Recent content by jon_sf

Comics like Calvin and Hobbes, or Garfield, or The Far Side were exposed to a huge swath of the population through newspaper syndication. When I was growing up in the 80s, that's how I first experienced comics. Those big comic strips were syndicated in almost all the big newspapers, and the...

Scaling is hard. I work in the software industry (though not the game industry), and what they're trying to do is extremely difficult. They're suddenly turning on the firehose of millions of users connecting to their servers, which simulate extremely complicated worlds, and needing everything...

Salon had an interesting article on facial recognition in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings. It talks about what is currently possible, and the hurdles that still remain. In some ways, Google Glass could be better at detecting people, because it could take multiple pictures of people...

Interesting point. I wonder if there's been a move to use more functional languages in game design, that are better suited to run in parallel, and can be more easily optimized. I know that graphics rendering has been something that has always been well-suited to parallelization. (Thus why...

Better hardware means that games can have better graphics, higher polygon counts, richer textures, better sound, etc. But those don't spring out of thin air. To create more detailed models, you need modelers spending more time creating and animating them. In the original Legend of Zelda...

I imagine that the "versioning" going on with the Ouya will be iterative improvements to hardware, as you can get better chips & graphics cards for N dollars as time goes by. Kindof like how the PS3 have had several versions (original, slim, super-slim), with changes to form factor, some...

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-microsoft-income-by-segment-2012-10 In that chart, the light blue area near the bottom is the Entertainment division, which includes Xbox. Some months it's slightly positive, other months it's in the red. It's pretty tiny compared to the other...

(Caveat: this isn't directed just at you, Groenteman. You just stated this clearly in a way that was quotable.) Actually, researchers do have techniques for distinguishing between correlation and causation. They use control groups, factor in those variables and try to hold them constant...

To be fair, a lot of what Apple does is to take ideas developed by other people and implement them with a high level of polish. They seem to be doing alright, with a market cap of half a trillion dollars. (I say this as someone who owns many Apple products, and am generally a fan of what they...

"Jeez, people shouldn't be offended by stuff on the internet, and post negative comments to websites about it. I'm going to go post a negative comment on some website about how I think people are whiny."

Yeah, that seems like a reasonable service to me. Let's say they charge $10/month for the service. It looks like most of the tools are aimed at the GM, so you only really need a subscription for the GM of the group. If you've got 5 people in your group, that's each person kicking in...

In their mythos, Strife uses a pair of revolvers, and Fury is the token female and she wields a whip. Will be interesting to see what they do with them. I enjoyed Darksiders 2. I agree with some of his criticism about the item management getting a little tiresome, trying to figure out what...

For the record, it's possible for the FBI to get UDIDs from sources other than Apple itself. The UDID of a device is accessible by any app running on your iPhone. It's part of the SDK that's exposed to developers...

Yeah, I'm in the "not a big deal" camp either. All companies need to make money to pay their employees, keep the servers running, and earn their investors a profit. They can do that by: 1. Charging customers for the product/service. (e.g. selling physical things, games, etc.) 2. Create...

Except for the fact that it has sold over 10 million copies [http://www.imediamonkey.com/2012/08/05/diablo-3-overtakes-warcraft-with-10-million-sales/], which is a massive success from Blizzard's/Activision's perspective. Also, I'm inclined to say that if you buy something and get 200 hours...