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Comment An old quote (Score 1) 347

by Narbo (#42861235) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Alternative To the Canonical Computer Science Degree?

Back when I was in second year comp sci (mid/late 90s) we had a course which was roughly titled "Programming in C". The basics of C were covered in a single week; after that it was all about algorithms etc... One of the students asked the professor why we had gone over learning the language so quickly to which he gave an answer which has stuck with me to the current day:

"We are not here to teach you C. C is only a tool. We are here to teach you how to solve problems."

That's what your degree is about. Gaining the knowledge and background to solve problems.
User Journal

Journal Journal: .Tornados hit Springfield again 4

Journal by mcgrew

Lucky for me, it wasn't my Springfield, but the Springfield in Massachusetts. Unlike when the tornados hit Springfield, IL, the ones in Massachusetts killed four people. The AP article's description sounds exactly like what I went through:
Piracy

Estimating Game Piracy More Accurately 459

Posted by Soulskill from the arrrrbitrary-numbers dept.
An anonymous reader tips a post up at the Wolfire blog that attempts to pin down a reasonable figure for the amount of sales a game company loses due to piracy. We've commonly heard claims of piracy rates as high as 80-90%, but that clearly doesn't translate directly into lost sales. The article explains a better metric: going on a per-pirate basis rather than a per-download basis. Quoting: "iPhone game developers have also found that around 80% of their users are running pirated copies of their game (using jailbroken phones). This immediately struck me as odd — I suspected that most iPhone users had never even heard of 'jailbreaking.' I did a bit more research and found that my intuition was correct — only 5% of iPhones in the US are jailbroken. World-wide, the jailbreak statistics are highest in poor countries — but, unsurprisingly, iPhones are also much less common there. The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple — the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales."

Comment There are no great games without great sound (Score 1) 99

by Narbo (#24880177) Attached to: The State of Game Audio

It always boggles me why designers often neglect sound. Can you think of a really AAA title that has poor quality sound and music? Sound is often the singular difference in between a good game and #$%#$% awesome game.

If you want an example of how great sound design can take a game to the next level look at Castlevatia: SOTN. There are lots of platform games that have a similar style and execution but a big reason that its the finest platform game of all time is that the music is BRILLIANT.

Feed Engadget: Samsung no longer selling flat panels, other wares in Japan (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment, Portable Audio, Portable Video

Yeah, we're still scratchin' our noggins too, but even after we rubbed our eyes and adjusted the bifocals, it still looks as if the AP is reporting that Samsung will stop selling flat panel televisions and "other consumer products" in Japan. Hot on the heels of Hitachi pulling the plug on RPTVs on this side of the pond, Samsung is citing "poor profitability" as the reasoning behind its dramatic move, and it noted that LCD TVs, DVD players, DAPs and "other items" would no longer be sold to individuals in the Land of the Rising Sun. It was, however, stated that the outfit would continue selling flat screen computer monitors directly to businesses along with memory chips, LCDs and mobile phones to Softbank, but considering that last year less than one-percent of the firm's total sales in the country were made up of consumer electronics sales, we guess it's a little easier to wrap our head around the decision. Nevertheless, there's no reason for us to think that Sammy will be pulling back the reigns in any other regions of the world, but it'll be quite strange in Tokyo with no signs of Sammy in the CE realm.

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