite a few years now. They've a couple of nasty habits (from the point of view of both the gamer and the shareholder) which contribute to this.

The first is the continual chase after the "last big thing" - EA rarely comes up with new mega-hit formulas itself; rather, it belatedly notices when somebody else produces one, tries to mimic it and usually fails. Hence the expensive and largely unsuccessful attempts to copy the Call of Duty formula with Medal of Honor and Battlefield (the former in particular having been a costly disaster for the company) and the late arrival, whole-hearted embrace of and often embarrassing fiascos in the pay-to-win mobile space.

The second bad habit is that of making expensive acquisitions and then ruining their unique selling points. Bioware is the biggest example here; Dragon Age: Inquisition may do a bit of reputational-repair, but the Bioware brand is much tarnished from when EA acquired it.

EA isn't going to die overnight; if it does die in the next 10 years, it's more likely to be a "death by a thousand cuts" kind of affair, probably with some smaller rump of the company surviving. But despite the fact it has some really talented developers (it makes some amazingly good games, despite its reputation), I just don't think it's smart or agile enough to keep up with Activision, Ubisoft or Square-Enix in the longer term.

The funny thing about EA is that when it's gone, we'll probably miss it. It's used its (now slightly diminishing-returns) cash-cow sports franchises to fund some interesting games like Dead Space that would probably never have been made otherwise.

The next guess is, ironically, a company whose gaming division is doing very well and will likely continue to do very well right up to the point the company (possibly) collapses; Sony. Sony's currently building up the kind of console-wars installed-base lead it hasn't had since the PS2-era and is doing it with much healthier margins than it had during that generation. The problem is that the wider company is a shambles, selling electronic goods that nobody wants. There's still plenty of time for Sony to turn itself around, but it's not absolutely certain that it will.

Nintendo has perhaps the opposite problem; the part of the company that makes and sells consoles is doing pretty badly, while other bits of the business are doing quite well. The Wii-U has failed now. Aafter Mario Kart 8 and Smash Bros failed to have a significant impact on sales, it has run out of last chances and even Nintendo themselves seem increasingly reluctant to support it at the expense of the 3DS. It appears almost certain that the Xbox One overtook it on installed base somewhere around October/November, despite the Wii-U's 12 month head start. While the 3DS isn't doing too badly, it's more a "PSP-level" success than a "DS-level" success (though the PSP was indeed a successful machine) and is particularly dependant upon the Japanese market. I don't think Nintendo's going bust, but I suspect that the threat of a shareholder revolt may mean that the Wii-U ends up being the company's last home console (or they may try a panicked and quick-to-fail emergency successor, which will only slightly delay the inevitable). They have some strong brands though and if they can shed the home-console hardware business, they'll probably still be here and still be healthy in 10 years time.

And MS... will be discussed to death elsewhere in this thread. I don't think they're going out of business. I do think it's more uncertain that they will stay in the home console market, however. They've rescued the Xbox One fairly neatly after a disaster of a launch (it's had a good Christmas season in sales terms), but it is clearly never going to be the living-room dominance vehicle that their board thought it was going to be. Is MS interested in continuing to drive the Xbox brand itself on the understanding that it will only ever really be a games console, or will it seek a buyer? Dunno...

And then in the domain of the smaller developers, there are a few companies in obvious difficulty. Crytek are the most obvious; they've been out to commit suicide as quickly as possible over the last year or two and are already showing signs of distress. But there will be others too; the early years of a console cycle are often brutal for studios, as production costs rise sharply.

But I suspect the bulk of the failures are going to pass unnoticed. There's definitely a sense now that we've reached (and possibly passed) the peak of the indie-gaming boom of the last couple of years. I think a large number of the indie studios currently clogging up Kickstarter and Steam's Greenlight won't be around in 12 months time, let alone 10 years. A couple will probably survive, flourish and begin to look more like the traditional commercial developers - but the free-for-all we were seeing in 2012 is mostly behind us now.

My home PC setup has a 500GB SSD for the operating system, frequently used software and a few games that are significantly affected by hard drive speed, then a 3TB media storage HDD and a 4TB HDD for the rest of my Steam/Origin library. Nobody has yet convinced me that this isn't a sensible way to order things.

What is interesting, though, is how many PC games released over the last 12-18 months have been significantly affected by the speed of the drive they're installed on. I'm not just talking about loading-screens here - while it's always nice to reduce the time you spend staring at a loading screen, it's not generally essential to your experience of the game. Rather, what I've noticed is that a lot of recent games (particularly those with an open-world structure) which stream content from the drive during play (often to eliminate or reduce load-screens) can be prone to significant in-game stuttering when running off anything but an SSD.

Watch_Dogs was perhaps the most egregious example of this; running off a platter-drive can render the PC version almost unplayable (certainly during driving sequences), while when played from SSD, it's just a badly optimised and boring game (but playable). Far Cry 4 is also significantly affected and, while I don't own it, I gather Assassin's Creed Unity is the same. All of those are Ubisoft games (so the problems potentially have the same underlying cause), but it's not just their titles that derive benefits; Dragon Age Inquisition is prone to loading-stutter in some of its areas when run off a platter drive.

Other games, particularly those with smaller areas and more linear structures, seem largely unaffected. Putting Wolfenstein: New Order on an SSD will marginally reduce your loading times, but not do much else. The same holds true for Dark Souls 2, Lords of the Fallen and Alien: Isolation.

The odd thing is that relatively few benchmarking articles for games actually examine the impacts of drive-speed. Eurogamer's (otherwise excellent) Digital Foundry series will test variants on CPU and GPU, but often doesn't even tell us what kind of drive they were running the game off.

Before anybody points it out - all of the post below is anecdote - usual caveats apply.

A friend of mine is a teacher - he generally works with the 10-11 age-range (which in the UK at least, is unusual for a male teacher). This is, as is documented in any number of official and unofficial studies, a particularly critical year in the education of boys; it's when many of them start to fall behind the girls in their year group in academic terms (not catching up until the 18-21 age range). The individuals who start falling behind at this point generally never catch up.

Now, just a few weeks ago, and spurred by the impending release of this movie, I had a long conversation with said friend about childhood literacy, academic achievement and the Hobbit.

See, his view is that the big problem with the UK education system and boys is that they lose all interest in reading for pleasure right around that 10-11 age range. This is, in part, because the generally approved reading materials in schools have a heavy female tilt (lots of teddy bears and thinking about feelings, not so much on the swords, dragons and robots), but there's not actually a mandatory reading list at this age and teachers (if they're willing to stand up to the senior management in their school if needed) have quite a lot of leeway.

And his big antidote to "losing" boys at this age has, for close to a decade now, been "The Hobbit". Indeed, he's of the view that it's one of the finest children's books ever written; short enough not to be off-putting, gripping pretty much from the first page and written with an authorial voice that strikes a good balance between not being condescending and not being too advanced for the age-range in question. It is also a damned exciting story, with wizards, dragons, goblins and magic rings. The girls don't hate it and the boys absolutely lap it up.

So from his point of view, the movies have been a bit of a disaster. He'd been hoping for something he could take classes along to. Instead, the movies, are dark, brooding, serious, dark and extremely violent in places. They're absolutely not suitable for the age range the book is pitched at and, in any case, they miss the fundamental quality of what makes the book so great.

It's not a disaster for him - the book is still there and always will be there. But his view was that it was a missed opportunity to give the "best children's book ever written" a proper adaptation.

I've not read The Hobbit for many years myself, but this does chime with my own memory of it.

There is no GamerGate. Not really. There are several amorphous bunches of people who hang around on some forums. There's a similarly amorphous bunch of people who use a twitter tag, often for wildly differing reasons. There are a handful of internet petitions. There's a fictitious mass-movement that some juvenile "supporters" have imagined up because it makes them feel good. And there's a fictitious shadowy, sinister organisation that a bunch of equally juvenile opponents have imagined up because it gives them a convenient straw man to attack. Really, nobody comes out of this well.

During my postgrad years (so going back to the start of the last decade now), I had two online roles back to back which gave me a fair amount of visibility to a lot of angry people online. First, I was the head admin of a major European Counter-Strike league. Then I was an oper (and one of the public-facing ones rather than the backroom code-tweakers) on a very large European-based IRC network. Both of those roles involved telling angry people things they didn't want to hear. Things like "somebody in your clan was caught cheating, you are now banned" or "no, I will not gline somebody just so you can have your usual nick back".

And so, on a pretty much daily basis, people threatened to kill me. They were going to find out where I lived and kill me, or maybe track down my parents and kill them or maybe rape my grandmother or my sister (I don't have a sister, but hey), or whatever, or something, or they just hoped I got CANCER or AIDS and would go away and DIE. To be honest, I suspect anybody who's done a similar role (or worked in customer service in certain types of company) also gets similar on a daily basis.

Were the people making those threats good people? Hell no. Even the fact that they were angry doesn't excuse behaviour like that. But what did I do about it? In the Counter-Strike role, if they clan wasn't already banned from the league, then it sure was the moment they made death threats. In the IRC role, it takes only a few seconds to apply a gline and suspend accounts with network services, but the warm fuzzy feeling that follows can last an hour or more. Did I ever actually feel in danger? Did I ever feel I needed to call the police? Hell no. Talking shit online is, unfortunately, pretty much as old as the internet itself and I had no particular political axe to grind.

So yeah, immature idiots on one side and professional grievance-mongers trying to inflate trash talk out of all proportion on the other. Nobody comes well out of this, for the most part.

Actually, the one thing that did strike me about this was how much the whole thing was a product of the indie gaming community. Almost every AAA publisher or developer out there either stayed silent or distanced from it as quickly as possible (which was the only sensible course of action). 2014 is really feeling like the year AAA gaming got smart and indie gaming got dumb.

Ugh...

Region locks are vile practice. It's infuriating to see them creeping into PC gaming (historically a region-free platform) at a time when two of the three console developers have ditched them and the third (Nintendo) is considering dropping them. That said, it's worth reflecting on why they exist. There are, historically, two reason behind this.

The first is plain old-fashioned cultural stereotyping (which somebody being less diplomatic might call "racism"). This is the classic Nintendo reason. Big paternalist companies like Nintendo (they're not alone in this, but are the worst offenders) have this weird outlook that says that they should function as some kind of moral arbiter of what should and should not be available in each territory. Hence certain games are "not a good cultural fit for some regions" (usually a view based on offensive broad-brush stereotypes... or racism, if you prefer the more honest term) or "require alterations to be culturally appropriate" (meaning "we're going to cut the game to hell on release in some territories, because REASONS"). Happily, this particular driver behind region locking is on the decline. Sony used to buy into it every bit as much as Nintendo, but have completely washed their hands of it. Even Nintendo are considering getting out of this game. I should add that a few territories (a handful of religious-wacko countries, plus Germany and Australia - what good company they find themselves in) set up their own barriers that require these kind of locks on occasion. In those cases, the blame rests with the Governments of those countries, not the platform owners/publishers.

The second reason is more complex and is down to differential pricing. Not every currency is of the same strength or stability. The last few days have made that pretty clear, if it wasn't already. And by and large, a lot of those countries which have weak and/or unstable currencies also tend to have very high piracy rates. A lot of companies (Microsoft used to be particularly bad in this respect, but have been stepping back lately) operate under the delusion that if they sell their products really really cheap in those territories, they can get people to buy legitimately, rather than pirating their products (all the evidence to date shows this doesn't work). Problem is, when you do that, you create a huge reverse-import problem; why would a US or European consumer pay the going rate in their territory for a locally-bought copy, when they could import a Brazillian or Russian or Vietnamese copy for a fraction of the price (which probably has English-language support anyway)?

Now, in a pure free market, one of two things would happen. Either the company selling the product would have to drop its price globally, or else it would have to accept that customers in those marginal economies just couldn't, for the most part, afford its products. But we live in a world where they're allowed to circumvent the free-market at will - via region locks. So first-world consumers get to subsidise producers (usually fruitless) speculation in developing-world markets.

There's a curious mirror image of this around one particular market; Japan. See, Japanese consumers are willing to pay massively over the odds for media (movies, games, TV series both live action and animated), particularly when said media is domestically produced. Seriously, you think UK or Australian consumers pay over the odds? It's nothing to what they'll pay in Japan. And because Japan has a large media industry which has grown accustomed to being able to milk this unquestioningly loyal (and seemingly happy to be exploited) domestic market, a good chunk of it is desperate to keep said market behind a walled garden, with reverse importing from the rest of the world locked off.

So yeah... region locking... a few reasons for it, none of them good for the consumer. Truly sad to see it come to Steam (though it's been creeping in at the margins for a while now). The only alternative? Fix all regions' price to the dollar (allowing for differences in local sales taxes, which is the major difference, for instance, between US and UK prices). But then a good chunk of the world wouldn't be able to afford to buy anything like as many games.

Shouldn't be the customer's problem. A big part of the root cause of the Kickstarter backlash is that it makes it into the customer's problem.

I know people who have taken entry-level development positions with large games developers. That's certainly one way to get experience. Yes, the pay, working hours and culture will probably suck, but that's the price you pay for wanting to work in an over-subscribed field. Any large developer will always be carrying a lot of people with little to no experience of games development - the things that suck which I just mentioned mean that this is a field with high turn-over. What matters is that there are experienced people in the right places.

In fact, given that the main skill that seems to be lacking in failed Kickstarter campaigns is project management, you could argue that relevant experience doesn't have to come from games development. Delivering (or at least making a major contribution to) any complex technical project within fixed time and budget constraints is good experience, regardless of field.

Launching a Kickstarter or Early Access for an implausible game design and taking people's money for a project that you then mismanage horribly and fail to deliver any product is not a viable business model. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to think it is.

You're right that "backers" need to realise that Kickstarter is not a pre-order mechanism. But developers also need to realise that turning to crowdfunding means, by necessity, a different kind of development model to a "traditional" game.

If this game was - as is more usual - being funded by a big publisher and Frontier decided that the offline mode wasn't working out, then that would be the cue for them to begin a negotiation with the publisher. The publisher might be fine with the change. It might not be. The publisher might want to change its funding committment. It might even want to walk away and leave the project looking for a new publisher. But at the end of the day, it's a commercial negotiation.

Now generally, when a game Kickstarter goes horribly wrong, the root cause is that the developer was a "two men and a dog" team with little to no experience of games development. That's not the case here; Frontier are an established studio with a long track record of delivering games (even if most of those games for the last decade-and-a-bit have been low-profile franchise tie-ins). But they're attempting to behave here as though the absence of a traditional publisher means that they have licence to do what they want without the usual accountability to backers. There's no possible world in which that is reasonable.

So it's no wonder backers are upset.

So let's give Ubisoft the benefit of the doubt for a moment. I'm not going to slate them for the fact that you need a top-end graphics card to get good performance with all the bells and whistles. I actually quite like to see developers showing a bit of ambition when it comes to pushing the envelope on PC graphics. Let's even assume that something went badly wrong in the AMD optimisation. It's not completely unknown for things to go wrong with a GPU manufacturer at the last moment - the PC version of Rage was a hideous mess on PCs with Nvidia cards when it released, because a driver update that was anticipated between the game going golden-master and hitting the shelves turned out not to be what the developer was expecting.

But even allowing for that, how does it explain the console versions being such a mess? There are detailed performance analysis reports out there showing frankly shocking levels of performance on both of the console platforms (Playstation 4 and Xbox One - no last-gen releases for this game). Both platforms fail to hold even a consistent 30 fps, with the Playstation 4 version (which in theory should be the better of the two, as the console does have a little bit more horsepower) having some truly shocking moments where the framerate dips into the teens.

If you're used to playing games on a PC, this might not sound too shocking. After all, unless you have a particularly old PC, you can almost always salvage a playable framerate by dropping your graphics quality. But that option isn't there on a console. For action oriented games on a console, a locked 60 fps rate is the "gold standard" and is becoming almost mandatory for twitch-shooters, precision driving games and other genres that rely on rapid response times. The popularity of the Call of Duty series, generally inexplicable to PC gamers, has largely been driven by the fact that the series has long adhered to the 60 fps standard on the consoles, meaning that it has felt tighter and more precise than its competitors.

But if you can't manage a locked 60 framerate, then the general consensus is that a locked 30 framerate is an acceptable fallback. It won't feel as precise, but it at least eliminates the disconcerting impact of framerate fluctuations (particularly unpleasant when you're playing on a controller). For a console action-game to fail to manage even a locked 30 fps is pretty shocking these days. For it to be dipping into the teens suggests either misguided design choices or terrible optimisation (or both).

Plus, yeah, the whole "falling through the floor" thing is happening on consoles as well as PC. The game's broken and it's not (entirely or chiefly) down to a particular brand of graphics card.

Agree with you, until your final sentence. EA makes some utter crap. They also make some fantastic games. EA published Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect 2 and Dead Space, which were some of the finest games in recent memory. Dead Space, in particular, was a huge commercial risk and the kind of game that only a company with deep enough pockets to experiment would dare to take.

They also put out some utter crap, as well as their lazy annualised franchises and unfinished spunkgargleweewee like Battlefield 4. They also, at times, behave like complete shits in their attitude to their workforce and their willingness to push the boundaries on issues such as DRM and pay-to-win mechanics (though the latter seems to be dying now, thank god).

But they're a big company; big enough and containing enough people that trying to tar the whole thing with a single brush is a bit futile.

I think of EA as being a bit like the National Lottery we have here in the UK. Almost all of its players are from the lowest rungs of our social and educational ladders. And a fair proportion of the money it raises is used to subsidise the kind of "high art" (opera, theater, galleries) that struggles to be commercially viable on its own. So it's basically a tax on stupidity that funds some pretty great stuff as a by-product. Yeah... that's EA.

In fairness, while they'll probably get away with it this time, recent history suggests that with major franchises, you can fool people once, but you pay the price on the next game. Some examples here:

Final Fantasy XIII: sold extremely well on the basis of hype and the brand. Was a terrible game in almost every respect. Final Fantasy XIII-2 is a rather better game. Lightning Returns (the third installment) is actually a very good game. Both sold terribly, due to reputational damage from their predecessor.

Resident Evil 6: near-universally panned. Sold pretty well on the basis of a massive marketing campaign. Resident Evil releases since then have had a much better critical reception, but much lower sales.

Call of Duty: Ghosts: Its predecessor, Black Ops 2, was actually a pretty interesting game, integrating RTS elements and branching storylines. Ghosts was a lazy, by the numbers pile of spunkgargleweewee. Its sales weren't fantastic by Call of Duty standards, but were still insane. The latest installment, Advanced Warfare, is much better, but is the slowest selling installment in the franchise in years.

So if Ubisoft put out another Assassin's Creed next year, expect it to tank in sales terms, no matter how good it is.

There's certainly plenty of evidence by now to suggest that games with review embargoes tend to be poor, or at least not as good as they've been hyped as. Aliens: Colonial Marines was the big example from last year - review embargo until launch, then reviews mostly in the 4/10 to 6/10 range (with a fair few even lower). More recently, Destiny (critical consensus "fairly good but not even close to justifying the hype") and Driveclub (barely works, and underwhelming even when it does work) have been good examples.

By contrast, when a game is sent for review well in advance of release, the reception is usually much more positive. Recent examples include Bayonetta 2 (reviews 3 weeks early in some cases, near-universal praise), Alien: Isolation (America hates it, rest of the world loves it) and Dragon Age: Inquisition (not actually released yet, but reviews near universal in their praise).

The lack of pre-release reviews is generally a very strong indication in its own right that a game is not going to be good.