Before you hire on to a company, please, for the love of Pete, find out how it's funded.
If they started from nothing, got three rounds totalling $100Mish from VC over the past 2-3ish years and don't have a shipping product to show for it, absolutely don't work there. VC money means that the company needs to be on the fast track to acquisition or IPO, which means that layoffs that cut burn rate will make the company more attractive to investors while the product is busy slipping.
If it's funded by an angel investor or angel pool, then find out everything you can about their personalities, their investment portfolios, how much they're worth and how much this venture, based on its burn rate, is likely to be straining them.
If it's funded by the people managing it, these, in my experience, are usually the best companies to work for. It's their daily routine on the line, in addition to their cash.
Find out if management has worked at companies where they've conducted layoffs before. They will likely do it again.
Find out if the company has ever missed payroll. If they have, do not assume this is a bad thing. Particularly if everyone stayed on board, this can be a positive thing, and it means management doesn't fire people at the first sign of cashflow problems. If missed payrolls happen all the time, then figure out, based on how often it happens, what your actual salary would be, counting the missed paychecks. It's really no different from saying that you are going to be paid a lower salary. As long as you are planning for missed payrolls, they won't really be missed.
Find out how you are going to split profits on the product. If it's just an ephemeral hand-waving promise that profits will be split, don't take the job. If it's just stock options, don't take the job. If it's going to be a subjective percentage of a pool based on performance, consider taking it if the deciding personalities strike you as fair, well-balanced people. If it's going to be a fixed percentage base with subjective bonuses, then absolutely take the job. None of this is real unless you get it on paper. So make sure you have that piece of paper the day you show up for work.
Most employees believe in the myth of salaries, and their precious, surprised little faces when they learn that there is no Santa Claus never cease to amaze me. Income comes into most companies in large, unwieldy piles of cash, not perfectly metered little bundies of biweekly love. So understand that salaries are a fiction, that exist to create the illusion of stability while lowering the employee's compensation for work over the long haul. We have come to depend on them because we, as individuals, have lost the discipline to save and manage money.
Always, always, always ask how much cash is in the bank right now. Always, always, always ask what the company burn rate is. Do the simple math, and plan to start looking for a job 2-3 months before that money runs out, assuming that they won't make a single penny in the interim or enjoy any further loans or investment.
Watch company growth. Ask every month or two what the new burn rate is. Do curve-fitting to get a more accurate idea of when the bank account goes empty.
Most people take salaried jobs because they don't want to sweat over the company bank account. Sweat it. You're just burying your head in the sand if you don't. Let the fear of that going zero motivate you. And let the excitement of seeing a percentage of those proceeds motivate you.
Morale is usually a function of how well the product is coming together. If it's making exciting progress, catching up, or God forbid, surpassing the competition, investors will usually continue to jump on until the product ships. This is always the first-order response for morale. People love working on good product.
Odds are, if you're in a web development company, your demand has dried up, you're competing with several other development companies also desperate for wo
What they needed then and need now is a comprehensive, grass-roots developer support program and to get humble quick about the power and performance.
It's a nifty freaking technology, and it was a LOT of fun to play with. Did you realize that the Crusoe during the launch party was the fastest native picojava bytecode processor in the world? Did you realize that had they exposed an interface to CMS (code morphing software), that someone out there could have written a PowerPC personality for it, allowing it to run both x86 and PPC apps at the same time? Can you imagine what else you could do with access to this incredibly powerful, real-time, back-end compiler? Did you realize that you could decode, issue and retire two integer ops and an MMX or fp op on every cycle, the same decode rate as a modern Athlon and a faster decode rate than the P4? Did you realize that all the tech is in place to allow you to download CMS upgrades that vastly improve performance? Did you know they have a perf monitoring tool that puts vtune to shame? Did you know that using gdb connected as a cross-debugger, you can hit "ctrl-C" in an NMI handler or anywhere else and get a complete dump of the internal processor state, including numerous perf statistics?
Tip of the iceburg for the current core, and their next generation architecture (TM8x00) is SO MUCH COOLER. Like hella-cool with chocolate sauce.
But you probably didn't know any of this because they don't think developers are their #1 customers. Someone there needs to watch Ballmer do his developer dance.
Crusoe's are cool. Transmeta was cool, too. Working there was like working down the hall from about a dozen John Carmacks. You could walk into any one of these offices and be blown away by what they were working on. They were crossing real-time translation and optimization bridges that Intel won't be getting to in years but will eventually have to face.
Microsoft learned long ago how important developers were. That should have been the main market to chase. Crusoe wasn't ready for the masses, not by a long shot. The performance is catching up with a vengeance with every new core, but they made so many promises and IPO'd on so much hype, that they entered the classic promise debt trap that so many dot-coms fell into, and their lofty marketing plan claiming that benchmarks are "wrong" (please!) and that it offers this brilliant power savings are just goofy.
Had they remained lean, not staffed up to 400+ people from the 150ish they had when I joined, and stayed quiet, humble, and in the service of developers until developers helped propel them to mass marketability, they would not be the laughing stock they are today.
Yes, they hoped to be faster than "native" x86 based computers by morphing to VLIW, but what they didn't realize was that there would be a terrible price in instruction bandwidth. They ended up with a lemon, made lemonade, then added red food coloring and called it wine.
If they exposed an API to CMS, I think they would be truly impressed by the tricks that independent developers could come up with to compress their own instruction stream to make the compression ratio competetive with x86 code footprint.
Do you realize that's really the main performance problem with Crusoe? The instruction bandwidth! On average, x86 instructions, because they're variable width and byte granularity, are 6X smaller than the average Crusoe instruction, which is made up of two or four 32-bit atoms in the current architecture.
OK, that's too darn bad, but it's the youngest surviving newcomer to the x86 market, and this is a solvable problem, and "with many eyeballs, all problems become shallow," once said a bright chap who ought to put his foot down and say it again.
Tablets: I made the demos that ran on tablets for their shows and IPO roadshow. They're cute, fun, no market for them yet, but again, something to get in the hands of developers so that they can make killer apps to create a market for tablets.
Like most other Linux software, Linux games should probably be released for love, not profit. There are important requirements if you're going to do this:
1. It had probably better be a 2D game. Sorry, but 3D drivers on Linux simply can't keep up with the breakneck development pace of 3D driver development on Windows. Requiring 3D gives you a tiny slice of a market that's already a niche.
2. Release the source code. If you're afraid to do this, don't make the Linux port. You do not have to release the levels, models, textures, animations, sounds, sprites, or any other artistic source or even components. A giant "wad" file is just fine.
3. You should release the Linux port simultaneously with the Windows product. Just developing it simultaneously is a huge boon to bug isolation, and when you release the source, you'll get passionate Linux hackers extending, optimizing and debugging your code for free. Remember: you're selling the data, not the code.
Whatever Loki did wrong, I want to thank them for essentially sponsoring Sam Lantinga in his development of SDL.
I'm out there talking to publishers regularly, and just so you know, Linux games aren't the only games that are suffering. Publishers are shying away terribly from Windows game development now. They're throwing every penny they have at consoles.
Discussing details, for me, is a sign of intelligence. Dumb people, like our president, speak only in broad strokes and flub the details. Smart people understand the issues from top to bottom. So even if someone is discussing a topic that I know I'm a retard on and don't understand, I'll look to experts, get the topic explained, and see if I can't make an intelligent decision.
Clinton was freaking bright. Slept around but bright. I miss him terribly. This country could do with more leaders who aren't getting elected through careful image management.
Oh, stop it. You sound like a gossipping fishwife, piecing incomplete data from speculative press into silly conclusions. "The truth is the truth." Give me a break.
The 5800 is the 5600 at TSMC's 0.13u fab instead of IBM's 0.18u fab. I agree with Hemos that the 5800 is cool. And if the 5800 is cool, it's only because it's identical to the 5600, and the 5500 and 5400 are the exact same design with half the L2 disabled (less L2 => less die area => better yield => cheaper parts). It's all the same chip design. Any claims that the 5800's design is unmanufacturable just doesn't wash with me. IBM manufactured the same parts just fine at 0.18u.
Transmeta's mistakes are myriad, but Transmeta's accomplishments are unbelievable. The press keeps covering them because they have a an incredible technology and it's a David vs Goliath story.
Yeah, the 5x00, at full bore, is probably only 60% as fast (depends very much on the load) as an Intel part at that clock-speed, but Transmeta with its 418 employees beat out AMD with its 14,400 employees in the ultra-light mobile space, and Intel with the bloat and burn of 86,100 employees may be next.
Transmeta has only had product in the channel for just over a year. 60% isn't half bad, and they are learning at an absurd rate. Intel has been at this over 20 years, and with all that experience, even they make some terrific blunders, like RAMBUS and the Itanium.
I am an avid fan of x86 microarchitectures. There are only two out there which I consider interesting, bold, and the kinds of designs which will take us to the next stage of microprocessor development, the P4 and Crusoe. Which is more advanced and has a more promising future for growth? Crusoe, definitely.
The P4 with its unscheduled trace cache is like Crusoe's inbred second cousin. The P4 lacks a sensible place to put its translations, has to reschedule its translations on every execution, has not the brains to apply even a fraction of the advanced CMS optimization techniques, and all that comes at a big cost in transistor count, yield, and heat.
It is clear that virtually every Intel engineer knew the P4 architecture was a big gamble with its much lower decoder bandwidth, puny L1 cache, huge branch penalties, and deeply retarded choice of RAMBUS. When the P4 came out, it was slower than the P3. The Itanium was way slower. That has never been true of a single release, internal or external, at Transmeta.
Even though it is changing radically, no one at Transmeta thinks the next-generation Crusoe architecture is much of a gamble. Viewed from virtually every angle, it's an almost undeniable improvement over the p95 architecture.
The challenge for Transmeta will be finding a manufacturing partner that can keep up with Intel's undeniably strong track record in advancing process technology. Intel is pushing the process and MHz hard, but their microarchitectures are going nowhere fast.
Having just left Transmeta for gamier pastures, I assure you that the people writing press releases, designing websites, and manning show floors for VIA (Centaur), Intel, AMD, and Transmeta are after only one thing- money.
All of their "issues" and "features" are make-believe. They are fly vomit, meant to turn consumers into a common, runny soup of stupidity, that can be slurped without the need to chew on issues.
Speedstep is not a joke. It's a cheap, excellent hack, far easier to verify and debug than PowerNow or LongRun. Intel enjoys most of the power savings afforded by LongRun simply by implementing APM and getting the same job done faster than the p95 and therefore going to sleep sooner. Sensible, mundane, and vomit-free, but true nonetheless.
LongRun has problems with all kinds of applications featuring unpredictable loads. And so does APM. Each is good at a certain set of applications, but neither is clearly superior. And to overlook the critical importance of your choice of operating system, southbridge, video card,... oh god i can't continue. This is like cleaning up someone else's vomit, and it's tripping my gag reflex.
Food, reconstitute thyself. Intel and Transmeta are in a deadly competetive battle. They are slitting their own wrists to give you 5% here and 3% there and need fly vomit because the numbers 3 and 5 don't sell product. Listen to your friends. Try a Transmeta notebook. Try an Intel notebook. You will like what you like. End of story. Every portable is completely different, no matter which CPU you use. Read reviews, friends, and personal experience, not corporate web sites.
It's very odd, but I feel RTS is a rare genre which has actually peaked and is now in deline. Total Annihilation had an outstanding user interface, and units did largely what they're supposed to do. And there were no artificial 12-man limits on the number of units you could select.
For instance, you could send a building bot around the base on patrol, and he'd automatically reclaim metal, energy, repair units, repair buildings, help build units, or help build buildings, depending on the availability of resources. It's not just about flexibility but about sensible heuristics and testing and balancing, all fields that have been badly overlooked.
I played Kohan, and it's a wonderful first title, but neither it nor anything I've played in a very long while comes close to TA.
TA has its flaws, but I have not seen its equal in RTS for years now, and the fans are *still* generating new units, new maps, and even new games out of TA.
Check out http://www.planetannihilated.com if you want to learn more.
I would love to see someone make a new RTS that learned all the user interface and most of the heuristic lessons from TA along with the matchmaking and community support lessons from Battle.net, but I feel that right now, we're in a rut where alpha-blended 3D accelerated special effects and enough camera angels to rival a porno DVD are being prioritized over the real design issues.
If you want to personally port a game to Linux, write me a letter (remove the _nospamplease), and I'll try to hook you up with the game author and source code. The catches are: a. I need a resume and convincing that you're not a flake, and b. you'll probably have to release it in binary form only.
My problem with SCSI is that there is no power management support for it in Linux, so your drive will spin constantly while the machine is on. Besides wasting electricity, this wears out your drive, and it starts to make more noise. My last SCSI brick started keening at a terrible pitch after about a year of constant operation. I won't buy SCSI again until the power management controls are up to IDE standards in the Linux kernel.
God, I can't wait for mass storage to go solid state.:)
I strongly recommend Will Wright, author of the Sims. He's an awesome speaker and gave what most people considered to be the best presentation of the 2001 GDC.
Read the article. It said in the end, there were 2M lines of code. That's an awful lot of code, and the final build took 50 minutes to complete on a fast P3. Even if it went open source, I think that like Mozilla, there would be a black hole where little could be done with the source except read and try desperately to understand it.
Woah, I stayed up all night gripped by the other behind-the-scenes stories that I guess I had just somehow missed. Check them out:
http://www.gamespot.com/features/btg/
The story of Lionhead studios read like one of a man with 18 Charisma holding together a company by sheer force of will and charm, but you should read the incredible story of tragedy, specifically "Haunted Glory: The Rise and Fall of Trilobyte" and the story of lies and folly, "Knee Deep in a Dream: The Story of Daikatana." I also found the story "Total Annihilation: The Story So Far" fascinating because the game really was so unbelievably good, and it seemed like Chris Taylor had come out of nowhere. The "Eye of the Storm: Behind Closed Doors at Blizzard" story is of course this industry's unbounded success story and was also a fairly interesting read because Blizzard has historically been so secretive and unwilling to discuss its insides with the press.
Having done the indie self-funded game development thing, I have never read a story more inspirational than the one on Peter M. and Black & White. It was thrilling and romantic to hear about the bullpen style open office, the absurdly long hours, frankly the outright suffering, the light and flexible approach to design, the excitement of frantically describing your vision and watching it come together, and through thick and thin Peter's unflappable optimisim and gamemanship.
Although I think the year-long 16+ hour days are tragic and wrong, I think this is otherwise how games should be made. I hope in exchange for funding it himself, Peter and his developers enjoy a tasty return on investment.
Actually, the Diablo franchise sold 2.75M copies in 2000. Diablo was designed after Nethack. I still play Nethack today, roughly 12 years after I played my first game. Nethack has a lot of problems, but it is today still a *very* challenging game to win without cheating, and every game is quite different, even if you use the same character class.
People take for granted that most of Diablo's levels and magic items are randomly generated. This is a big deal. No other major games are doing random level generation by default, and few competing RPG's use randomly-generated magic items.
I believe that randomly generated quests are a plausible next step. In the future, I believe it will be possible to create your own character classes and that you will have clever, dynamic options for rendering of these custom classes. For instance, an 18-strength character will have a beefier musculature than a 17-strength character, and you will be able to see the difference. It is not hard to imagine a scale for charisma (bad hair, bad complexion, bad teeth, nasty facial expression that morphs smoothly up to perfect hair, perfect complection, charming facial expression, etc), or for dexterity (when doing your IK to get hand from point A to point B, dexterity could create an algorithmic flourish).
I agree that Diablo 2 gets tiring from the click-kill RSI-inducing user interface, but this is a user interface and AI issue that I think is solvable. For one, Diablo 2 did not allow the user to queue targets. This would not only make attacking simpler but would improve the multiplayer experience for people playing over slow, lossy links.
The Diablo games have short-comings, but it is the only modern game franchise I see pushing the limits of dynamic content generation, I think it has a lot of room to grow, and I wish it well.
I believe Blizzard's one major mistake is that they profess to be abandoning 2D engines. 3D engines have a consistent track record of not staying in the PC Data Top 10 lists anywhere near as long as the evergreen 2D engines. 3D PC engines are notorious for being flaky if you use a driver feature the driver author didn't expect to be heavily used. I believe that most strategic and RPG-ish PC titles, even today, should be 2D, because it makes market sense, the user gets a more consistent experience, and it gives the coder explicit, direct control of every pixel. There is room for 3D games, but the market is not as broad a reach because frankly, Microsoft botched the delivery of D3D and couldn't keep it simple, and the 3D accelerator IHV's flailed trying to add unique display features to their chips.
Surprisingly, Fallout Tactics - which was just released - is the first PC title I've played that used anti-aliased sprites. The result is gorgeous, and it works on every platform perfectly. When we did Abuse, we added dynamic lighting, an effect that wasn't terribly hard to do, but for some reason hadn't graced PC scrollers before, perhaps because someone thought it was difficult to use a lookup table to shade one palettized colour into another. It wasn't that hard, the effect was dramatic, and it worked on every platform.
There is a lot left to explore, and I think people forget that the power and grace of a modern computer is that it's a general purpose processor. In other words, it's always going to be slower than an ASIC (such as a 3D accelerator), but you will be able to enjoy your own, custom, unique, pixel-accurate effects.
We have a VP of somethingerother here who has a lot of pithy sayings outside his office door, the sort of thing you'd see in a Dilbert strip talking about teamwork, promptness, goals, and I think I'm going to be sick. But he did have one refreshing one which described "intrepreneurs". These are like entrepreneur's, but they're working inside of someone else's company instead of their own. I definitely fall under this category. Sounds as if you may, too.
One of the first things it tells you to do is to come to work every day ready to be fired. I believe in this. If you're fired for differing with your boss on the grounds of a technical topic that you are the expert on and he is not, then you're doing yourself a favor, and it will not reflect negatively on your career.
Another is that there's a difference between saying and doing, and doing should be done underground. Rewrite it without telling your boss. He can't appreciate the importance anyway, so there's no point in making a soap opera out of it.
We can all advise you on the importance of not mucking with code because so many newbies have the unquenchable desire to rewrite, but we're stereotyping you and don't know the actual score. You're the one who has to to deal with that hairball, so you know better than any of us what needs doing. Follow your instinct. Whether you're right or wrong, I gaurantee you that it will be a valuable learning experience.
Take the promotion and the full responsibility, but negotiate for a budget of open req's. Hire or promote a protoge to do the parts of the job you don't want to do, even if they seem like they should be part of your job, but put him under you in the corporate structure. Call the title something nebular like "assistant manager".
This way, you will get an upgraded salary, you'll be doing what you prefer to do, you'll learn something about delegation, and because you're still doing the hacking you enjoy, you will appear to be leading by example and will command more respect from your employees.
Think of this as a highly paid education. It's definitely not as nasty as going back to school, being forced to do arbitrary homework, dealing with super-early classes, unintelligible TA's, class and professor availability problems, etc.
People have been predicting a game crash for years. Won't happen. Trust me. There is excellent content in the pipe. There are excellent platforms in the pipe. Sales are brisk, even if they aren't uniform.
Even if sales disappeared, you would still find people working on the next epic title. It goes beyond profits. Game developers write games because they're passionate about it and addicted to it. Just as film-making is a dumb idea for turning a buck, so is game-making. It's not a sensible business to be in, but people get hooked even though it is extremely risky.
VC's generally avoid game investments because it falls in the class of "hit-driven" industries. I had a friend who wrote what I consider to be one of the finest business plans I've ever read, but it was for a game company. He shopped it to over 200 VC's. No one bit. He eventually got backed by one of the few game publishers that has managed to stay afloat (surprise, surprise).
This is the way the game industry tends to work. Whoever is winning often ends up being the next big publisher.
So in a sense, you could say the game industry has always been in a slump because no one wants to invest directly in start-ups, but in a way, its own incestuous investments are more stable because the winning game developers end up investing in the other game developers.
Amateur game developers are the angel investors that infuse new money into the industry. They work for months - sometimes even years - without pay, draining their savings because they believe in the title.
It may be the case that many developers continue to suffer the marketing politics, the retailer shelf-space bribes, project cancellations, poor back-end compensation, artificial milestones, moving target libraries, and turnover. However, the consumers will not.
Ask yourself if the film industry or music industry or book industry has ever really "crashed". There are lots of starving, passionate actors, musicians, and writers, but consumers continue to see great selection year after year.
It would take something really major, like the repeal of copyright law or a way for pirates to have access to considerably higher bandwidth media and connections than the developers have access to in order to cause serious damage to the game, movie, music, or book industries.
I think I agree with you about pdf, but no one has really stepped up with a satisfactory alternative. But nevermind that. Until someone does, you can get your Microsoft fonts here for free: Microsoft
If the Dems and the GOP were corporations, they would have long-since been broken up under anti-trust laws.
Congress limits the President's power in a very healthy way, but when you have a single party in control of the Congress, it takes on the disturbing characteristics of a mob or a monopolistic corporation, depending on how it assesses threats and opportunities.
The dominant parties also make general election for our highest office something like winning an Academy Award. Out of hundreds of millions, only a few behind the curtains performed the real election which reduced the choices from dozens of excellent candidates to two.
That's very wrong.
If elected President, would you sign a bill to break up the dominant parties, allowing healthier competition for the office to resume?
Looks like a cool television, but how did they arrive at a 1600x1200 resolution for a monitor with a 16:9 aspect ratio? Couldn't they have done 1600x900 and given us square pixels?
I'll bet a device of mass destruction that they're going to use the poor report as an excuse to get
"top people" budgeted to overhaul their computer security.
And where will that budgeted money actually go? A device of mass destruction, probably.
The escrow idea sounds pretty hard. Not only do you have this extra, painful obligation to keep clients' payments in escrow in a safe place (banks do fail), but you also have to keep ridiculous records on who paid and where they can be found.
What happens if I pay for my book, then I move, then the payments don't hit the watermark, and ol' King is obligated to send my money back? Kind of a pain, aint it?
Saw Titan. You cannot remove your eyeballs from the screen. It blows away every major movie I've seen since the beginning of 2000. If it had a hilarious drug scene with stoner music, there would have been no reason to produce Heavy Metal 2. Don Bluth's rotoscoping techniques have evolved considerably since the days of Lord of the Rings and Wizards. No longer is he mixing shock troops with Nazi helmets and red glowing eyes with a Middle Earth theme. It was an artsy, clever technique back then, but I wasn't ready to stomache that again. It's his beautiful rotoscoping that I wanted another dose of, and I got it in spades with excellent dialogue and stunning effects to spare.
He's now employing the same devotion to technique seen in The Iron Giant. They rotoscoped tons of scenes and painstakingly overdrew every frame. The effect is brilliant.
When I saw the trailers, I "knew" the movie was going to suck. The "tip-offs" were the blue aliens whose rendering style didn't match anything else in the movie. I just assumed this was the effect of rampaging amateurism when it's actually weapons-grade professionalism. Words can't do this justice. You need to see the flick. There is so much more I haven't even touched on.
Reading Katz, on the other hand, is like wanting an ice cream cone and then being strapped to a table, afixed to a funnel, and force-fed cod liver oil instead.
His writing is cloyingly overdramatic and his fishing for sensationalism is so blantant, that I think his work should be relegated to a distant site where we can send him millions of hits via perl script, so that he can achieve his little i'm-a-famous-writer orgasm without spraying us all in the face.
Wow, awesome transcript from the judge! Thanks! Moderate that post up to 5! That was a completely entertaining, unedited, and better-transcribed sequel to the deposition. I had no idea that court transcripts could be that entertaining. There is so much colour in that thing. It isn't just the stupidity of arguing over the public's right to see the content of edited depositions. It's the delicate play of the attourneys trying valiantly to show deference to the judge while he wontonly rips assholes playing the Devil's Advocate. At the same time, I can actually see the judge's leanings and yet see him hold back, always making sure it's clear how impartial he is in the case and how much he respects previous rulings and circuit courts. And that bit where Sims is just clearly flustered and surrounded, so his feral legal cortex tries to carry the ball with weighty phrasing as his cerebellum takes a coffee break and admits that he has lost his train of thought. And then, blammo, without so much as a twitch, the judge takes him out with a double-barrelled shotgun to the crotch, as if in response to his blunder.
Slashdot Mirror
Before you hire on to a company, please, for the love of Pete, find out how it's funded.
If they started from nothing, got three rounds totalling $100Mish from VC over the past 2-3ish years and don't have a shipping product to show for it, absolutely don't work there. VC money means that the company needs to be on the fast track to acquisition or IPO, which means that layoffs that cut burn rate will make the company more attractive to investors while the product is busy slipping.
If it's funded by an angel investor or angel pool, then find out everything you can about their personalities, their investment portfolios, how much they're worth and how much this venture, based on its burn rate, is likely to be straining them.
If it's funded by the people managing it, these, in my experience, are usually the best companies to work for. It's their daily routine on the line, in addition to their cash.
Find out if management has worked at companies where they've conducted layoffs before. They will likely do it again.
Find out if the company has ever missed payroll. If they have, do not assume this is a bad thing. Particularly if everyone stayed on board, this can be a positive thing, and it means management doesn't fire people at the first sign of cashflow problems. If missed payrolls happen all the time, then figure out, based on how often it happens, what your actual salary would be, counting the missed paychecks. It's really no different from saying that you are going to be paid a lower salary. As long as you are planning for missed payrolls, they won't really be missed.
Find out how you are going to split profits on the product. If it's just an ephemeral hand-waving promise that profits will be split, don't take the job. If it's just stock options, don't take the job. If it's going to be a subjective percentage of a pool based on performance, consider taking it if the deciding personalities strike you as fair, well-balanced people. If it's going to be a fixed percentage base with subjective bonuses, then absolutely take the job. None of this is real unless you get it on paper. So make sure you have that piece of paper the day you show up for work.
Most employees believe in the myth of salaries, and their precious, surprised little faces when they learn that there is no Santa Claus never cease to amaze me. Income comes into most companies in large, unwieldy piles of cash, not perfectly metered little bundies of biweekly love. So understand that salaries are a fiction, that exist to create the illusion of stability while lowering the employee's compensation for work over the long haul. We have come to depend on them because we, as individuals, have lost the discipline to save and manage money.
Always, always, always ask how much cash is in the bank right now. Always, always, always ask what the company burn rate is. Do the simple math, and plan to start looking for a job 2-3 months before that money runs out, assuming that they won't make a single penny in the interim or enjoy any further loans or investment.
Watch company growth. Ask every month or two what the new burn rate is. Do curve-fitting to get a more accurate idea of when the bank account goes empty.
Most people take salaried jobs because they don't want to sweat over the company bank account. Sweat it. You're just burying your head in the sand if you don't. Let the fear of that going zero motivate you. And let the excitement of seeing a percentage of those proceeds motivate you.
Morale is usually a function of how well the product is coming together. If it's making exciting progress, catching up, or God forbid, surpassing the competition, investors will usually continue to jump on until the product ships. This is always the first-order response for morale. People love working on good product.
Odds are, if you're in a web development company, your demand has dried up, you're competing with several other development companies also desperate for wo
What they needed then and need now is a comprehensive, grass-roots developer support program and to get humble quick about the power and performance.
It's a nifty freaking technology, and it was a LOT of fun to play with. Did you realize that the Crusoe during the launch party was the fastest native picojava bytecode processor in the world? Did you realize that had they exposed an interface to CMS (code morphing software), that someone out there could have written a PowerPC personality for it, allowing it to run both x86 and PPC apps at the same time? Can you imagine what else you could do with access to this incredibly powerful, real-time, back-end compiler? Did you realize that you could decode, issue and retire two integer ops and an MMX or fp op on every cycle, the same decode rate as a modern Athlon and a faster decode rate than the P4? Did you realize that all the tech is in place to allow you to download CMS upgrades that vastly improve performance? Did you know they have a perf monitoring tool that puts vtune to shame? Did you know that using gdb connected as a cross-debugger, you can hit "ctrl-C" in an NMI handler or anywhere else and get a complete dump of the internal processor state, including numerous perf statistics?
Tip of the iceburg for the current core, and their next generation architecture (TM8x00) is SO MUCH COOLER. Like hella-cool with chocolate sauce.
But you probably didn't know any of this because they don't think developers are their #1 customers. Someone there needs to watch Ballmer do his developer dance.
Crusoe's are cool. Transmeta was cool, too. Working there was like working down the hall from about a dozen John Carmacks. You could walk into any one of these offices and be blown away by what they were working on. They were crossing real-time translation and optimization bridges that Intel won't be getting to in years but will eventually have to face.
Microsoft learned long ago how important developers were. That should have been the main market to chase. Crusoe wasn't ready for the masses, not by a long shot. The performance is catching up with a vengeance with every new core, but they made so many promises and IPO'd on so much hype, that they entered the classic promise debt trap that so many dot-coms fell into, and their lofty marketing plan claiming that benchmarks are "wrong" (please!) and that it offers this brilliant power savings are just goofy.
Had they remained lean, not staffed up to 400+ people from the 150ish they had when I joined, and stayed quiet, humble, and in the service of developers until developers helped propel them to mass marketability, they would not be the laughing stock they are today.
Yes, they hoped to be faster than "native" x86 based computers by morphing to VLIW, but what they didn't realize was that there would be a terrible price in instruction bandwidth. They ended up with a lemon, made lemonade, then added red food coloring and called it wine.
If they exposed an API to CMS, I think they would be truly impressed by the tricks that independent developers could come up with to compress their own instruction stream to make the compression ratio competetive with x86 code footprint.
Do you realize that's really the main performance problem with Crusoe? The instruction bandwidth! On average, x86 instructions, because they're variable width and byte granularity, are 6X smaller than the average Crusoe instruction, which is made up of two or four 32-bit atoms in the current architecture.
OK, that's too darn bad, but it's the youngest surviving newcomer to the x86 market, and this is a solvable problem, and "with many eyeballs, all problems become shallow," once said a bright chap who ought to put his foot down and say it again.
Tablets: I made the demos that ran on tablets for their shows and IPO roadshow. They're cute, fun, no market for them yet, but again, something to get in the hands of developers so that they can make killer apps to create a market for tablets.
Doesn't that increase your UV radiation exposure by a factor of 15,000X, too? Sounds like a cancer risk to me unless they have a filter for that.
Like most other Linux software, Linux games should probably be released for love, not profit.
There are important requirements if you're going to do this:
1. It had probably better be a 2D game. Sorry, but 3D drivers on Linux simply can't keep up with the breakneck development pace of 3D driver development on Windows. Requiring 3D gives you a tiny slice of a market that's already a niche.
2. Release the source code. If you're afraid to do this, don't make the Linux port. You do not have to release the levels, models, textures, animations, sounds, sprites, or any other artistic source or even components. A giant "wad" file is just fine.
3. You should release the Linux port simultaneously with the Windows product. Just developing it simultaneously is a huge boon to bug isolation, and when you release the source, you'll get passionate Linux hackers extending, optimizing and debugging your code for free. Remember: you're selling the data, not the code.
Whatever Loki did wrong, I want to thank them for essentially sponsoring Sam Lantinga in his development of SDL.
I'm out there talking to publishers regularly, and just so you know, Linux games aren't the only games that are suffering. Publishers are shying away terribly from Windows game development now. They're throwing every penny they have at consoles.
=-ddt->
Discussing details, for me, is a sign of intelligence. Dumb people, like our president, speak only in broad strokes and flub the details. Smart people understand the issues from top to bottom. So even if someone is discussing a topic that I know I'm a retard on and don't understand, I'll look to experts, get the topic explained, and see if I can't make an intelligent decision.
Clinton was freaking bright. Slept around but bright. I miss him terribly. This country could do with more leaders who aren't getting elected through careful image management.
-dave.
Oh, stop it. You sound like a gossipping fishwife, piecing incomplete data from speculative press into silly conclusions. "The truth is the truth." Give me a break.
The 5800 is the 5600 at TSMC's 0.13u fab instead of IBM's 0.18u fab. I agree with Hemos that the 5800 is cool. And if the 5800 is cool, it's only because it's identical to the 5600, and the 5500 and 5400 are the exact same design with half the L2 disabled (less L2 => less die area => better yield => cheaper parts). It's all the same chip design. Any claims that the 5800's design is unmanufacturable just doesn't wash with me. IBM manufactured the same parts just fine at 0.18u.
Transmeta's mistakes are myriad, but Transmeta's accomplishments are unbelievable. The press keeps covering them because they have a an incredible technology and it's a David vs Goliath story.
Yeah, the 5x00, at full bore, is probably only 60% as fast (depends very much on the load) as an Intel part at that clock-speed, but Transmeta with its 418 employees beat out AMD with its 14,400 employees in the ultra-light mobile space, and Intel with the bloat and burn of 86,100 employees may be next.
Transmeta has only had product in the channel for just over a year. 60% isn't half bad, and they are learning at an absurd rate. Intel has been at this over 20 years, and with all that experience, even they make some terrific blunders, like RAMBUS and the Itanium.
I am an avid fan of x86 microarchitectures. There are only two out there which I consider interesting, bold, and the kinds of designs which will take us to the next stage of microprocessor development, the P4 and Crusoe. Which is more advanced and has a more promising future for growth? Crusoe, definitely.
The P4 with its unscheduled trace cache is like Crusoe's inbred second cousin. The P4 lacks a sensible place to put its translations, has to reschedule its translations on every execution, has not the brains to apply even a fraction of the advanced CMS optimization techniques, and all that comes at a big cost in transistor count, yield, and heat.
It is clear that virtually every Intel engineer knew the P4 architecture was a big gamble with its much lower decoder bandwidth, puny L1 cache, huge branch penalties, and deeply retarded choice of RAMBUS. When the P4 came out, it was slower than the P3. The Itanium was way slower. That has never been true of a single release, internal or external, at Transmeta.
Even though it is changing radically, no one at Transmeta thinks the next-generation Crusoe architecture is much of a gamble. Viewed from virtually every angle, it's an almost undeniable improvement over the p95 architecture.
The challenge for Transmeta will be finding a manufacturing partner that can keep up with Intel's undeniably strong track record in advancing process technology. Intel is pushing the process and MHz hard, but their microarchitectures are going nowhere fast.
You poor, deluded, digestable protein.
... oh god i can't continue. This is like cleaning up someone else's vomit, and it's tripping my gag reflex.
Having just left Transmeta for gamier pastures, I assure you that the people writing press releases, designing websites, and manning show floors for VIA (Centaur), Intel, AMD, and Transmeta are after only one thing- money.
All of their "issues" and "features" are make-believe. They are fly vomit, meant to turn consumers into a common, runny soup of stupidity, that can be slurped without the need to chew on issues.
Speedstep is not a joke. It's a cheap, excellent hack, far easier to verify and debug than PowerNow or LongRun. Intel enjoys most of the power savings afforded by LongRun simply by implementing APM and getting the same job done faster than the p95 and therefore going to sleep sooner. Sensible, mundane, and vomit-free, but true nonetheless.
LongRun has problems with all kinds of applications featuring unpredictable loads. And so does APM. Each is good at a certain set of applications, but neither is clearly superior. And to overlook the critical importance of your choice of operating system, southbridge, video card,
Food, reconstitute thyself. Intel and Transmeta are in a deadly competetive battle. They are slitting their own wrists to give you 5% here and 3% there and need fly vomit because the numbers 3 and 5 don't sell product. Listen to your friends. Try a Transmeta notebook. Try an Intel notebook. You will like what you like. End of story. Every portable is completely different, no matter which CPU you use. Read reviews, friends, and personal experience, not corporate web sites.
It's very odd, but I feel RTS is a rare genre which has actually peaked and is now in deline. Total Annihilation had an outstanding user interface, and units did largely what they're supposed to do. And there were no artificial 12-man limits on the number of units you could select.
For instance, you could send a building bot around the base on patrol, and he'd automatically reclaim metal, energy, repair units, repair buildings, help build units, or help build buildings, depending on the availability of resources. It's not just about flexibility but about sensible heuristics and testing and balancing, all fields that have been badly overlooked.
I played Kohan, and it's a wonderful first title, but neither it nor anything I've played in a very long while comes close to TA.
TA has its flaws, but I have not seen its equal in RTS for years now, and the fans are *still* generating new units, new maps, and even new games out of TA.
Check out http://www.planetannihilated.com if you want to learn more.
I would love to see someone make a new RTS that learned all the user interface and most of the heuristic lessons from TA along with the matchmaking and community support lessons from Battle.net, but I feel that right now, we're in a rut where alpha-blended 3D accelerated special effects and enough camera angels to rival a porno DVD are being prioritized over the real design issues.
If you want to personally port a game to Linux, write me a letter (remove the _nospamplease), and I'll try to hook you up with the game author and source code. The catches are: a. I need a resume and convincing that you're not a flake, and b. you'll probably have to release it in binary form only.
This is how Linux game ports work- one by one.
My problem with SCSI is that there is no power management support for it in Linux, so your drive will spin constantly while the machine is on. Besides wasting electricity, this wears out your drive, and it starts to make more noise. My last SCSI brick started keening at a terrible pitch after about a year of constant operation. I won't buy SCSI again until the power management controls are up to IDE standards in the Linux kernel.
:)
God, I can't wait for mass storage to go solid state.
I strongly recommend Will Wright, author of the Sims. He's an awesome speaker and gave what most people considered to be the best presentation of the 2001 GDC.
Read the article. It said in the end, there were 2M lines of code. That's an awful lot of code, and the final build took 50 minutes to complete on a fast P3. Even if it went open source, I think that like Mozilla, there would be a black hole where little could be done with the source except read and try desperately to understand it.
Woah, I stayed up all night gripped by the other behind-the-scenes stories that I guess I had just somehow missed. Check them out:
http://www.gamespot.com/features/btg/
The story of Lionhead studios read like one of a man with 18 Charisma holding together a company by sheer force of will and charm, but you should read the incredible story of tragedy, specifically "Haunted Glory: The Rise and Fall of Trilobyte" and the story of lies and folly, "Knee Deep in a Dream: The Story of Daikatana." I also found the story "Total Annihilation: The Story So Far" fascinating because the game really was so unbelievably good, and it seemed like Chris Taylor had come out of nowhere. The "Eye of the Storm: Behind Closed Doors at Blizzard" story is of course this industry's unbounded success story and was also a fairly interesting read because Blizzard has historically been so secretive and unwilling to discuss its insides with the press.
Having done the indie self-funded game development thing, I have never read a story more inspirational than the one on Peter M. and Black & White. It was thrilling and romantic to hear about the bullpen style open office, the absurdly long hours, frankly the outright suffering, the light and flexible approach to design, the excitement of frantically describing your vision and watching it come together, and through thick and thin Peter's unflappable optimisim and gamemanship.
Although I think the year-long 16+ hour days are tragic and wrong, I think this is otherwise how games should be made. I hope in exchange for funding it himself, Peter and his developers enjoy a tasty return on investment.
Actually, the Diablo franchise sold 2.75M copies in 2000. Diablo was designed after Nethack. I still play Nethack today, roughly 12 years after I played my first game. Nethack has a lot of problems, but it is today still a *very* challenging game to win without cheating, and every game is quite different, even if you use the same character class.
People take for granted that most of Diablo's levels and magic items are randomly generated. This is a big deal. No other major games are doing random level generation by default, and few competing RPG's use randomly-generated magic items.
I believe that randomly generated quests are a plausible next step. In the future, I believe it will be possible to create your own character classes and that you will have clever, dynamic options for rendering of these custom classes. For instance, an 18-strength character will have a beefier musculature than a 17-strength character, and you will be able to see the difference. It is not hard to imagine a scale for charisma (bad hair, bad complexion, bad teeth, nasty facial expression that morphs smoothly up to perfect hair, perfect complection, charming facial expression, etc), or for dexterity (when doing your IK to get hand from point A to point B, dexterity could create an algorithmic flourish).
I agree that Diablo 2 gets tiring from the click-kill RSI-inducing user interface, but this is a user interface and AI issue that I think is solvable. For one, Diablo 2 did not allow the user to queue targets. This would not only make attacking simpler but would improve the multiplayer experience for people playing over slow, lossy links.
The Diablo games have short-comings, but it is the only modern game franchise I see pushing the limits of dynamic content generation, I think it has a lot of room to grow, and I wish it well.
I believe Blizzard's one major mistake is that they profess to be abandoning 2D engines. 3D engines have a consistent track record of not staying in the PC Data Top 10 lists anywhere near as long as the evergreen 2D engines. 3D PC engines are notorious for being flaky if you use a driver feature the driver author didn't expect to be heavily used. I believe that most strategic and RPG-ish PC titles, even today, should be 2D, because it makes market sense, the user gets a more consistent experience, and it gives the coder explicit, direct control of every pixel. There is room for 3D games, but the market is not as broad a reach because frankly, Microsoft botched the delivery of D3D and couldn't keep it simple, and the 3D accelerator IHV's flailed trying to add unique display features to their chips.
Surprisingly, Fallout Tactics - which was just released - is the first PC title I've played that used anti-aliased sprites. The result is gorgeous, and it works on every platform perfectly. When we did Abuse, we added dynamic lighting, an effect that wasn't terribly hard to do, but for some reason hadn't graced PC scrollers before, perhaps because someone thought it was difficult to use a lookup table to shade one palettized colour into another. It wasn't that hard, the effect was dramatic, and it worked on every platform.
There is a lot left to explore, and I think people forget that the power and grace of a modern computer is that it's a general purpose processor. In other words, it's always going to be slower than an ASIC (such as a 3D accelerator), but you will be able to enjoy your own, custom, unique, pixel-accurate effects.
We have a VP of somethingerother here who has a lot of pithy sayings outside his office door, the sort of thing you'd see in a Dilbert strip talking about teamwork, promptness, goals, and I think I'm going to be sick. But he did have one refreshing one which described "intrepreneurs". These are like entrepreneur's, but they're working inside of someone else's company instead of their own. I definitely fall under this category. Sounds as if you may, too.
One of the first things it tells you to do is to come to work every day ready to be fired. I believe in this. If you're fired for differing with your boss on the grounds of a technical topic that you are the expert on and he is not, then you're doing yourself a favor, and it will not reflect negatively on your career.
Another is that there's a difference between saying and doing, and doing should be done underground. Rewrite it without telling your boss. He can't appreciate the importance anyway, so there's no point in making a soap opera out of it.
We can all advise you on the importance of not mucking with code because so many newbies have the unquenchable desire to rewrite, but we're stereotyping you and don't know the actual score. You're the one who has to to deal with that hairball, so you know better than any of us what needs doing. Follow your instinct. Whether you're right or wrong, I gaurantee you that it will be a valuable learning experience.
Take the promotion and the full responsibility, but negotiate for a budget of open req's. Hire or promote a protoge to do the parts of the job you don't want to do, even if they seem like they should be part of your job, but put him under you in the corporate structure. Call the title something nebular like "assistant manager".
This way, you will get an upgraded salary, you'll be doing what you prefer to do, you'll learn something about delegation, and because you're still doing the hacking you enjoy, you will appear to be leading by example and will command more respect from your employees.
Think of this as a highly paid education. It's definitely not as nasty as going back to school, being forced to do arbitrary homework, dealing with super-early classes, unintelligible TA's, class and professor availability problems, etc.
People have been predicting a game crash for years. Won't happen. Trust me. There is excellent content in the pipe. There are excellent platforms in the pipe. Sales are brisk, even if they aren't uniform.
Even if sales disappeared, you would still find people working on the next epic title. It goes beyond profits. Game developers write games because they're passionate about it and addicted to it. Just as film-making is a dumb idea for turning a buck, so is game-making. It's not a sensible business to be in, but people get hooked even though it is extremely risky.
VC's generally avoid game investments because it falls in the class of "hit-driven" industries. I had a friend who wrote what I consider to be one of the finest business plans I've ever read, but it was for a game company. He shopped it to over 200 VC's. No one bit. He eventually got backed by one of the few game publishers that has managed to stay afloat (surprise, surprise).
This is the way the game industry tends to work. Whoever is winning often ends up being the next big publisher.
So in a sense, you could say the game industry has always been in a slump because no one wants to invest directly in start-ups, but in a way, its own incestuous investments are more stable because the winning game developers end up investing in the other game developers.
Amateur game developers are the angel investors that infuse new money into the industry. They work for months - sometimes even years - without pay, draining their savings because they believe in the title.
It may be the case that many developers continue to suffer the marketing politics, the retailer shelf-space bribes, project cancellations, poor back-end compensation, artificial milestones, moving target libraries, and turnover. However, the consumers will not.
Ask yourself if the film industry or music industry or book industry has ever really "crashed". There are lots of starving, passionate actors, musicians, and writers, but consumers continue to see great selection year after year.
It would take something really major, like the repeal of copyright law or a way for pirates to have access to considerably higher bandwidth media and connections than the developers have access to in order to cause serious damage to the game, movie, music, or book industries.
I think I agree with you about pdf, but no one has really stepped up with a satisfactory alternative. But nevermind that. Until someone does, you can get your Microsoft fonts here for free: Microsoft
If the Dems and the GOP were corporations, they would have long-since been broken up under anti-trust laws.
Congress limits the President's power in a very healthy way, but when you have a single party in control of the Congress, it takes on the disturbing characteristics of a mob or a monopolistic corporation, depending on how it assesses threats and opportunities.
The dominant parties also make general election for our highest office something like winning an Academy Award. Out of hundreds of millions, only a few behind the curtains performed the real election which reduced the choices from dozens of excellent candidates to two.
That's very wrong.
If elected President, would you sign a bill to break up the dominant parties, allowing healthier competition for the office to resume?
Looks like a cool television, but how did they arrive at a 1600x1200 resolution for a monitor with a 16:9 aspect ratio? Couldn't they have done 1600x900 and given us square pixels?
(bitch, moan, whine...:)
I'll bet a device of mass destruction that they're going to use the poor report as an excuse to get
"top people" budgeted to overhaul their computer security.
And where will that budgeted money actually go? A device of mass destruction, probably.
The escrow idea sounds pretty hard. Not only do you have this extra, painful obligation to keep clients' payments in escrow in a safe place (banks do fail), but you also have to keep ridiculous records on who paid and where they can be found.
What happens if I pay for my book, then I move, then the payments don't hit the watermark, and ol' King is obligated to send my money back? Kind of a pain, aint it?
He's now employing the same devotion to technique seen in The Iron Giant. They rotoscoped tons of scenes and painstakingly overdrew every frame. The effect is brilliant.
When I saw the trailers, I "knew" the movie was going to suck. The "tip-offs" were the blue aliens whose rendering style didn't match anything else in the movie. I just assumed this was the effect of rampaging amateurism when it's actually weapons-grade professionalism. Words can't do this justice. You need to see the flick. There is so much more I haven't even touched on.
Reading Katz, on the other hand, is like wanting an ice cream cone and then being strapped to a table, afixed to a funnel, and force-fed cod liver oil instead.
His writing is cloyingly overdramatic and his fishing for sensationalism is so blantant, that I think his work should be relegated to a distant site where we can send him millions of hits via perl script, so that he can achieve his little i'm-a-famous-writer orgasm without spraying us all in the face.
Wow, awesome transcript from the judge! Thanks! Moderate that post up to 5! That was a completely entertaining, unedited, and better-transcribed sequel to the deposition. I had no idea that court transcripts could be that entertaining. There is so much colour in that thing. It isn't just the stupidity of arguing over the public's right to see the content of edited depositions. It's the delicate play of the attourneys trying valiantly to show deference to the judge while he wontonly rips assholes playing the Devil's Advocate. At the same time, I can actually see the judge's leanings and yet see him hold back, always making sure it's clear how impartial he is in the case and how much he respects previous rulings and circuit courts. And that bit where Sims is just clearly flustered and surrounded, so his feral legal cortex tries to carry the ball with weighty phrasing as his cerebellum takes a coffee break and admits that he has lost his train of thought. And then, blammo, without so much as a twitch, the judge takes him out with a double-barrelled shotgun to the crotch, as if in response to his blunder.