Zoid's a sweetie, but he's understating things just a tad.
I don't mean to burst anyone's bubble, but id's politics have always been incredibly severe. It's sort of a treehouse/boy's club atmosphere, very charged with adrenaline, egos, and testosterone. I loved it and contributed to it. It's an infectious behavior. Romero and Kevin, in particular, would use their 18 Charismas to make the politics fun. Don't ask me how that's possible. You'd have to be there. It's very colourful. You forgive the atmosphere pretty quickly when they start plopping multiple 5- and 6-figure bonuses in your lap.
But it's actually nice to see John put that in his plan file. It's more truthful advertising if the prospective employees know what's going on behind the curtain. These same kind of politics affect your bonuses, your workload, and frankly your general health if you're prone to stress-related problems like ulcers, skin problems, or gum disease. You guys would be pretty shocked to hear the real stories of how several of id's talented people left the company, but it's never a binary, "He humped a farm animal on company time."
This is definitely not the sign of an id implosion. Kevin and Adrian won't be pleased about John's plan file, but they're fundamentally level-headed businessmen and will probably get over it. John won't stop coding. Everything he does is fun to work with, and if they fire John, the daily miracles that time the id engine will simply move elsewhere.
I do ABSOLUTELY recommend if you're a talented artist to apply for the position. It's an adventure unlike anything you'll embark. You'll make grievous wads of cash. You'll gape at the bizarre effects of instant media focus. You'll get to watch and learn from some of the industry's finest talent. You'll fear for your mortal soul if you get a ride from John to work. You'll have access to almost any software tool or piece of hardware you want to get your hands on.
It's a growth experience.
Re:After Skimming the Article...
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Silicon Hell
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· Score: 2
No joking matter.
My brother worked for a gas company that made the dopants and etchers used in silicon wafers. This included incredibly lethal gases, like HCl and arsenic. He has a dual chemistry/geology degree from a respectable university, but he too was subject to deplorable conditions.
I started out by jokingly refering to his job as "taste-testing dopants", but it became deadly serious after he described a cannister of HCl gas hat ruptured in the warehouse. It instantly became a gruesome data visualization tool. You could actually see the strength of the air flow through PC's running in the warehouse at the time by inspecting their melted internals just before the fans went out.
It was an awful company here in the valley, and it serves a lot of the industry's gas needs. This is definitely an infrastructure disease. I've seen a lot of crappy journalism, and this article certainly qualified by not explaining the other side, but I assure you, the other side isn't that moving.
Perhaps ironically, an EE Times article I read not too long ago described a study which showed that air pollution in the valley was increasing everyone's rate of cancer. So the well-paid engineers in their cublicles (like me) are paying a poetic price.
Different beasties. VNC runs over the network, which means it can be pretty slow depending on the graphical intensity of the application.
You got me on the price. I was quoting the student price. Didn't realize the regular price was so high. I'm sure they would negotiate that down for volume orders, though.
I wouldn't be quite so nuts over the issue of free-ness. VMware is a cool hack, and it really does add a lot of value to corporate environments. If you don't want to pay for it, don't pay for it, but that doesn't lessen its contribution to Linux as a way to get into the corporate market.
Keep in mind that MIS peeps are often badly overworked, and it's a no-brainer to spend a couple hundred per seat if it off-loads a lot of support hastles.
I think VMWare is the killer app for Linux in the corporate environment.
What you want to do is install Windows 9x under VMWare on every user's desktop in a corporate setting. At the cost of only $100ish extra per seat (if I recall), what this gives you is:
1. A sandbox where you can more quickly recover from Win9x crashes,
2. The ability to "roll back" work before you corrupted your Win9x image,
3. Remote sysadmin of Win9x images (yum!),
4. Linux functionality in case MIS wants to give users access to home-grown tools, and
5. The inability to play 3D hardware-accelerated games at work.
So you get the nice Win9x interface, you get the applications you want, you get Linux applications, and you get better administration and less game-playing. I think Linux is plenty ready for prime time in
I notice a lot of this advice is about hiring a good CFO, lawyer, marketing guy, etc. I disagree with hiring that kind of cruft early on. They're important people, but not as important as you.
You can contract lawyers indefinitely, and the good ones know their limitations and tend to sub-contract to the best lawyer for the job anyway.
CFO's are farging handy. Remember, though. It's just a title. You don't need a purebreed, and you don't need someone with an MBA. I know a CFO who raised $80M w/ very little formal business training, but he features a limitless sense of excitement and creativity. I am also pretty handy at raising money, and made one of the industry's studlier publishing contracts out of the gate, and I haven't had any training, either. If you know someone in school or at work who seems to have a knack for getting budgetary increases or funding or hefty purchase orders, odds are good they're a much better deal than hiring a fat cat CFO from Silly Valley. It definitely is cool to have a full-time guy on this, but you'll notice that he keeps coming back from meetings w/ investors saying, "Hey, um, I need a demo." The coders really are doing most of the work early on.
Likewise for a marketing guy. If you end up with a publishing company instead of handling your own sales, not only is a marketing guy largely uneccessary, but you'll find that there is advance-on-royalty money available. It's much tastier money than VC.
Because you're a software company, it's mostly about your burn rate. If you do the math, you'll notice that by far, your biggest expenditure will be salaries. Writing a design doc and schedule for your project and then, um, doubling or tripling the time, is going to be a useful wake-up call on how much money you need and when you need it. A really sexy schedule, design doc, and description of the team can literally be turned into a publishing contract w/ advances on royalties paid on milestones. In my experience, milestones cometh every few months as large checks that you kiss and dance around.
Some specific advice:
1. Do not get yourself overworked about trade shows like CES or Comdex. Chasing demos can become a full-time sport and can easily kill your company due to their disruptive effect on development. My advice- ignore them completely until everyone who comes by your company and checks out your software instantly suffers from violent, uncontrollable priapism.
2. Troll schools. If you need cheap, awesome talent, troll your high school and/or college. Ask the teachers who the most kick-ass student was at so-and-so, then track him down. It is very flattering to be courted this way, so you might be surprised at how easy it is to score.
3. Use free software with source code for the long run. Expensive software is usually only useful in the short run. I just wanted to say that. I don't think that's advice. It's just an observation. I don't know what to do with it yet.
4. Ban C++. If you must go OOP, use Java, but don't tell your publisher or investors. Java actually kicks ripe bottom. Don't knock it. C is also a dandy, dandy language. Most of the studliest code I've seen (including almost everything open sourced) is still written in C. I'm prejudiced against C++ because although you find great coders who use it, they tend to have violently clashing styles, which causes all kinds of headaches you don't need.
5. Remember humor. When you realize that one of your employees, publishers, or investors is being an asshole, don't get all soap opera-y. If you want to talk about it before doing something about it, then remember to use colorful analogy and strive to make someone giggle. In a small, hungry company, bankruptcy looms ominously and constantly. No one needs more drama. If you need inspiration, go to slashdot and read the "5, Funny" posts. You'll find them surprisingly poignant.
6. Artwork. Holy mother of pearl. Believe me when I say you can easily, easily, easily keep a full-time artist busy. Artists work for cheap, because... well, I dunno why, to tell the truth. Concept art can literally make or break an investment or publishing deal. Icons and GUI layout can literally make or break a demo. The look of your business card, the company t-shirt, the banner you make for the trade show, the illustrations and layout for the business plan... Get the picture? You'd better.
7. Random last-ditch effort anecdote: make it a plug-in. If things start going to poopoo, see how hard it is to make it a Netscape plug-in. A friend of mine did this once w/ a 3d engine, and he got a lot more attention from investors as a result. Hehe.
8. Consider cross-platform development. Developing an executable for both Windows and Linux, for example, helps you isolate bugs in your code versus bugs in your understanding of OS & library services.
9. Do not design for the "everyday guy." You have no idea what you're talking about. Niche markets are often more profitable and better to focus on for a long-term business. If it's between making a spreadsheet that does everything for everybody and a spreadsheet that kicks ass for industrial plastic extruders, go for the latter. It'll probably give you more money up front, too. Barring a paying gig, make something that excites you personally.
10. If you don't think you can do it in 2 years, don't do it. People get burned out. Your exciting start-up will turn into a pit of guilt & despair as your first mega-studly geeks decide to bail. Really try to realisticly figure out what you can do in two years, and if you think it's too much, think of something else.
That's enough BS for now. I wish you guys the best of luck!
One cool way to do this is to sell your data. You're often writing a new tool because you want to work with data more easily. Well, because you're the author, odds are good you know how to use your software better than the average bloke, so you might be able to turn a dime working on the data your software is designed to handle.
For instance:
1. If it's a game, sell the artwork, levels, and sound files. These are called "mission packs" in the game industry.
2. If you're writing a GUI like GNOME or KDE, then sell the artwork for "themes".
3. If you're writing a music composition proggy, then sell music. Um, nevermind. Better keep your day job on this one.
Guess it goes w/o saying, but some data is easier to sell than others.:)
Anyway, if working on the data is too much of a load, or you don't want to work at that, then try to partner with someone who is good at it. In exchange for splitting the profits, he gets a piece of software that is custom-designed for and around his artwork/etc, and you get gorgeous data to help demo the killer function of your proggy, and you both get a little scratch, hopefully.
Very level-headed arguments, and a deft attempt to address a class of stocks, when they're clearly focused on one stock, Red Hat. These same arguments were being made the day Red Hat IPO'd, and yet the stock has climbed dramatically over the past several months.
If stock price were just about the P/E, then Yahoo would not be valued at $100B with earnings of less than $100M, and Yahoo is actually really interesting parallel to Red Hat. It was one of the first, it has a doubtful profit model, and its valuation seems largely to be a function of its first-ness and how quickly people go to Yahoo when they think "search engine". That's important for advertising revenues, but also for the ease with which they can release product themselves. And what do you know? Yahoo is not a flash in the pan. It's stock price has been going strong for over three years, now.
Red Hat is also one of the first Linux companies, it has a doubtful profit model, and I think its valuation is based on where people go when they think "I want to know something about Linux." In fact, I'll bet Red Hat can show that they're one of the most heavily-hit sites in the Linux community. People scoff at Red Hat's "other" business model of selling CD's you can get for free, but if you're getting all the eyeballs first, it's nothing to sniff at. They are selling different features on essentially the same product for $30, $80, and $150, respectively. You can buy them online at their own site, where all the eyeballs are ending up.
There's an undefinable sense of "potential" that I (and obviously others) associate with Red Hat, and I think if the Forrester folks really want to put their theories to the test, they should try to twist up the courage to short RHAT. Red Hat is a risky stock, but shorting it is going to be riskier in 2000 than buying it.
John is being incredibly humble here. The Linux sales of Q3 will be on the radar of every publisher and game developer out there.
It's unfortunate that Q3 is being sold as seperate SKU's because it really does make sense to just release one and then tally the results of who is running the Windows, MacOS, and Linux executables. Besides making technical sense, a single SKU lessens the retailer's return rates which lowers the losses due to cost of goods and thus lets the publisher sell a higher-quality manual and box.
But most people don't register their games, and automatic registration, even if all you're registering is the information, "a unique ip ran the linux binary" is associated with Orwellian tactics.
Another reason publishers shy away from allowing multiple versions in a SKU is because each version creates a seperate flavor of support issues, and support costs add up fast. Again, this is a situation that would be vastly improved by automatically gathering and submitting data on the machine that is having trouble.
If game companies released the source code to the automatic registration component of their games and made that component a seperate executable or perhaps a dynamically loaded library, would users feel less betrayed and spied-upon?
Reading that FoF seemed a lot more like an Intel-bashing fest than a Microsoft trial, constantly referring to the infeasbility of alternate microprocessors and OS's for anything but Intel-based systems. Anyone else get the impression this whole process is laying the groundwork to nail Intel next?
But to stay closer to topic, do any of my fellow Microsoft-bashers know what would be a "healthy" solution to the monopoly? I feel a bit like the cat who caught the rat and now doesn't know what to do with it.
On contemplation, I really don't think it's healthy for Windows to be artificially forced to a smaller market share, and I wonder if releasing the source is about as useful as Netscape releasing the source to Mozilla. The Win9x source has got to be even nastier. And would the resulting OS-fragmentation will be good for already horrific compatability problems.
Certainly, breaking the company up will have little effect on Windows dominance, as one of the companies will still own the OS, and that company will clearly continue as the dominant monster. There are a lot of things Microsoft could do to be friendlier and more open, but most of those things are unusually hard to enforce.
I guess splitting the NT (Win2k) side from the 9x (Millenium) side would be a healthy start, as I understand those dev groups are fiercely competetive within Microsoft anyway. I think the NT guys would quickly lower their prices to compete head-on with Win9x, and I'll bet a lot of people would switch on the grounds that Win2k is so much more stable and even a lot faster for some applications.
Anyone else here notice how much more they noticed Linux in the press once it got a mascot?
Branding might be the answer here. One solution, or at least ameliorization, might be to create a handsome certification stamp for web sites that run correctly on Linux Netscape.
That way, important sites can brag, "This site uses no wonky extensions that aren't in a blessed form of Java, JavaScript, or Shockwave" then plop down the sexy logo, and then link the sexy logo to a database of sites that are Linux Netscape-friendly.
I get pretty upset over glorified sites, myself. I don't think everyone making sites that don't work with Linux grok that they've goofed. Most peeps understand how big Linux is now that we've some stock IPO's associated with Linux that did so dern well.
Perhaps Tux riding the Mozilla character in a cowboy hat a la the "running linux" book cover? If this idea appeals to someone willing to run the site, lemme know, and I'll get a good game artist to put together a sexy logo.
A Microsoft console could definitely sell. It can compete with the Sega's, Nintendo's, and Sony's just fine. Here's why:
1. Microsoft has a track record of out-selling most publishers out the gate with a new product solely on the strength of their branding. Even as a newbie game publisher, they consistently outsold the leading game publishers by a factor of 2x out of the chute.
2. Game developers love developing games for fixed architectures. Designing games for "PC"'s is a nightmare by comparison. With a fixed architecture, you can really push the game design, which is why Playstation titles often seem so much more exciting and complete than PC titles despite running on a gutless 34MHz MIPS R3000 with 2Mb of RAM.
3. The first game developers to ship product for a system, no matter how lame that system is, will sell close to a 1:1 ratio with the platforms. That means even if the product is a real stinker, like the Atari Jaguar, and it only ships on the order of 100k units, you'll sell 100k games. That's considered to be near-hit volume. Why do you sell 1:1? It's a weird phenomenon which I associate very much with being American- buying a new platform gives you a kind of "fever" to buy any available titles for it immediately.
4. A console architecture based on an x86 means game developers don't have to learn a new asm, and they can probably enjoy far more mature debugging tools. Debugging is the biggest pain in the butt when it comes to consoles. The tools are usually really weak, so it takes a strong (and expensive) coder to successfully write them.
So if Microsoft approaches EA and says, "We're making this console, here's the architecture, would you please write games for it," you'd better believe they'd get started immediately. You don't need to retool, you don't need to rehire. The race is on. Can you be one of the first titles out there? If not, you have to make a quality game, which is a lot harder, but either way, you win big. That can't be said of a mature medium where the competition is incredibly fierce and profits are dwindling.
The reason you don't see 20 different consoles popping up all the time is that it takes a huge investment. Most consoles sell for cost or even at a loss, and the advertising campaigns are incredibly expensive because they have to reach children and 20-somethings everywhere. All the money is made in licensing fees, so you have to wait a while for the profit to roll back in, and if you're up against a monster, odds are good you'll fall over in the long run.
In Japan, by the way, consoles dramatically outnumber PC's. PC game sales in Japan are completely limp. But if you can make a hit console game in Japan, it's possible to beat both the worldwide sales and the worldwide margins in a single territory. Final Fantasy VII (albeit an extreme example) sold over 7M units in Japan. That's more volume than any PC game, including the undying sales of Myst, has ever sold worldwide.
Console game development is really interesting and responsible for most of the $6B+ game industry.
If you get the opportunity to be the first to write anything for any new Microsoft platform, frankly, whether a Linux weenie like me or not, you'd be daft not to sign the paperwork immediately.
I hope this gives a better idea of why Microsoft might be considering such a product. They're in an unusually strong position to deliver a successful console platform.
I had similar hopes, which were dashed when I finally played UO on the Origin LAN. It is unkind of me to say, but it ran like a dog. I realized what was wrong after I got the full low-down on the server architecture. It was a poor choice on how to distribute the load.
Nevertheless, it's still a miracle they finished the product.
Takes about 1Mbyte/sec for DVD-quality mpg2 playback. That's a titch high for even DSL and cable modem users, and at 1Mbit/sec, more in line with what those users can swallow (on a good day, phase of the moon just right, servers aren't too badly loaded), you're going to need to play that back on one darn small window.
If SKG wants to explore production on the web, I recommend taking a shot at fully modelled 3D animation, a la Pixar but way less geometric, lighting, and animation complexity, and instead make it real-time by requiring cheap but fast 3D accelerators. This hasn't been done professionally before, and as anyone who has watched a grainy, barfy little 320x200x256color Quake movie can attest, even "amateurs" have created dramatic, funny, awe-inspiring content. Imagine what the pros could learn to do, and with a budget, and with today's technology!
But it takes lots of talent to do it right and a lot of modifications to directing techniques to understand its strengths and limitations as a medium. So if they want to be there for the next big thing on the web, I think this is where they should be sinking the bucks and time. Unlike so many other web ventures, you could actually turn a profit selling good flicks for your PC, and there are some nice bennies:
1. You can re-use your character models, textures, and basic animations. 2. You can re-use your world textures, possibly parts of the geometery ("sets"). 3. Colored lighting techniques are very cheap. 4. Those hyper-expensive spin-shots usually done with a battery of cameras are now free. 5. You can re-use sound effects. 6. No expensive shoot. License actor skins in several costumes for the movie, get their lines in a foley studio. Then use variations on stock animations for the cast's movement instead of dragging big-name and big-budget actors through the tedium of mocap.
In other words, you get not only re-use within a production, but between productions, and in distribution, too. You just can't say that about platters of film or even DVD's. That could be a big, big deal.
Here's hoping SKG (or someone else wielding Mbucks of st00pid money) gives it a shot.:)
There is a gotcha. Unless they do some neat stuff, they will prolly still have to hock up a healthy 64kbits/sec stream for the soundtrack, and downloading those first textures and models is gonna smart a little. On the bright side, the user could always start watching without textures and watch them "res in" as the textures come down the pipe. (teehee)
Still, these are neat problems to have, unlike the one of how to make RealVideo look and sound better than pigs making bacon in what looks more like an icon than a window.
ESR seems like a swell guy n all, but it made me cringe to see Doom as a case study painted in the light he painted it. I mean, he drew some pretty wonky conclusions, like that it showed the "network is the computation" and other weirdo buzz-wordy stuff. I think the "Doom case study" belongs in his paper about "How to be a hacker," because, at least the way I remember it, it was released strictly for cool points with hackers.
After talking to the FBI about an infamous break-in I was a victim of, the first question out of their mouths was, "What is the value of the stolen property?" It turns out that how you answer this question decides how they prioritize (whether they get to it) the investigation. I think the FBI knows that it's not easy to value software, which is why they ask it, even though they know the answer is hard to enumerate. They just want to filter out cases to reduce their alreaday overwhelming workload. You've just been hacked. It was an incredibly humiliating and frustrating experience, and I didn't even pride myself on my security skills. I just wanted the bastard caught. Pure vengeance. That's all. Didn't want him to get away with it. I can just imagine what it's like for Novell or Sun to be hacked. You have plenty of motivation to bring out the big numbers. They're going to improve the odds that the FBI gets off their ass. Even if it's not going to make them any money, these companies are probably crying for blood. Malicious hacking is wrong. If you want to be a hacker and you want to do something for the hacker community, then do the hack, find an elegant, charming, but DISCRETE way to bring the security hole to the attention of the sysadmin, and move on to the next challenge. I think these kinds of "Chaotic Good Hackers" are a benefit to society, but they are depressingly few and far between. =-ddt-> PS. Please don't give me any crap about the semantics of "hack" and "crack". I grew up with "hack" having the same double-meaning it has for most peeps, but "crack" specifically meant defeating software piracy systems.
I hate junk mail, but Intel has a track record of suing its competitors out of existence. Makes me feel awfully sorry for the poor wretch. I'd have felt better if the recipients of the mail e-filed a class action suit, instead of the suits at Intel shutting him down. Ya know? I mean after all, it's the management he was berating, not the engineers, and it's the management who forced him to shut up. I got the impression from an article I read about him several months ago that he was basically a middle man. Intel employees who heard the dirt were feeding it to him, and he would in turn expose it back to the rest of the employees. And it seemed from the article that his tactics were just the result of the cold way they booted him.
I dunno. I hate spam as much or more than the next guy, but this ruling leaves me with a queazy feeling.
I think if SCO were to create their own Linux distribution, that they would do considerably better in the marketplace than they are by clutching like grim death onto their aging code base. The SCO name still has some value, after all, but I think their Unix competetiveness is waning.
I guess this leads us to a more unusual thought. Microsoft could not only sell a Linux distribution, but would likely within months outsell all the other Linux distributors combined. I saw something like this happen with their game publishing arm. From nothing to mega-hit sales numbers. It's a phenomenon. If you're writing a game, you go to Microsoft first, because even if it turns out like crap, you will sell hundreds of thousands of units gauranteed, and a good game will probably break 1M units. If it's anyone else, no matter how good or established or gigantic, the sell-throughs are far smaller. Microsoft just has an incredibly powerful sales system.
Agreed. That headline totally unhinged my jaw until I read the articles and realized that they have only licensed mp3.
=-ddt->
A Doom co-author sees the bright sides.
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Why Kids Kill
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· Score: 1
1. Maybe this will inspire hazard pay for teachers. They deserve to make a lot more.
2. If Doom can inspire boys to kill, maybe this puts Doom in the ranks of the classic works of poetry, books, and women which have inspired grown men to kill for most of recorded history.
3. Maybe the school killings will inspire a law which grants children all the rights of adults in this society, in addition to the responsibilities of adults, namely that if you get caught carrying a gun, you might sort of get shot by a police officer if he feels like you're better off dead.
4. Maybe this will make violence in games a bit more "tabboo" again, so that we can use it more artfully and dramatically in computer games. (I'm sorry, but some of the games that came out after Doom, were such pathetic, over-the-top wanna-be's.)
5. Maybe this will justify funding for more/better police officers to gaurd schools. Makes parents sad to see that happening, but I think it would be a good thing. I got beat up a lot as a kid, and I'll bet that wouldn't have happened with cops around.
6. Maybe I can add to my resume, "Like there are these connections, dude, between those games I worked on and like bad stuff. I'm not saying exactly, but hehe. Just trust me, dude. Connections. I swear! It was in the news and everything! I'm cool!"
John and Paul made me do it! Some creepy trivia for the ever-thirsty media. While programming Doom and Quake, I loved listening to Nine Inch Nails, Machines of Loving Grace, and even a little KMFDM. Of course, I also listened to a lot of Suzanne Vega, Sarah McLaughlin, and my all-time favorite, the Beatles.
You insensitive bitch! One day, American and I were brainstorming cool weapon ideas for Quake, and I contributed what would later be called the "nail gun" but which I had always thought of as the "spike gun" because I first dreamed of it when I was in junior high school. I was being bullied by kids because I looked and talked like a dork, and I was into D&D and computers. I literally wished I could shoot them with a spike that would nail them to a wall, where they would squint in pain, cry, and bleed a lot.
I only say this because I explicitly signed over my part of the Doom copyrights to id Software so that it could be sold in Canada, which means I can't be sued for being honest. Woohoo! Course, I ought to get my ears boxed by my parents for what I'm about to say..
I was a good kid in school, and the only temptations to violence I've had in my life were hateful thoughts I had about bullies. Bullies would suck at any age, but when you're young, they suck very large eggs. In fact, if bullying were an arrestable offense, I'd have been a much happier kid.
I liked the post from the guy who mentioned how weapons and explosives have always been available He's right. We should look at what changed, because it certainly isn't the availability of explosives and guns.
My pet theory is that the grand unified constant over time is that American kids want to be the coolest, the best, and different in a really awe-inspiring way. They so much want to be the coolest, that they're perfectly willing to be "bad guys" to achieve this.
Problem is, the "bad guys" used to just throw insults and punches, but then they graduated to sticks, then knifes, then guns and explosives. You have to keep one-upping the competition if you really want to be cooler. Now, knives are literally "kid stuff," and now it's probably not about packing a gun, it's probably about packing a gun that has "bad mutha fucka" scrawled on it in your enemy's blood. Remember when "bad" became a synonym for "cool"? Hey, it's just the next logical step.
I think if anything, the only thing we can expect is for the guns and explosives to get more exotic and powerful.
But I dunno for sure. Kids are incredibly smart, creative, and energetic. They might get cleverer, maybe dabbling in insinuitive poisons, elaborate booby traps, perhaps even murder with poetic slants. Hm. I'll bet if this happened, we might finally see girls as perpetrators of some of these nightmarish mass murders. They're definitely a lot crueler on a more regular basis than boys are, and clever! Jeez, I mean later on when they've grown up, some of them can cut you in half with a word. Snip!
It'd be pretty funky if a boy poisoned some crack cocaine so that a drug addict enemy of his died. Ooh! Or if he passively sold poisoned crack! Like setting out a rat trap. Man, you could do it cheaply and effectively by learning how to grow salmonella (it's gotta be easy if virtually all raw chicken has it) and infecting your drug with it. All the kids would get super sick, squirting out their insides for weeks and vomitting like there's no tomorrow. You know it would work, too, because the crack would probably lower their immune system to ensure infection. Wow. Hm. I couldn't enjoy that cause I've never had it in fer druggies, but it would be cool if all the bullies were crack heads. What do bullies have in common? Ponder, ponder...
I'll bet crack-poisoning would scare parents at first, but that after a while, they'd enjoy the fear that instilled in their kids. Kids don't believe completely random bad shit will just happen to them, but they definitely believe that assholes are out to get them, cause like, they are.
I think there's hope, though. America finds that sex is far more tabboo than violence. Maybe the next logical step in being cooler is starting to flash people in school, or filming their teachers getting it on and broadcasting it on the net, or um maybe "accidentally" bringing a porn VHS to school for their show n tell instead of the home movie.
Tell you what, that would have been AWESOME. Seeing a little T&A on the screen versus worrying about getting beat up? Dude, I'll take the skin. Sign me up. Thank you very much. Sex edukashun - by thuh students, four thuh students!
Oh boy, got a little excited and cracked a nasty rat. Oh my lord! Seek cover! What crawled up there?! Lemme borrow your pen for a second... oh.. oh god, oh man.. sorry about the pen.
Heh. Well, this has been a fun, nostalgic romp down memory lane. Kids, turning 30 sucks. Don't turn 30. I got hemorroids for my birthday. My business failed right before my birthday. And my marriage fell over right after my birthday. 30's bad, mmmkay? Actually, that's not true. I got the 'roids when I was 29. I think the key there is to not push like you're giving birth to a brown water balloon, and instead just kinda let it happen, ease 'em on out, just do some reading or contribute something to the stall door. Your anus will thank you later.
Just skip 30 and go straight to 31. I'll bet that one is a lot cooler. You're over the shock of 30, and it's like definitely your first year of being a "grown up." I think for my 31st birthday, I'm gonna go find some impressionable kid and give him some advice. "Hey kid, yeah you with the trench coat. Come here. That's it, atta boy, little closer... Yeah, OK, Perfect! LISTEN YOU LITTLE MORON, YOUR MOMMA TOLD YOU NOT TO APPROACH STRANGERS, NOW GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME! RUN! I MIGHT BE A PSYCHO WITH SOME CANDY! RUN BOY RUN! There's a good boy. He'll grow up, god willing, to be a decent citizen like me someday."
OK, last tidbit, as I guess I'm sposed to be morbid and talk about the shootings a little. So, my vote for most nightmarish imagery is the kids trying to hide under their desks, and the shooters actually going out of their way to kill them, too. Oh my god. That gives me the giga-creeps. I swear I've had nightmares like that where I'm hiding from someone with a gun, and he keeps pointing it around whatever obstacle I'm using. Sweet Jesus.
Woah, I just realized something totally unfair. I'll bet if you look like Bill Gates as a kid, you get treated like royalty now. Hm...
Ah, the weekend. More time to extend my perfect record of never killing anyone another two days, and time to play my favorite computer game, Total Annihilation.
Ed Muth said, "I find it hard to believe that some of the best computer scientists in the world will want to do their work for free. Without a long-term technical road map, without multimillion-dollar test labs, someone wants me to believe these visionary programmers and developers will want to do the best work of their lives and then give it away. I do not believe in that vision of the future."
Idealsts picked this fight, but pragmatists will finish it.
What MS forgot is that the first line of users isn't Mom and Dad, but other programmers, trying to write good code in short order for the operating system. Coders haven't been served well by MSDOS and Windows.
Linux serves coders, and those coders get a kick out of contributing code to the public, getting feedback, and honing their code for users or other coders. It's a highly recursive, parallelizable algorithm which virulently proliferates service and goodwill.
Or put another way, it's a pyramid scheme of goodwill. Linus gets the most goodwill, followed by the kernel contributors, application developers, and then Linux users for helping to make it a mainstream operating system.
Maybe that's not right, but it's the real world. Been waiting all my life to say that without feeling ashamed.
Slashdot Mirror
Zoid's a sweetie, but he's understating things just a tad.
I don't mean to burst anyone's bubble, but id's politics have always been incredibly severe. It's sort of a treehouse/boy's club atmosphere, very charged with adrenaline, egos, and testosterone. I loved it and contributed to it. It's an infectious behavior. Romero and Kevin, in particular, would use their 18 Charismas to make the politics fun. Don't ask me how that's possible. You'd have to be there. It's very colourful. You forgive the atmosphere pretty quickly when they start plopping multiple 5- and 6-figure bonuses in your lap.
But it's actually nice to see John put that in his plan file. It's more truthful advertising if the prospective employees know what's going on behind the curtain. These same kind of politics affect your bonuses, your workload, and frankly your general health if you're prone to stress-related problems like ulcers, skin problems, or gum disease. You guys would be pretty shocked to hear the real stories of how several of id's talented people left the company, but it's never a binary, "He humped a farm animal on company time."
This is definitely not the sign of an id implosion. Kevin and Adrian won't be pleased about John's plan file, but they're fundamentally level-headed businessmen and will probably get over it. John won't stop coding. Everything he does is fun to work with, and if they fire John, the daily miracles that time the id engine will simply move elsewhere.
I do ABSOLUTELY recommend if you're a talented artist to apply for the position. It's an adventure unlike anything you'll embark. You'll make grievous wads of cash. You'll gape at the bizarre effects of instant media focus. You'll get to watch and learn from some of the industry's finest talent. You'll fear for your mortal soul if you get a ride from John to work. You'll have access to almost any software tool or piece of hardware you want to get your hands on.
It's a growth experience.
My brother worked for a gas company that made the dopants and etchers used in silicon wafers. This included incredibly lethal gases, like HCl and arsenic. He has a dual chemistry/geology degree from a respectable university, but he too was subject to deplorable conditions.
I started out by jokingly refering to his job as "taste-testing dopants", but it became deadly serious after he described a cannister of HCl gas hat ruptured in the warehouse. It instantly became a gruesome data visualization tool. You could actually see the strength of the air flow through PC's running in the warehouse at the time by inspecting their melted internals just before the fans went out.
It was an awful company here in the valley, and it serves a lot of the industry's gas needs. This is definitely an infrastructure disease. I've seen a lot of crappy journalism, and this article certainly qualified by not explaining the other side, but I assure you, the other side isn't that moving.
Perhaps ironically, an EE Times article I read not too long ago described a study which showed that air pollution in the valley was increasing everyone's rate of cancer. So the well-paid engineers in their cublicles (like me) are paying a poetic price.
I agree completely with your post, Carnage.
Different beasties. VNC runs over the network, which means it can be pretty slow depending on the graphical intensity of the application.
You got me on the price. I was quoting the student price. Didn't realize the regular price was so high. I'm sure they would negotiate that down for volume orders, though.
I wouldn't be quite so nuts over the issue of free-ness. VMware is a cool hack, and it really does add a lot of value to corporate environments. If you don't want to pay for it, don't pay for it, but that doesn't lessen its contribution to Linux as a way to get into the corporate market.
Keep in mind that MIS peeps are often badly overworked, and it's a no-brainer to spend a couple hundred per seat if it off-loads a lot of support hastles.
I think VMWare is the killer app for Linux in the corporate environment.
What you want to do is install Windows 9x under VMWare on every user's desktop in a corporate setting. At the cost of only $100ish extra per seat (if I recall), what this gives you is:
1. A sandbox where you can more quickly recover from Win9x crashes,
2. The ability to "roll back" work before you corrupted your Win9x image,
3. Remote sysadmin of Win9x images (yum!),
4. Linux functionality in case MIS wants to give users access to home-grown tools, and
5. The inability to play 3D hardware-accelerated games at work.
So you get the nice Win9x interface, you get the applications you want, you get Linux applications, and you get better administration and less game-playing. I think Linux is plenty ready for prime time in
I notice a lot of this advice is about hiring a good CFO, lawyer, marketing guy, etc. I disagree with hiring that kind of cruft early on. They're important people, but not as important as you.
... well, I dunno why, to tell the truth. Concept art can literally make or break an investment or publishing deal. Icons and GUI layout can literally make or break a demo. The look of your business card, the company t-shirt, the banner you make for the trade show, the illustrations and layout for the business plan... Get the picture? You'd better.
You can contract lawyers indefinitely, and the good ones know their limitations and tend to sub-contract to the best lawyer for the job anyway.
CFO's are farging handy. Remember, though. It's just a title. You don't need a purebreed, and you don't need someone with an MBA. I know a CFO who raised $80M w/ very little formal business training, but he features a limitless sense of excitement and creativity. I am also pretty handy at raising money, and made one of the industry's studlier publishing contracts out of the gate, and I haven't had any training, either. If you know someone in school or at work who seems to have a knack for getting budgetary increases or funding or hefty purchase orders, odds are good they're a much better deal than hiring a fat cat CFO from Silly Valley. It definitely is cool to have a full-time guy on this, but you'll notice that he keeps coming back from meetings w/ investors saying, "Hey, um, I need a demo." The coders really are doing most of the work early on.
Likewise for a marketing guy. If you end up with a publishing company instead of handling your own sales, not only is a marketing guy largely uneccessary, but you'll find that there is advance-on-royalty money available. It's much tastier money than VC.
Because you're a software company, it's mostly about your burn rate. If you do the math, you'll notice that by far, your biggest expenditure will be salaries. Writing a design doc and schedule for your project and then, um, doubling or tripling the time, is going to be a useful wake-up call on how much money you need and when you need it. A really sexy schedule, design doc, and description of the team can literally be turned into a publishing contract w/ advances on royalties paid on milestones. In my experience, milestones cometh every few months as large checks that you kiss and dance around.
Some specific advice:
1. Do not get yourself overworked about trade shows like CES or Comdex. Chasing demos can become a full-time sport and can easily kill your company due to their disruptive effect on development. My advice- ignore them completely until everyone who comes by your company and checks out your software instantly suffers from violent, uncontrollable priapism.
2. Troll schools. If you need cheap, awesome talent, troll your high school and/or college. Ask the teachers who the most kick-ass student was at so-and-so, then track him down. It is very flattering to be courted this way, so you might be surprised at how easy it is to score.
3. Use free software with source code for the long run. Expensive software is usually only useful in the short run. I just wanted to say that. I don't think that's advice. It's just an observation. I don't know what to do with it yet.
4. Ban C++. If you must go OOP, use Java, but don't tell your publisher or investors. Java actually kicks ripe bottom. Don't knock it. C is also a dandy, dandy language. Most of the studliest code I've seen (including almost everything open sourced) is still written in C. I'm prejudiced against C++ because although you find great coders who use it, they tend to have violently clashing styles, which causes all kinds of headaches you don't need.
5. Remember humor. When you realize that one of your employees, publishers, or investors is being an asshole, don't get all soap opera-y. If you want to talk about it before doing something about it, then remember to use colorful analogy and strive to make someone giggle. In a small, hungry company, bankruptcy looms ominously and constantly. No one needs more drama. If you need inspiration, go to slashdot and read the "5, Funny" posts. You'll find them surprisingly poignant.
6. Artwork. Holy mother of pearl. Believe me when I say you can easily, easily, easily keep a full-time artist busy. Artists work for cheap, because
7. Random last-ditch effort anecdote: make it a plug-in. If things start going to poopoo, see how hard it is to make it a Netscape plug-in. A friend of mine did this once w/ a 3d engine, and he got a lot more attention from investors as a result. Hehe.
8. Consider cross-platform development. Developing an executable for both Windows and Linux, for example, helps you isolate bugs in your code versus bugs in your understanding of OS & library services.
9. Do not design for the "everyday guy." You have no idea what you're talking about. Niche markets are often more profitable and better to focus on for a long-term business. If it's between making a spreadsheet that does everything for everybody and a spreadsheet that kicks ass for industrial plastic extruders, go for the latter. It'll probably give you more money up front, too. Barring a paying gig, make something that excites you personally.
10. If you don't think you can do it in 2 years, don't do it. People get burned out. Your exciting start-up will turn into a pit of guilt & despair as your first mega-studly geeks decide to bail. Really try to realisticly figure out what you can do in two years, and if you think it's too much, think of something else.
That's enough BS for now. I wish you guys the best of luck!
One cool way to do this is to sell your data. You're often writing a new tool because you want to work with data more easily. Well, because you're the author, odds are good you know how to use your software better than the average bloke, so you might be able to turn a dime working on the data your software is designed to handle.
:)
For instance:
1. If it's a game, sell the artwork, levels,
and sound files. These are called "mission
packs" in the game industry.
2. If you're writing a GUI like GNOME or KDE,
then sell the artwork for "themes".
3. If you're writing a music composition
proggy, then sell music. Um, nevermind.
Better keep your day job on this one.
Guess it goes w/o saying, but some data is easier to sell than others.
Anyway, if working on the data is too much of a load, or you don't want to work at that, then try to partner with someone who is good at it. In exchange for splitting the profits, he gets a piece of software that is custom-designed for and around his artwork/etc, and you get gorgeous data to help demo the killer function of your proggy, and you both get a little scratch, hopefully.
Very level-headed arguments, and a deft attempt to address a class of stocks, when they're clearly focused on one stock, Red Hat. These same arguments were being made the day Red Hat IPO'd, and yet the stock has climbed dramatically over the past several months.
If stock price were just about the P/E, then Yahoo would not be valued at $100B with earnings of less than $100M, and Yahoo is actually really interesting parallel to Red Hat. It was one of the first, it has a doubtful profit model, and its valuation seems largely to be a function of its first-ness and how quickly people go to Yahoo when they think "search engine". That's important for advertising revenues, but also for the ease with which they can release product themselves. And what do you know? Yahoo is not a flash in the pan. It's stock price has been going strong for over three years, now.
Red Hat is also one of the first Linux companies, it has a doubtful profit model, and I think its valuation is based on where people go when they think "I want to know something about Linux." In fact, I'll bet Red Hat can show that they're one of the most heavily-hit sites in the Linux community. People scoff at Red Hat's "other" business model of selling CD's you can get for free, but if you're getting all the eyeballs first, it's nothing to sniff at. They are selling different features on essentially the same product for $30, $80, and $150, respectively. You can buy them online at their own site, where all the eyeballs are ending up.
There's an undefinable sense of "potential" that I (and obviously others) associate with Red Hat, and I think if the Forrester folks really want to put their theories to the test, they should try to twist up the courage to short RHAT. Red Hat is a risky stock, but shorting it is going to be riskier in 2000 than buying it.
John is being incredibly humble here. The Linux sales of Q3 will be on the radar of every publisher and game developer out there.
It's unfortunate that Q3 is being sold as seperate SKU's because it really does make sense to just release one and then tally the results of who is running the Windows, MacOS, and Linux executables. Besides making technical sense, a single SKU lessens the retailer's return rates which lowers the losses due to cost of goods and thus lets the publisher sell a higher-quality manual and box.
But most people don't register their games, and automatic registration, even if all you're registering is the information, "a unique ip ran the linux binary" is associated with Orwellian tactics.
Another reason publishers shy away from allowing multiple versions in a SKU is because each version creates a seperate flavor of support issues, and support costs add up fast. Again, this is a situation that would be vastly improved by automatically gathering and submitting data on the machine that is having trouble.
If game companies released the source code to the automatic registration component of their games and made that component a seperate executable or perhaps a dynamically loaded library, would users feel less betrayed and spied-upon?
Reading that FoF seemed a lot more like an Intel-bashing fest than a Microsoft trial, constantly referring to the infeasbility of alternate microprocessors and OS's for anything but Intel-based systems. Anyone else get the impression this whole process is laying the groundwork to nail Intel next?
But to stay closer to topic, do any of my fellow Microsoft-bashers know what would be a "healthy" solution to the monopoly? I feel a bit like the cat who caught the rat and now doesn't know what to do with it.
On contemplation, I really don't think it's healthy for Windows to be artificially forced to a smaller market share, and I wonder if releasing the source is about as useful as Netscape releasing the source to Mozilla. The Win9x source has got to be even nastier. And would the resulting OS-fragmentation will be good for already horrific compatability problems.
Certainly, breaking the company up will have little effect on Windows dominance, as one of the companies will still own the OS, and that company will clearly continue as the dominant monster. There are a lot of things Microsoft could do to be friendlier and more open, but most of those things are unusually hard to enforce.
I guess splitting the NT (Win2k) side from the 9x (Millenium) side would be a healthy start, as I understand those dev groups are fiercely competetive within Microsoft anyway. I think the NT guys would quickly lower their prices to compete head-on with Win9x, and I'll bet a lot of people would switch on the grounds that Win2k is so much more stable and even a lot faster for some applications.
Anyone else here notice how much more they noticed Linux in the press once it got a mascot?
Branding might be the answer here. One solution, or at least ameliorization, might be to create a handsome certification stamp for web sites that run correctly on Linux Netscape.
That way, important sites can brag, "This site uses no wonky extensions that aren't in a blessed form of Java, JavaScript, or Shockwave" then plop down the sexy logo, and then link the sexy logo to a database of sites that are Linux Netscape-friendly.
I get pretty upset over glorified sites, myself. I don't think everyone making sites that don't work with Linux grok that they've goofed. Most peeps understand how big Linux is now that we've some stock IPO's associated with Linux that did so dern well.
Perhaps Tux riding the Mozilla character in a cowboy hat a la the "running linux" book cover? If this idea appeals to someone willing to run the site, lemme know, and I'll get a good game artist to put together a sexy logo.
A Microsoft console could definitely sell. It can compete with the Sega's, Nintendo's, and Sony's just fine. Here's why:
1. Microsoft has a track record of out-selling most publishers out the gate with a new product solely on the strength of their branding. Even as a newbie game publisher, they consistently outsold the leading game publishers by a factor of 2x out of the chute.
2. Game developers love developing games for fixed architectures. Designing games for "PC"'s is a nightmare by comparison. With a fixed architecture, you can really push the game design, which is why Playstation titles often seem so much more exciting and complete than PC titles despite running on a gutless 34MHz MIPS R3000 with 2Mb of RAM.
3. The first game developers to ship product for a system, no matter how lame that system is, will sell close to a 1:1 ratio with the platforms. That means even if the product is a real stinker, like the Atari Jaguar, and it only ships on the order of 100k units, you'll sell 100k games. That's considered to be near-hit volume. Why do you sell 1:1? It's a weird phenomenon which I associate very much with being American- buying a new platform gives you a kind of "fever" to buy any available titles for it immediately.
4. A console architecture based on an x86 means game developers don't have to learn a new asm, and they can probably enjoy far more mature debugging tools. Debugging is the biggest pain in the butt when it comes to consoles. The tools are usually really weak, so it takes a strong (and expensive) coder to successfully write them.
So if Microsoft approaches EA and says, "We're making this console, here's the architecture, would you please write games for it," you'd better believe they'd get started immediately. You don't need to retool, you don't need to rehire. The race is on. Can you be one of the first titles out there? If not, you have to make a quality game, which is a lot harder, but either way, you win big. That can't be said of a mature medium where the competition is incredibly fierce and profits are dwindling.
The reason you don't see 20 different consoles popping up all the time is that it takes a huge investment. Most consoles sell for cost or even at a loss, and the advertising campaigns are incredibly expensive because they have to reach children and 20-somethings everywhere. All the money is made in licensing fees, so you have to wait a while for the profit to roll back in, and if you're up against a monster, odds are good you'll fall over in the long run.
In Japan, by the way, consoles dramatically outnumber PC's. PC game sales in Japan are completely limp. But if you can make a hit console game in Japan, it's possible to beat both the worldwide sales and the worldwide margins in a single territory. Final Fantasy VII (albeit an extreme example) sold over 7M units in Japan. That's more volume than any PC game, including the undying sales of Myst, has ever sold worldwide.
Console game development is really interesting and responsible for most of the $6B+ game industry.
If you get the opportunity to be the first to write anything for any new Microsoft platform, frankly, whether a Linux weenie like me or not, you'd be daft not to sign the paperwork immediately.
I hope this gives a better idea of why Microsoft might be considering such a product. They're in an unusually strong position to deliver a successful console platform.
I had similar hopes, which were dashed when I finally played UO on the Origin LAN. It is unkind of me to say, but it ran like a dog. I realized what was wrong after I got the full low-down on the server architecture. It was a poor choice on how to distribute the load.
Nevertheless, it's still a miracle they finished the product.
Takes about 1Mbyte/sec for DVD-quality mpg2 playback. That's a titch high for even DSL and cable modem users, and at 1Mbit/sec, more in line with what those users can swallow (on a good day, phase of the moon just right, servers aren't too badly loaded), you're going to need to play that back on one darn small window.
:)
If SKG wants to explore production on the web, I recommend taking a shot at fully modelled 3D animation, a la Pixar but way less geometric, lighting, and animation complexity, and instead make it real-time by requiring cheap but fast 3D accelerators. This hasn't been done professionally before, and as anyone who has watched a grainy, barfy little 320x200x256color Quake movie can attest, even "amateurs" have created dramatic, funny, awe-inspiring content. Imagine what the pros could learn to do, and with a budget, and with today's technology!
But it takes lots of talent to do it right and a lot of modifications to directing techniques to understand its strengths and limitations as a medium. So if they want to be there for the next big thing on the web, I think this is where they should be sinking the bucks and time. Unlike so many other web ventures, you could actually turn a profit selling good flicks for your PC, and there are some nice bennies:
1. You can re-use your character models,
textures, and basic animations.
2. You can re-use your world textures, possibly
parts of the geometery ("sets").
3. Colored lighting techniques are very cheap.
4. Those hyper-expensive spin-shots usually
done with a battery of cameras are now free.
5. You can re-use sound effects.
6. No expensive shoot. License actor skins in
several costumes for the movie, get their
lines in a foley studio. Then use
variations on stock animations for the
cast's movement instead of dragging big-name
and big-budget actors through the tedium of
mocap.
In other words, you get not only re-use within a production, but between productions, and in distribution, too. You just can't say that about platters of film or even DVD's. That could be a big, big deal.
Here's hoping SKG (or someone else wielding Mbucks of st00pid money) gives it a shot.
There is a gotcha. Unless they do some neat stuff, they will prolly still have to hock up a healthy 64kbits/sec stream for the soundtrack, and downloading those first textures and models is gonna smart a little. On the bright side, the user could always start watching without textures and watch them "res in" as the textures come down the pipe. (teehee)
Still, these are neat problems to have, unlike the one of how to make RealVideo look and sound better than pigs making bacon in what looks more like an icon than a window.
It airs Oct 13. They finished filming & editing some time ago.
ESR seems like a swell guy n all, but it made me cringe to see Doom as a case study painted in the light he painted it. I mean, he drew some pretty wonky conclusions, like that it showed the "network is the computation" and other weirdo buzz-wordy stuff. I think the "Doom case study" belongs in his paper about "How to be a hacker," because, at least the way I remember it, it was released strictly for cool points with hackers.
Wow, I really need to pee. Bye.
=-ddt->
After talking to the FBI about an infamous break-in I was a victim of, the first question out of their mouths was, "What is the value of the stolen property?" It turns out that how you answer this question decides how they prioritize (whether they get to it) the investigation. I think the FBI knows that it's not easy to value software, which is why they ask it, even though they know the answer is hard to enumerate. They just want to filter out cases to reduce their alreaday overwhelming workload. You've just been hacked. It was an incredibly humiliating and frustrating experience, and I didn't even pride myself on my security skills. I just wanted the bastard caught. Pure vengeance. That's all. Didn't want him to get away with it. I can just imagine what it's like for Novell or Sun to be hacked. You have plenty of motivation to bring out the big numbers. They're going to improve the odds that the FBI gets off their ass. Even if it's not going to make them any money, these companies are probably crying for blood. Malicious hacking is wrong. If you want to be a hacker and you want to do something for the hacker community, then do the hack, find an elegant, charming, but DISCRETE way to bring the security hole to the attention of the sysadmin, and move on to the next challenge. I think these kinds of "Chaotic Good Hackers" are a benefit to society, but they are depressingly few and far between. =-ddt-> PS. Please don't give me any crap about the semantics of "hack" and "crack". I grew up with "hack" having the same double-meaning it has for most peeps, but "crack" specifically meant defeating software piracy systems.
I hate junk mail, but Intel has a track record of suing its competitors out of existence. Makes me feel awfully sorry for the poor wretch. I'd have felt better if the recipients of the mail e-filed a class action suit, instead of the suits at Intel shutting him down. Ya know? I mean after all, it's the management he was berating, not the engineers, and it's the management who forced him to shut up. I got the impression from an article I read about him several months ago that he was basically a middle man. Intel employees who heard the dirt were feeding it to him, and he would in turn expose it back to the rest of the employees. And it seemed from the article that his tactics were just the result of the cold way they booted him.
I dunno. I hate spam as much or more than the next guy, but this ruling leaves me with a queazy feeling.
=-ddt->
I think if SCO were to create their own Linux distribution, that they would do considerably better in the marketplace than they are by clutching like grim death onto their aging code base. The SCO name still has some value, after all, but I think their Unix competetiveness is waning.
I guess this leads us to a more unusual thought. Microsoft could not only sell a Linux distribution, but would likely within months outsell all the other Linux distributors combined. I saw something like this happen with their game publishing arm. From nothing to mega-hit sales numbers. It's a phenomenon. If you're writing a game, you go to Microsoft first, because even if it turns out like crap, you will sell hundreds of thousands of units gauranteed, and a good game will probably break 1M units. If it's anyone else, no matter how good or established or gigantic, the sell-throughs are far smaller. Microsoft just has an incredibly powerful sales system.
=-ddt->
Agreed. That headline totally unhinged my jaw until I read the articles and realized that they have only licensed mp3.
=-ddt->
1. Maybe this will inspire hazard pay for teachers. They deserve to make a lot more.
2. If Doom can inspire boys to kill, maybe this puts Doom in the ranks of the classic works of poetry, books, and women which have inspired grown men to kill for most of recorded history.
3. Maybe the school killings will inspire a law which grants children all the rights of adults in this society, in addition to the responsibilities of adults, namely that if you get caught carrying a gun, you might sort of get shot by a police officer if he feels like you're better off dead.
4. Maybe this will make violence in games a bit more "tabboo" again, so that we can use it more artfully and dramatically in computer games. (I'm sorry, but some of the games that came out after Doom, were such pathetic, over-the-top wanna-be's.)
5. Maybe this will justify funding for more/better police officers to gaurd schools. Makes parents sad to see that happening, but I think it would be a good thing. I got beat up a lot as a kid, and I'll bet that wouldn't have happened with cops around.
6. Maybe I can add to my resume, "Like there are these connections, dude, between those games I worked on and like bad stuff. I'm not saying exactly, but hehe. Just trust me, dude. Connections. I swear! It was in the news and everything! I'm cool!"
John and Paul made me do it! Some creepy trivia for the ever-thirsty media. While programming Doom and Quake, I loved listening to Nine Inch Nails, Machines of Loving Grace, and even a little KMFDM. Of course, I also listened to a lot of Suzanne Vega, Sarah McLaughlin, and my all-time favorite, the Beatles.
You insensitive bitch! One day, American and I were brainstorming cool weapon ideas for Quake, and I contributed what would later be called the "nail gun" but which I had always thought of as the "spike gun" because I first dreamed of it when I was in junior high school. I was being bullied by kids because I looked and talked like a dork, and I was into D&D and computers. I literally wished I could shoot them with a spike that would nail them to a wall, where they would squint in pain, cry, and bleed a lot.
I only say this because I explicitly signed over my part of the Doom copyrights to id Software so that it could be sold in Canada, which means I can't be sued for being honest. Woohoo! Course, I ought to get my ears boxed by my parents for what I'm about to say..
I was a good kid in school, and the only temptations to violence I've had in my life were hateful thoughts I had about bullies. Bullies would suck at any age, but when you're young, they suck very large eggs. In fact, if bullying were an arrestable offense, I'd have been a much happier kid.
I liked the post from the guy who mentioned how weapons and explosives have always been available He's right. We should look at what changed, because it certainly isn't the availability of explosives and guns.
My pet theory is that the grand unified constant over time is that American kids want to be the coolest, the best, and different in a really awe-inspiring way. They so much want to be the coolest, that they're perfectly willing to be "bad guys" to achieve this.
Problem is, the "bad guys" used to just throw insults and punches, but then they graduated to sticks, then knifes, then guns and explosives. You have to keep one-upping the competition if you really want to be cooler. Now, knives are literally "kid stuff," and now it's probably not about packing a gun, it's probably about packing a gun that has "bad mutha fucka" scrawled on it in your enemy's blood. Remember when "bad" became a synonym for "cool"? Hey, it's just the next logical step.
I think if anything, the only thing we can expect is for the guns and explosives to get more exotic and powerful.
But I dunno for sure. Kids are incredibly smart, creative, and energetic. They might get cleverer, maybe dabbling in insinuitive poisons, elaborate booby traps, perhaps even murder with poetic slants. Hm. I'll bet if this happened, we might finally see girls as perpetrators of some of these nightmarish mass murders. They're definitely a lot crueler on a more regular basis than boys are, and clever! Jeez, I mean later on when they've grown up, some of them can cut you in half with a word. Snip!
It'd be pretty funky if a boy poisoned some crack cocaine so that a drug addict enemy of his died. Ooh! Or if he passively sold poisoned crack! Like setting out a rat trap. Man, you could do it cheaply and effectively by learning how to grow salmonella (it's gotta be easy if virtually all raw chicken has it) and infecting your drug with it. All the kids would get super sick, squirting out their insides for weeks and vomitting like there's no tomorrow. You know it would work, too, because the crack would probably lower their immune system to ensure infection. Wow. Hm. I couldn't enjoy that cause I've never had it in fer druggies, but it would be cool if all the bullies were crack heads. What do bullies have in common? Ponder, ponder...
I'll bet crack-poisoning would scare parents at first, but that after a while, they'd enjoy the fear that instilled in their kids. Kids don't believe completely random bad shit will just happen to them, but they definitely believe that assholes are out to get them, cause like, they are.
I think there's hope, though. America finds that sex is far more tabboo than violence. Maybe the next logical step in being cooler is starting to flash people in school, or filming their teachers getting it on and broadcasting it on the net, or um maybe "accidentally" bringing a porn VHS to school for their show n tell instead of the home movie.
Tell you what, that would have been AWESOME. Seeing a little T&A on the screen versus worrying about getting beat up? Dude, I'll take the skin. Sign me up. Thank you very much. Sex edukashun - by thuh students, four thuh students!
Oh boy, got a little excited and cracked a nasty rat. Oh my lord! Seek cover! What crawled up there?! Lemme borrow your pen for a second... oh.. oh god, oh man.. sorry about the pen.
Heh. Well, this has been a fun, nostalgic romp down memory lane. Kids, turning 30 sucks. Don't turn 30. I got hemorroids for my birthday. My business failed right before my birthday. And my marriage fell over right after my birthday. 30's bad, mmmkay? Actually, that's not true. I got the 'roids when I was 29. I think the key there is to not push like you're giving birth to a brown water balloon, and instead just kinda let it happen, ease 'em on out, just do some reading or contribute something to the stall door. Your anus will thank you later.
Just skip 30 and go straight to 31. I'll bet that one is a lot cooler. You're over the shock of 30, and it's like definitely your first year of being a "grown up." I think for my 31st birthday, I'm gonna go find some impressionable kid and give him some advice. "Hey kid, yeah you with the trench coat. Come here. That's it, atta boy, little closer... Yeah, OK, Perfect! LISTEN YOU LITTLE MORON, YOUR MOMMA TOLD YOU NOT TO APPROACH STRANGERS, NOW GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME! RUN! I MIGHT BE A PSYCHO WITH SOME CANDY! RUN BOY RUN! There's a good boy. He'll grow up, god willing, to be a decent citizen like me someday."
OK, last tidbit, as I guess I'm sposed to be morbid and talk about the shootings a little. So, my vote for most nightmarish imagery is the kids trying to hide under their desks, and the shooters actually going out of their way to kill them, too. Oh my god. That gives me the giga-creeps. I swear I've had nightmares like that where I'm hiding from someone with a gun, and he keeps pointing it around whatever obstacle I'm using. Sweet Jesus.
Woah, I just realized something totally unfair. I'll bet if you look like Bill Gates as a kid, you get treated like royalty now. Hm...
Ah, the weekend. More time to extend my perfect record of never killing anyone another two days, and time to play my favorite computer game, Total Annihilation.
Ed Muth said, "I find it hard to believe that some of the best computer scientists in the world will want to do their work for free. Without a long-term technical road map, without multimillion-dollar test labs, someone wants me to believe these visionary programmers and developers will want to do the best work of their lives and then give it away. I do not believe in that vision of the future."
Idealsts picked this fight, but pragmatists will finish it.
What MS forgot is that the first line of users isn't Mom and Dad, but other programmers, trying to write good code in short order for the operating system. Coders haven't been served well by MSDOS and Windows.
Linux serves coders, and those coders get a kick out of contributing code to the public, getting feedback, and honing their code for users or other coders. It's a highly recursive, parallelizable algorithm which virulently proliferates service and goodwill.
Or put another way, it's a pyramid scheme of goodwill. Linus gets the most goodwill, followed by the kernel contributors, application developers, and then Linux users for helping to make it a mainstream operating system.
Maybe that's not right, but it's the real world. Been waiting all my life to say that without feeling ashamed.
=-ddt->
Well-written, informative, and genuine. Thanks
for posting. We don't get much of a glimpse into the guts of Microsoft.
=-ddt->