> But... but... you forgot to mention they're using previous-generation processors in their brand-new laptops! That takes courage!
Not really. The Kaby Lake equivalents of the Skylake CPUs they are using have not been released yet, so they are the current generation CPUs in those configurations.
Also, it wasn't until the early 60s that the earliest photocopiers appeared, courtesy of Haloid Xerox corporation, and a good decade after that before most people could usually get access to them for personal use.
That brought about a change in thinking. Prior, unless a print shop was going to get involved, you only really thought about making copies at the time of creation - via carbon paper, or mimeographs. People weren't used to the idea of creating copies of something after the fact.
The writing habits of authors and people like Roddenberry were already well developed. Today we think nothing of 'backing things up', but at the time it must have been a strange idea to them.
Ahhh. David H Ahl's 101 BASIC games - those were written on a mainframe I believe, and required a little bit (not much usually) of work just to translate to the BASIC dialects found on the common machines of the time (Commodore PET, Apple ][, TRS-80, Atari). The Atari BASIC was the hardest of the bunch because it's string handling differed the most (not being based on the Dartmouth/Microsoft BASIC interpreters of the time)
For real fun, I remember at about age 14, taking a commercial game- Starbase Hyperion - that was written in Atari BASIC, but had a few 'anti-hack' measures, and undoing them to make it readable when listed (like coming up with meaningful names for all the variables - they were in a table that had been replaced with control characters).
As I recall, it was common for the CPU in machines of that era to interact heavily with the Floppy Controller during the I/O process: listening for the sync hole (a real hole in the floppy), driving the stepper motor, transferring bytes, intra-sector timings, stop/start bits, etc. All of which could be further impacted by the system clocks and even the memory wait states used in that particular machine.
There were many early "homebuilt" CP/M machine from sources like HeathKit, Northstar, etc, so there could have been quite a few variants in terms of the actual magnetic data on the disk.
For some real fun, look up how the CompuColor II (circa 1979) controlled it's floppy disks -- it used a serial IO chip in developer/debug mode to save on having a dedicated floppy controller chip.
As someone who has made games for over 20 years, including mobile, and was responsible for a game in Steam's top 100 played over 10 years after it's initial release... let me translate this press release for you...
"We want a revenue stream sustained for 10 years without us having to constantly develop new games and enter into the lottery that is mobile games today....
Having worked on some hugely popular titles let me just say that I've learned that despite all you do, you don't control your audience. You're in the entertainment business, no matter how good an entertainment product you have, and no matter how much marketing you are doing, you are not making something that is truly necessary in your customer's lives.
So if your players get bored, don't have as much time to spare, popular fads change, new fads sweep the popular conscience, technologies or platforms change, they don't have the money to spare, they want something new and more novel, or whatever... then life moves on and so do your players.
The idea suggested by the headline - that a game's life cycle will be longer just because a developer deems it should be, is ludicrous.
Digging into the press release, though, that's not what they are saying. They are saying they will design their games, technically and gameplay, with a long lifespan in mind. That means growing and evolving content - new levels, new content, new stories, etc. Ongoing active development, much like a long running TV show - never completely wrapping things up and always leaving the door open for what comes next.
Doing that means keeping a development team active for the duration.. which in reality is going to be for as long the game sustains a certain revenue level. If not, the game goes into "sunset" mode. Lots of mobile games are already doing this entire strategy.
Heck, I worked on an iOS game doing just that 3 years ago. It requires that your game develop a large enough *paying* player base early on, and that you sustain their interest enough to keep the IAPs coming, and do it on a regular and consistent enough basis. The whole whale vs non-payer thing comes into play, as well as newer, shinier competition. That means they will pull out all the (Skinner boxes, social groups/teams, etc) stops to keep players hooked and interested.
Great if you can do it, but there is no magic formula or guarantee that you will succeed, or for as long as you want to.
It's officially not released yet, and the seller linked to is in Japan and gouging anyone who can't wait another couple weeks. I'm not sure how or what stock they got a hold of.
According to Intel, list price is $377 boxed or $366 Tray. Not $540.
Imagine hundreds of world leaders and nongovernmental organizations, science groups, and United Nations functionaries gathered for a meeting heralded as the most important conference since World War II, in which "the future of the world is being decided." These officials seem to agree that institutions of "global governance" need to be established to reorder the world economy and massively restrict energy resources. Large numbers of them applaud wildly when socialist dictators denounce capitalism. Strange philosophical and metaphysical activism surrounds the gathering. And we are told by our president that all of this is based, not on fiction, but on science — that is, a scientific consensus that human activities, particularly greenhouse gas emissions, are leading to catastrophic climate change.
We don't have to imagine that scenario, of course. It happened in Copenhagen, in December 2009. It will happen again in Paris, in December 2015.
Now, none of this disproves the hypothesis of catastrophic, human induced climate change. But it does describe an atmosphere that would be highly conducive to misrepresentation. And at the very least, when policy consequences, which claim to be based on science, are so profound, the evidence ought to be rock solid. "Extraordinary claims," the late Carl Sagan often said, "require extraordinary evidence." When the megaphones of consensus insist that there's no time, that we have to move, MOVE, MOVE!, you have a right to be suspicious.
I fly on average about twice a week so I have the whole safety briefing just about memorized. So while I mostly tune out because of that, I think the majority of people just tune out because a lot of the information is too obvious and most is repeated later in the flight (e.g. "The fasten safety belt indicator light has been activated. For your safety, please ensure your safety belt is security fastened and do not wander about the cabin.") It's been about ten years that I can recall a movie theater reminding me during the previews to locate the nearest exit in case of a fire. Honestly, I'd rather see the safety briefing go away and just make everyone refer to the printed handout already in front of every passenger - like with my car.
Until recently (with in-dash navigation systems warning screens) the auto industry has gotten by with using the supplemental car manuals to cover all the safety items with 98% of car owners never reading it cover to cover. I just pray the day never comes that before I drive my car, I have to watch a three-minute video on the in-dash navigation screen how to fasten my seat belt, what to do if the air bag deployment system goes off, and how there are many car model choices and Toyota thanks me for my continued loyalty and hopes that I'll drive again with them real soon. Great for catching bank robbers driving away, but horrible for escaping chainsaw maniacs and zombie hordes.
"The chain which can be yanked is not the eternal chain." -- G. Fitch
