These methodologies are the management equivalent of profiling and debugging for programmers. When you write code, you want to know how well it is performing, where the slow parts are, etc.
Management methodologies are exactly this. Process management is a science, and it has rigorous steps. A good manager will understand these methodologies, so they can focus on the intent of them and leverage trusted techniques. Of course, a manager who has only had a 2 week course in various methodologies is likely to mess them up-- just like an inexperienced programmer who has been told "use this profiler" and has never seen such a tool before.
-m
Putting in housing and parking affordable to all of the 20 something employees and eliminating the 12% state capital gains that kills our stock options might make MA more.com friendly... or, they could just name it the ".com" state. Aren't politicians great? I mean, why do anything to actually change the condition of the state when they can change the name instead.
I use my mouse left-handed and switched to a MS natural keyboard tipped down (i.e. near part higher). Aside from making it impossible to hit C-Y with my left hand, this works pretty well, keeps my wrists straight, and means that my right hand (arrow keys) and left hand (mouse) get an equal workout. As an added bonus, it is even harder for one's colleagues to use one's console:)
We found each other mostly by random coincidence; the two "founders" were brothers and hacked together in high school with some friends. That made up the original core development group.
Since then, most of us have wandered in because we were friends of people who wore working on stuff there. There have probably been about 50 people total-- some wander in, write a few lines, and wander out, others contribute to project after project.
Right now there are maybe 10 people doing various things including marketing, testing, art, development, and research. In order to keep new blood coming in, some of us teach summer courses to high school students. This is a good way to help out and inspire little up and coming nerds like you once were, as well as recruiting to keep the company going. The people in college can usually drag their friends in the same frat or dorm into contributing, so we meet a lot of high school and college kinds.
It's pretty hard to attract older people. They are burned out by their day jobs and don't want to work nights and weekends on another project. I find that it is really restorative to work in a good environment, but if you aren't already doing that, it sounds like a lot of work to hold down two jobs. Hey, maybe if we get enough people, some of them can go full time Morgan Systems and make the company really grow. It's always one of our fantasies.
Now that I'm in sales mode, I should have mentioned that dead projects (things that are no longer supported) are released as source so that users who write code are never screwed. They can always write to the company and request new features while the project is supported, and can get the source and fix bugs/add features if the project is gone. I really wish big companies would do that. I understand that there are good reasons for keeping source controlled when it is part of a flag ship product, but ditching users by shutting down support for a product and not making the source or specs available really sucks-- it's not a good way to run a customer relationship.
This has been 100% of my experience in the industry as well. I agree that the best game developers are multi-talented, with expertise at art, design, game scripting, implementation, and good old fashioned hacking.
I ended up working with a small shareware company part time, so that I could still work on games, but do it in a pleasant environment. Your list description of an ideal environment is what I strive for. Our company focusses on the relationship between customers, the company, and "employees". We have no salaries, so we are free to work on or start whatever projects we want, because it is not costing the company anything. If something ships, the profits are distributed entirely among the people who contributed to the product.
The down side of this is that you don't ship sexy, cutting edge apps. The things that ship as consumer products in our case tend to be simple Win32 arcade games, which have accumulated a small cult following and get a few million downloads a year.
However, we do have some sexy things in house-- platform independent (well, really linux, win32, mac, sparc... anywhere codewarrior or gcc compile to) games, 2d/3d graphics engines, languages, etc. that are developed and licensed to larger companies, as well as small but lucrative consulting deals for websites and small apps. We don't get the brand recognition of working on a product anybody has ever heard of, and you don't get the support of having up front resources to afford to hire people and buy art-- everything is through contributors who work for free (plus royalties, of course). We do get to work in an exciting, supportive environment (where everyone wants to be there and finds it fun!). It is comfortable, but I wouldn't say "low-key", though. There are a lot of late nights of hacking or design sessions, because that's one way great things get done in this industry.
FWIW, Morgan Systems is the company. You probably won't be impressed with the games, and they don't run under linux:( Maybe some of our other stuff will start to get out though; we have a simplified Matlab style app/language and ray tracer that are going to be released as open source, and run everywhere. Hopefully some of our libraries are coming to a game near you, but not with our brand on them.
I wonder how much is in their distro, though. The Windows kernel is way huge, but that is only a small part of the OS. The file system, GDI, UI (which includes IE now), device drivers, etc. make up the bulk.
The coolest thing about this is that with a 200kb NT, it would be possible to use it as an NT emulator, making it possible to load NT device drivers under other OS's. A little linux-NT bridge could easily be built, where the drivers would get all of the NT services they expect.
This would be very helpful for getting "alternative" OS's like BeOS, Linux, MacOS, OS/2, (and now, PetrOS) etc. running on currently unsupported hardware.
Forbes made up the list. They had two categories: royalty and working people. The news show you saw must have mixed them up. Ballmer was #4 on the working people list. The Sultan of Brunei was #1 on the royalty list.
There are a few subtle issues involved here. At about 12fps (the eye's sampling rate), you can't tell the difference between multiple frames and true motion-- this is what makes computer animations possible.
However, this doesn't mean you can't tell the difference in frame rate as it goes higher. There is a strobe effect due to phase differences between your eye and the animation rate. This is what you report in your simple experiment above. This effect remains until about 80fps, at which point your eyes just can't tell the difference. This is why really fast moving objects on a movie screen (like the point of view from the tip of a roller coaster) still don't look great, even though you can't see the individual frames. This effect is also very pronounced if you play a game like Quake (or Unreal!) at different frame rates-- it looks a heck of a lot better as you edge towards 80fps.
Note: There are still the probe droids used on Hoth, but they are non-humanoid.
The empire doesn't use humanoid droids, but R2's are standard in X-wings for the rebellion, and there are a bunch running around in other capacities.
A big part of Darth Vader's character is that he is part machine, and the anti-machine backlash (both in the movie and in real life) is part of what makes him "evil" and inhuman. I wonder how this fits into the character's beliefs about machines.
How long do you think it will be on the 12th until MovieFone's servers die? Everyone in America trying to do an http post to get tickets at the same time...
When a James Bond movie comes out, Boston theatres are packed with college students-- can't wait for this one!
-m
Re:Just try to go and see it with an open mind peo
on
Phantom Menace Reviews
·
· Score: 1
Lucas can never measure up to fifteen+ years of expectations in a two hour film! Just take it for what it is. I'd bet against you. I have really high expectations for this movie. Not in the sense of "It's the greatest, most important film of all time", but in the sense that Star Wars created a universe complete unto itself, and I've spent 15 years waiting for a window back into it to see more. Star Wars is great because of its mythology, attention to detail, and general artistry: TPM looks to bring all of this back with a vengance. My biggest concern is that it will go too far with eye candy at the expense of the Star Wars feel.
On another note: How is he going to explain the absence of 10e6 droids in the later films? Would you downgrade to storm troopers from robot legions? I'm sure it will be explained though. A backlash against intelligent droids?
a) Performance: Have you seen the screen-shot video clips? I don't have any doubts about performance. Anyway 20million polys is more than the PSXII can generate geometry for, so it's certainly enough.
b) Obsolescence:(as Nintendo still sells the N64, which came out in like '95?'96? only now is Nintendo making money on the hardware...). Nintendo never intended to make money off of it... they sold it below cost to make money off of licensing games.
c/s) Competition/Price: PC's are in a totally different ball game. PSX, N64... a stable, uniform platform. Try running/writing a PC game that never crashes, runs the same on everyone's machine and has (almost) no glitches. I don't know about you, but most PC games I run can't match this. I'm willing to pay a lot more for this kind of reliability out of a game machine. -m
Um... doesn't MS own WebTV or am I totally scrambled?
PSXII will be a totally awesome set-top box if they really go for it; maybe this will really bring 3d to the net. But they'd need a HD to cache stuff on, store cookies, etc.; every "web" set-top plan has a few 100 meg for this purpose. -m
Yes! I'm stuck on RCN because MediaOne hasn't wired my area. RCN service sucks. My cable modem is down 20% of the time, and often the phones and cable go down as well. (And the FX channel has sound problems; but maybe that's not RCN's fault). -m
Yes, great job on this article, Jon! Those kids getting harassed in the schools are the next generation of *us*. The intelligent/net/geek culture has now evolved to the point where there are enough of us outside the schools to make a difference. Especially for kids in urban and near-urban or depressed suburban areas, they need our help. Kudos to those who have suggested taking this to the media, the politicians, and the school administrators. Public schools are very reactive to the public-- they need the local public to vote to approve their budgets. Local campaigns to change schools can actually have effects, especially in places where 100 votes is the swing difference between a passed and failed budget. I try to contribute by volunteer teaching in high schools. Often, meeting, encouraging and befriending the kids who remind you of yourself can be a really positive experience in both of your lives. And you can help guide them to a good college. Littletown has really lit a spark at/. Hey, maybe those kids were nothing like us. But the backlash is definitely directed at American culture cracking down on still emerging net culture, and is really hurting the first truly on-line generation. -m
Have you ever lived in the Northeast US? The states are way too powerful-- they have too many rights and the individuals have too few. Mass., NY, and Conn. have almost restored things to the way they were prior to the American Revolution-- religious based laws regarding alcohol and recreation, gun control laws that border on the insane, curfews [for young people], huge taxes, and an indirect and unresponsive legislature.
Individuals need to be protected from the States by a federal government today. The federal government has the burden of accomodating people from wildly different walks of life, and is more resistant to regional bigotry and lunacy. Individual inventors should be protected from State governments using their work freely; especially in an age where State governments run lotteries, stores, auctions and other commercial establishments. Otherwise the patent system will be defeated-- would you seek a patent or rely on a trade secret if the patent allows a State government to use it for free and keeping your technology secret allows you to contract to the State? It's bad enough that the federal government can abuse patents by classifying them and claiming "National Security".
That said, I get a sick feeling every time I think about some patents-- like software ones. These completely restrict innovation by preventing people from using the best algorithms and letting large companies eat up mindspace and prevent small companies from producing products. Has the GIF patent really helped the state of the art? Maybe-- it forced the open source movement (when did we become a movement? I'm getting media blitzed) to introduce PNG and JPEGroup to work on JPEG2000.
It seems most companies (at least the ones I've worked for) pursue patents not because they intend to use the technology, but to prevent someone else from using the technology to obsolete the company's ancient business plan and technology. Rumor has it that oil companies patent the heck out of alternative energy sources to prevent them from being used...
On the previous Hellmouth article, someone posted about Nerd Revenge, suggesting that getting a better job, a better spouse, and a better car means that you "won" and the jock working at McDonalds "lost". I like to tell myself this, but I'm not so sure it is true.
What does it mean that you won on these criterion? You sacrificed everything you cared about when you were oppressed in high school-- freedom, deep intellectual concerns, a love of good books and good stories, general geeki-ness, and tried to beat the popular croud at their own game. So now that you are rich, well dressed, have lots of friends, and are tied 24/7 to your cell phone doing internet consulting... have you won? You bought into their ideals and sacrificed what you cared about. Sleeping with that popular person's boyfriend (or girlfriend), driving a porsche, and having them get your fries isn't what winning at life is all about.
To the people still stuck in school: Middle school was hell. High school was hell. If you are lucky, you manage to slide by on the sidelines, keep your D&D friends, keep your computer, and keep learning. If you aren't, someone "cracks down" on you and takes away the things that are expanding your universe. Life is infinitely better in college; you'll find more people like yourself, be able to control what you buy, what you watch, what you do. You will [mostly] be rewarded for being intelligent and dedicated.
Slashdot Mirror
These methodologies are the management equivalent of profiling and debugging for programmers. When you write code, you want to know how well it is performing, where the slow parts are, etc. Management methodologies are exactly this. Process management is a science, and it has rigorous steps. A good manager will understand these methodologies, so they can focus on the intent of them and leverage trusted techniques. Of course, a manager who has only had a 2 week course in various methodologies is likely to mess them up-- just like an inexperienced programmer who has been told "use this profiler" and has never seen such a tool before. -m
-m
Wonder if this slanted agreement is related to the new building Bill bought for MIT...
magic
Since then, most of us have wandered in because we were friends of people who wore working on stuff there. There have probably been about 50 people total-- some wander in, write a few lines, and wander out, others contribute to project after project.
Right now there are maybe 10 people doing various things including marketing, testing, art, development, and research. In order to keep new blood coming in, some of us teach summer courses to high school students. This is a good way to help out and inspire little up and coming nerds like you once were, as well as recruiting to keep the company going. The people in college can usually drag their friends in the same frat or dorm into contributing, so we meet a lot of high school and college kinds.
It's pretty hard to attract older people. They are burned out by their day jobs and don't want to work nights and weekends on another project. I find that it is really restorative to work in a good environment, but if you aren't already doing that, it sounds like a lot of work to hold down two jobs. Hey, maybe if we get enough people, some of them can go full time Morgan Systems and make the company really grow. It's always one of our fantasies.
Now that I'm in sales mode, I should have mentioned that dead projects (things that are no longer supported) are released as source so that users who write code are never screwed. They can always write to the company and request new features while the project is supported, and can get the source and fix bugs/add features if the project is gone. I really wish big companies would do that. I understand that there are good reasons for keeping source controlled when it is part of a flag ship product, but ditching users by shutting down support for a product and not making the source or specs available really sucks-- it's not a good way to run a customer relationship.
-magic
This has been 100% of my experience in the industry as well. I agree that the best game developers are multi-talented, with expertise at art, design, game scripting, implementation, and good old fashioned hacking.
I ended up working with a small shareware company part time, so that I could still work on games, but do it in a pleasant environment. Your list description of an ideal environment is what I strive for. Our company focusses on the relationship between customers, the company, and "employees". We have no salaries, so we are free to work on or start whatever projects we want, because it is not costing the company anything. If something ships, the profits are distributed entirely among the people who contributed to the product.
The down side of this is that you don't ship sexy, cutting edge apps. The things that ship as consumer products in our case tend to be simple Win32 arcade games, which have accumulated a small cult following and get a few million downloads a year.
However, we do have some sexy things in house-- platform independent (well, really linux, win32, mac, sparc... anywhere codewarrior or gcc compile to) games, 2d/3d graphics engines, languages, etc. that are developed and licensed to larger companies, as well as small but lucrative consulting deals for websites and small apps. We don't get the brand recognition of working on a product anybody has ever heard of, and you don't get the support of having up front resources to afford to hire people and buy art-- everything is through contributors who work for free (plus royalties, of course). We do get to work in an exciting, supportive environment (where everyone wants to be there and finds it fun!). It is comfortable, but I wouldn't say "low-key", though. There are a lot of late nights of hacking or design sessions, because that's one way great things get done in this industry.
FWIW, Morgan Systems is the company. You probably won't be impressed with the games, and they don't run under linux :( Maybe some of our other stuff will start to get out though; we have a simplified Matlab style app/language and ray tracer that are going to be released as open source, and run everywhere. Hopefully some of our libraries are coming to a game near you, but not with our brand on them.
The coolest thing about this is that with a 200kb NT, it would be possible to use it as an NT emulator, making it possible to load NT device drivers under other OS's. A little linux-NT bridge could easily be built, where the drivers would get all of the NT services they expect.
This would be very helpful for getting "alternative" OS's like BeOS, Linux, MacOS, OS/2, (and now, PetrOS) etc. running on currently unsupported hardware.
-m
-m
However, this doesn't mean you can't tell the difference in frame rate as it goes higher. There is a strobe effect due to phase differences between your eye and the animation rate. This is what you report in your simple experiment above. This effect remains until about 80fps, at which point your eyes just can't tell the difference. This is why really fast moving objects on a movie screen (like the point of view from the tip of a roller coaster) still don't look great, even though you can't see the individual frames. This effect is also very pronounced if you play a game like Quake (or Unreal!) at different frame rates-- it looks a heck of a lot better as you edge towards 80fps.
-m
The empire doesn't use humanoid droids, but R2's are standard in X-wings for the rebellion, and there are a bunch running around in other capacities.
A big part of Darth Vader's character is that he is part machine, and the anti-machine backlash (both in the movie and in real life) is part of what makes him "evil" and inhuman. I wonder how this fits into the character's beliefs about machines.
-m
-m
-m
On another note: How is he going to explain the absence of 10e6 droids in the later films? Would you downgrade to storm troopers from robot legions? I'm sure it will be explained though. A backlash against intelligent droids?
-m
b) Obsolescence: (as Nintendo still sells the N64, which came out in like '95?'96? only now is Nintendo making money on the hardware...). Nintendo never intended to make money off of it... they sold it below cost to make money off of licensing games.
c/s) Competition/Price: PC's are in a totally different ball game. PSX, N64... a stable, uniform platform. Try running/writing a PC game that never crashes, runs the same on everyone's machine and has (almost) no glitches. I don't know about you, but most PC games I run can't match this. I'm willing to pay a lot more for this kind of reliability out of a game machine. -m
PSXII will be a totally awesome set-top box if they really go for it; maybe this will really bring 3d to the net. But they'd need a HD to cache stuff on, store cookies, etc.; every "web" set-top plan has a few 100 meg for this purpose. -m
Yes! I'm stuck on RCN because MediaOne hasn't wired my area. RCN service sucks. My cable modem is down 20% of the time, and often the phones and cable go down as well. (And the FX channel has sound problems; but maybe that's not RCN's fault). -m
Yes, great job on this article, Jon! Those kids getting harassed in the schools are the next generation of *us*. The intelligent/net/geek culture has now evolved to the point where there are enough of us outside the schools to make a difference. Especially for kids in urban and near-urban or depressed suburban areas, they need our help. Kudos to those who have suggested taking this to the media, the politicians, and the school administrators. Public schools are very reactive to the public-- they need the local public to vote to approve their budgets. Local campaigns to change schools can actually have effects, especially in places where 100 votes is the swing difference between a passed and failed budget. I try to contribute by volunteer teaching in high schools. Often, meeting, encouraging and befriending the kids who remind you of yourself can be a really positive experience in both of your lives. And you can help guide them to a good college. Littletown has really lit a spark at /. Hey, maybe those kids were nothing like us. But the backlash is definitely directed at American culture cracking down on still emerging net culture, and is really hurting the first truly on-line generation. -m
Have you ever lived in the Northeast US? The states are way too powerful-- they have too many rights and the individuals have too few. Mass., NY, and Conn. have almost restored things to the way they were prior to the American Revolution-- religious based laws regarding alcohol and recreation, gun control laws that border on the insane, curfews [for young people], huge taxes, and an indirect and unresponsive legislature.
Individuals need to be protected from the States by a federal government today. The federal government has the burden of accomodating people from wildly different walks of life, and is more resistant to regional bigotry and lunacy. Individual inventors should be protected from State governments using their work freely; especially in an age where State governments run lotteries, stores, auctions and other commercial establishments. Otherwise the patent system will be defeated-- would you seek a patent or rely on a trade secret if the patent allows a State government to use it for free and keeping your technology secret allows you to contract to the State? It's bad enough that the federal government can abuse patents by classifying them and claiming "National Security".
That said, I get a sick feeling every time I think about some patents-- like software ones. These completely restrict innovation by preventing people from using the best algorithms and letting large companies eat up mindspace and prevent small companies from producing products. Has the GIF patent really helped the state of the art? Maybe-- it forced the open source movement (when did we become a movement? I'm getting media blitzed) to introduce PNG and JPEGroup to work on JPEG2000.
It seems most companies (at least the ones I've worked for) pursue patents not because they intend to use the technology, but to prevent someone else from using the technology to obsolete the company's ancient business plan and technology. Rumor has it that oil companies patent the heck out of alternative energy sources to prevent them from being used...
-m
FastFood for thought:
On the previous Hellmouth article, someone posted about Nerd Revenge, suggesting that getting a better job, a better spouse, and a better car means that you "won" and the jock working at McDonalds "lost". I like to tell myself this, but I'm not so sure it is true.
What does it mean that you won on these criterion? You sacrificed everything you cared about when you were oppressed in high school-- freedom, deep intellectual concerns, a love of good books and good stories, general geeki-ness, and tried to beat the popular croud at their own game. So now that you are rich, well dressed, have lots of friends, and are tied 24/7 to your cell phone doing internet consulting... have you won? You bought into their ideals and sacrificed what you cared about. Sleeping with that popular person's boyfriend (or girlfriend), driving a porsche, and having them get your fries isn't what winning at life is all about.
To the people still stuck in school: Middle school was hell. High school was hell. If you are lucky, you manage to slide by on the sidelines, keep your D&D friends, keep your computer, and keep learning. If you aren't, someone "cracks down" on you and takes away the things that are expanding your universe. Life is infinitely better in college; you'll find more people like yourself, be able to control what you buy, what you watch, what you do. You will [mostly] be rewarded for being intelligent and dedicated.
-m