191–200 of 316 posts
I'm really glad for what Carmack did. It's rather sad though, that support was dropped for this headset after only two years. As a reminder, the Oculus Go was released more than a year after the Nintendo Switch.
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Carmack made multiple fundamental breakthroughs in 3D graphics. Not only that, but he consistently positioned himself to commercialize those , which is not easy. His Quake 3 engine was the bread and butter of Id Software, generating billions in revenue. In recent times, he's done coronavirus simulations (I don't know anything else about that), and is doing AGI research. He's also a true hacker through and through. Si…
> generating billions in revenue. Source?
Well, at least my ideas are consistent.
As for the root source, I suppose I could just ask him now. But the idea came from a slashdot post. Carmack personally responded to some criticisms of Q3 code quality, and said that he was proud of it, and that it had generated a lot of revenue for the company.
Billions may have been off by a couple orders of magnitude though. I'm no longer sure.
Maybe not too far off, though. The revenue of Q3 Arena alone was $11M. Far more valuable is Id Tech 3, the engine that was licensed by many studios over many years. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find revenue numbers on that. I wonder if it's public.
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This is why I still try so hard to buy physical copies of games, and if there is a GOTY Edition, to have the DLC be on-disk , as opposed to being a bunch of download vouchers. I wanna be able to play the freaking game in ten years without worrying about whether the game/console's online service is still available to do some mandatory authentication or version check.
Unfortunately, a lot of new releases need a 0-day patch to be playable. It's basically an anti-piracy/anti-early release measure. So if you really want to preserve a game on disk, you pretty much have to pick up another copy stamped at a later date to include all of the patches.
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Of course for military equipment there are also other cost drivers - more demanding specs, less units produced to spread the development cost etc. etc.
This is true, but you may find that if you had to support something (and keep it relevant) across 20 years those specs and requirements may look much the same whether they are military or civilian. For example, the amount of bending of the case of a device has to be DRASTICALLY less to allow effectively sealing contaminants out for 20 years vice 2, as well as the seals themselves being an order of magnitude better if…
When you start designing things to last a long time AND be very reliable, the cost increases very quickly in ways that are not always predictable.
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> the job market favors engineers hopping around instead of staying at one place Does it? That's a fair description of the consulting space, but I don't think it's an accurate representation of the job market as a whole. When product companies hire software engineers, they tend to aim for the long haul.
You'd think. Most career advice I get is you need to jump ship to get an actual pay raise. Maybe stay 3 or 4 years. Not enough to build up deep knowledge, at least compared to older engineers imo
I quit my last job after 5 years and over my 30 year career, that's the shortest stint I've had.
This is tangential, but I really wish that their would be legislation, valid retroactively, to enable old unsupported devices to still be utilized. I think this goes somewhat beyond right to repair? Take for example digital backs for medium format cameras - these things are built in low numbers, with high end FPGAs and camera sensors, with JTAG interfaces ready to go and everything - but then forgotten about a few ye…
What if we required lifetime warranties for everything? By lifetime I mean human lifetime, not lifetime if the device. It sounds crazy when thinking how it’d work out in practice, especially with electronics, but we need drastic action like this to respond to climate change.
> allowing for a randomly discovered shrink wrapped headset twenty years from now to be able to update to the final software version, long after over-the-air update servers have been shut down. This resonates so much with me. Each time I setup a new device that requires an Internet connection, I think about how we can enjoy booting 30 years old retro computers and how the next generation will not be able to do the sa…
The same is true of some of the best work being done on the web, such as the NYTimes interactive infographics. Because they are so JS-heavy, and reliant on CI/CD pipelines for deployment, on custom CMSes, there is no way to archive them in the way that static pages containing just text and images can be archived on the Wayback Machine. Heck, even Flash projects from 15 years ago still run fine when compiled on Ruffle…
Imagining that future is about people wearing VR devices on their head (even as minimal as a pair of glasses) is hard to grasp. "In their head" would be a different matter but that is not what the current technology is focusing on (apart from Neuralink). Edit: not propagating for any such vision the future! just noticing that wearing stuff on head would be clunky and impractical for true immersion.
As a person who wears glasses, I'm very excited for AR devices. A great input device* and incremental improvements in the battery tech and energy efficiency would make them ideal for on-the-go computing, reading, and note taking. * https://wefunder.com/tapwithus looks promising, and facebook bought up companies doing similar things. A ring with a touch slider, gyroscope, and a button would be interesting.
I hope they do the Oculus Rift CV1 next. I'm trying to sell mine because it's useless without my deleted Facebook account.
> allowing for a randomly discovered shrink wrapped headset twenty years from now to be able to update to the final software version, long after over-the-air update servers have been shut down. This resonates so much with me. Each time I setup a new device that requires an Internet connection, I think about how we can enjoy booting 30 years old retro computers and how the next generation will not be able to do the sa…
Is it too much to ask for vendors to do the right thing?