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Comment Re:Yay (Score 1) 60

Yes, IT is fully aware, and they even set it up for me after I requested permission and pitched BitTorrent Sync's merits. My role has me working with anywhere from 20 to 60 external vendors at a time and transferring massive files that are stored on the network, and that's not something I could sneak by IT. ;) Besides, I respect IT enormously, and I vet absolutely everything involving network security and resource considerations by them before I do anything.

I also have an FTP, but only as a backup. In my role, I'm dealing with several gigs of transfers per day that need to be individually reviewed, and all of the files are coming from majorly offset time zones like China and India. The end of their day when they submit their work is roughly the beginning of mine, and vice versa. With an FTP, I have to manually trigger a download that may take all day to complete. If the files for review don't finish transferring until 5pm, my artists and I will be rushing to try to review the work before we go home and before my overseas teams get online. With BitTorrent Sync, the files are already synced by the time I get into work. That's 4 to 8 hours of time savings per day, which is hugely important to the schedules I'm working with.

Comment Re:Yay (Score 1) 60

I use BitTorrent Sync heavily at work for transferring extremely large files daily with a variety of external vendors in China, India, and Sweden. The cloud storage costs would be astronomical with the amount of data I'm syncing, and Google services generally don't work in China without a lot of headaches. And that's to say nothing of all the company-specific IT security and permissions I have to navigate to transfer files reliably and get them when I need them. BitTorrent Sync has always basically just worked with very little headache. I'm a huge fan, and have used it since it launched and watched it improve steadily over time.
Printer

From Austria, the World's Smallest 3D Printer 120

fangmcgee writes "Printers which can produce three-dimensional objects have been available for years. However, at the Vienna University of Technology, a printing device has now been developed which is much smaller, lighter and cheaper than ordinary 3D-printers. With this kind of printer, everyone could produce small, tailor-made 3D-objects at home, using building plans from the internet — and this could save money for expensive custom-built spare parts."

Comment Re:You don't need a certification to know somethin (Score 1) 235

I think you're making a logical error. You are comparing the value of the certificate as a predictor of success (that is, how much - if any - weight to give their degrees and certifications when deciding whether to hire them) and the value of the training process - yes, completely ignoring the certificate at the end - for someone that you've already hired and whose ability is not in question.

The question isn't whether someone with less intelligence or no experience in the subject matter can become an expert on a subject from a training program; the question is whether the smart and knowledgeable person you hired (let's at least assume that you hired someone who meets your standards, and have ruled out potential hires that would not cut the mustard without the certification or degree) can come out with much more and deeper knowledge of the subject.

Comment Re:'consoleitis' not slowing uptake of video cards (Score 1) 369

Well, I'm specifically talking about games that push the limits of graphics hardware, and that require a $500 video card to run. The market is very tiny there, but the increase in development costs is - I think - nontrivially larger than the cost of entry into the retail box console market. As a rough estimate, look at the budget for a Pixar movie: Up had a budget of $175M. The quality of art assets and graphics engine programming is going to be a bit lower running on a GeForce GTX580, but not that much lower, and instead of voice acting and writing you have longer runtime (so more assets), game design, and the requirement to do more art "in the round" since you don't have as much camera control as you do in a movie. So... $175M seems kind of reasonable to me as a rough estimate for pushing modern GPUs to the limit in a PC game.

AAA console game budgets are not quite that high yet with a few notable exceptions like Grand Theft Auto 4. So... I agree that the smaller market is a big concern (especially when you restrict it to "people who spent $500 on their video card"), and a reason that console development is more attractive (indie games, strategy games that don't translate well to console, and MMOs seem like the main exceptions here). However, I disagree that the budgets would be similar for a major console title (something getting close to a sales record, pushing the envelope of what the consoles can display, etc.) and a major PC title that tried to push the limit of a modern high-end graphics card.

Comment 'consoleitis' not slowing uptake of video cards (Score 4, Insightful) 369

"Though a $500+ video card is considered top of the line, a $250 one will now play pretty much any game at the highest settings with no problem. (Maybe that’s what everyone wanted?) Pretty soon, however, graphics chip makers won’t be able to sustain their rate of growth because the software is so far behind, which will be bad for gamers on consoles as well as PC."

Making content that looks good at 1080P (or 1920x1200 for some PC monitors) is hard. Some amazingly specialized people spend a lot of time working on it; the more powerful the graphics processor, the more that is possible, but the more art assets have to be created (along with all the associated maps to take advantage of lighting, special effects, shader effects...) and the more programming time has to me spent. Much like the number of pixels increases far faster than the perimeter of the screen, or the volume of a sphere increases faster than its surface area... the work to support ever-increasing graphics power grows faster than the visual difference in the image.

It's not sustainable, but those advancing graphics processors are a big part of why game developers are moving to consoles: a shinier graphics engine costs more money to develop, which increases the minimum returns for a project to be successful. Anyone who looks at the business side can see that the market of people who have $500 graphics cards is much tinier than the market of people who have an Xbox360 or Playstation3. If you're going to spend that much money on the shiny, of course you're going to shoot for a bigger return too!

When it takes a big team to develop something... well, that's generally not where the innovation is going to happen.

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