"Don't think it matters? What kind of result do you think Mr. Churchill might have received if he had stated, "Them Nazis is bad, we gots to beat em.""

I think people would stand up and shout:"About bloody time, you fat bastard! And twist your bloody hand when you make the V sign!"

It's painfull to see this comment modded +5, insightfull no less...
Mr. Browne has nothing against second hand sales.
He just has an axe to grind with gamestop, who actively prohibit customers from obtaining new games.
See here: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-04-12-the-real-cost-of-used-games

The thing is, nobody seems to have digged deeper than TFA and that is a real shame.
It is why journalism sucks these days. Seriously.
And that is why we have internet rumors going global news.
There is nothing as stupid as taking news by face value these days..
People becoming parrots with no capacity to actually understand.

YOUR FUCKING AUTOMATED MORONS, there is said it.

You need to read the RTFA article.
In the article referenced by this story is a link to the actual story as told by Richard Browne...

Let me quote a key section from Richard Brownes that will shine light on this issue (and crap all over TFA).

"I've been in this industry for 25 years, I've run development (internal and external) for seven different publishers. Used games were never, have never, been an issue to any of them. Today that actually still holds true; publishers don't hate used games, but they do hate the practices of GameStop and those that followed to force used games upon their customers - if you want to hear about nuclear options, GameStop fired theirs first. A colleague of mine brought to light how bad this has become just the other week. He went into his local GameStop and was point blank REFUSED the option of buying the game he went to get new. After pressuring the sales assistant for a few minutes he finally got his new game - but only after the assistant got his manager's approval to sell it to him. That's the state of retail today, and it's not healthy for the consumer at all. "

Now THAT is a different story.
Supposedly GameStop doesn't allow you to buy new games when they have second hand copies around.
Makes me wonder.

"Creating high quality 3d art is extraordinarily labour intensive, and the tech to improve the toolset for the artists is not advancing as fast as the ability to push more content to the screen."

Yeah, well, i'm sort of not completely agreeing.
It is still the case that a lot of hi-end productions do the production in much higher resolution than needed and scale that down at the end of the process.
If you look at the PS3, with it's dual-256MB memory, you can easily see that there can't be a lot of stuff on screen texture wise.
So in that case you will need to optimize the hell out of your artwork and use clever programming tricks to get the extra level of detail you see today.

Creating 3D art is peanuts today.
There are great tools that let you add lots of details from a macro perspective, there are fantastic modeling, texuring, shading and animation tools that intergrate into game design workflows etc.
The labour intesiveness has literarrily become a stroke of a brush.
Meanwhile we see complete CG movies with way more detail in them costing less to produce than some AAA games.
It just cannot be the artwork alone, not anymore.

Sure, if you want to invent your own engine then all tooling is up to you. Which means that artists will be hamered by your own lack of sophisticated tools.
But that doesn't mean that there is no good workflow available for creating assets.

That's a different categorisation than mine:
virus: uses an exploit in an executable to get runtime, reproduces to other files when executed. Cannot execute by itself.
worm: uses an exploit in the OS to get runtime, reproduces directly from OS to OS and can use networks to infect other OSes.
trojan: virus or worm arranging for a backdoor (for human or machine consumption).

But this type of classification is archaic at best.
Today's malwares are much more clever and use any vector/vulnerability to get the job done.
Basicly, there are several stages to a malware.
You get the infection (get runtime), payload (do something, like install a server or drop more malwares) and reproduction (infect others) stages.
Each can be designed with a different goal in mind and sometimes categories collapse.
For instance a worms reproduction can be it's infection if everything can be done over a network and the reproduction can be seen as the payload.
So you get a worm mechanism also infecting files like a virus.
Or a worm used to open a hole (acting as a trojan) for more complex attacks and then goes on to infect other machines.
That's what botnets do.
It's becomming increasingly more difficult to classify computer malwares in these simplistic terms.

"The quest to find random numbers is the quest to entangle our locality to ever more distantly blah blah blah"

Yawn...
For me randomness is just a tool against boredom.
#8a713e9425f61c01035b63ec5358097f

'Lame.'

The reality is that even the initialisation code of modern GPU's is several MB in size.
And the hardware is propietary.
And it is so incredibly complex that you would need a serious team for a long time to make a driver for that specific piece of graphics hardware.
Writing your own GPU drivers for the purpose of demos goes beyond the purpose of writing demo's.
Mind you, where would you get the specifications of the diverse GPU's from?
It used to be relatively easy in ye old days where almost all available hardware was either documented or simple enough to experiment your way through.
Nowadays even the software interfaces to the drivers are dragons. You don't want to know what is actually happening on the bus level.

I mean, you're expecting demo guys to write their own GPU drivers while the OS community is struggeling with this despite a ;arge ammount of serious people working on the issue.
Go ask these guys if they would whip up a driver for the sake of a demo.
Then ask them if it would fit in any size below 1MB.
Note the strange looks and insecure laughs.

That is just the reality of computing these days.
I first noticed when i saw java vm bytecode demo's 10 years ago. The world had changed.

""demo scene" requires an extra byte compared to "demoscene" ;)"

That is why the people in the scene generally refer to it simply as 'the scene' or just 'scene'.

Bah, you and your fancy VGA's... :P
Demos are at least 10 years older than 1995.

"I'm not arguing that it's not the best of its class. I'm just aruging that it's not really a 64K demo."

You just have to make the switch and see the available system api's as hardware that you program against.
And then the whole trickbox approach becomes valid again.
Because you can do DX calls the 'normal' way or you can optimize the shit out of them and put more usefull code in the same space.
So while the actual things that you tinker with now are software interfaces for the perifferals as opposed to hardware you still get to be smart-ass and do cool stuff with the limitation.

For me, it is not so much about tickling hardware as it is about doing as much as possible in as little as possible space.
I mean, even a VGA interface is 'cheating' when compared to programming for the 2600's stella, and the 2600 needed serious tricks every time you wanted to show anything on screen, not just demos.

Every generation has to deal with a different set of platformity and each generation has to figure out what the challenge is for the available platforms.
Since 3D hardware is ubiquitous but highly complex and depending on drivers to actually work (the drivers are a big part of the actual design of those components) it's just natural to use the provided interface (the driver as opposed to the bus) to do your tricks on.

Apple is just agnostic about the whole deal.
MACs may and/or may not be PC's, period.

"Why the Java hate?"

Because running a Java app always reminds me that a similar program woud run just as well on a 5 year older computer when written in a native language?
I sometimes do things in Java , but there is always this nagging feeling in the back of my head that i'm somehow wasting a lot of energy and resources when running the code.
I will propably live in this limbo untill Java cpu's are common.

". Those requirements are *not* there when using skype or similar."

And quite frankly, most of the time there is no reason to have these requirements.
Besides, the available bandwidth on packet switched networks these days is much bigger then required for having a voice communication.
Telephone bitrate is somewhere around 64kbps which is insignificant in modern networks.
You could have about 16 simultaneous phone conversations with a symmetrical 1mbps connection.
Voice is trivial in most situations.

"They just gave you an Android smartphone for signing up"

They don't give you anything.
You pay more than retail price for that device through your monthly subscription.
All they do is provide very expensive credit that you can pay off over the contracts period.

", but if a God did create something to look 14 billion years old, then that's how old it would look despite our best testing."

But that would make the god a very childish one, for wanting to fool us this way.
And besides, we are then nothing but puppets for its ammusement, aren't we?
I mean, he had absolute power to design us like he wanted and yet he gives us black death and cancer and aids.
I mean, why all the needless suffering?