Even better, I suspect there are no where near 100,000 10 letter words in any dictionary. The OED is only about 600,000 words total, and I'm guessing that far less than 1 in 6 words is ten letters long.
And a computer program trying to perform this analysis can clearly do a lot of cleverness about things like hashing all the valid 3 letter combinations so I bet an exhaustive search could be performed in 50,000 ^ 5 or less. That's in the range of only 10^23. That'd be computible by a million computers in a few years.
1) Unfortunately, we were really pushing the limits of distributed development with the amount of data we were pushing around. The artwork was horrendously huge, and so to a great extent source control was more expensive time wise than compile. We invested in fast disks and 100mbit ethernet which was the best you could reasonably get at the time (1gbit existed, but it would have meant upgrading all the computers and would have been horrendously expensive). We should have made a source control system change, VSS was very poorly performing, but we could never bite the bullet on making that change. I actually wrote a vss replacement client to fix some performance issues on the client side, but that only improved the situation by about 2x and we needed more like 100x.
2) Management was the key problem. They were just some guys who developed games because they liked it at one point, and got sucked up into management roles because they founded the company. They didn't actually know anything about being managers, and they did it very badly.
3) Thankfully, I didn't get divorced, and no, I don't think anyone who did thought it was worth it. It was just really hard to escape. The bitterness for me comes from having worked even as hard as I did, and then not getting paid like I was promised. I trusted the wrong people. At least one of the bosses did wind up with a divorce though. But that doesn't make me happy, I don't like people to suffer.
4) That's exactly who the game business is built on the backs of. And the problem is that there are more than enough desperate and talented under 25 guys who want to make games to make it work. It's also why quality control on games is so poor.
They lick walls for sure. From age 1ish to about age 4 you get to spend all the time you'd care to trying to keep track of what goes into their mouths.
I'm glad if my posts have helped you. To be fair to the industry in general: not every company demands 80 hour weeks. However, to work less than 50 per week is rare enough that I don't know anyone able to keep their hours that low. Having kids in particular I think makes you much better off sticking with someplace where you can work reasonable hours and spend more of your time with them.
It's an unfortunate problem (for those of us with families who would like to make games). A lot of kids grow up thinking making video games would be cool, and enough of them have the talent and are willing to throw their whole lives into it, for a while. I think as long as that remains true, game development will continue to be an ultra high burn rate career for young single men.
Every so often I dream about putting together a team of older people with the right experience to develop games in a saner way, but it will never be reality unless I get lucky with stocks or find myself a venture capital angel.
The solution which works much better is to have the litigant pay standard rate legal fees of both sides if they lose. Then if someone big sues you, a lawyer can take your case and defend you, offering only to charge you if he succeeds in your defense (and then he gets paid by the litigator, eg RIAA rather than you).
You might think that more is always better, but when it comes to frikken sharks with frikken laser beams on their head, you eventually reach a point where the frikken sharks are immobilized by the pressure in the shark tank, and then what use are they?
GPUs are commonly already 16 processor units wide in the pixel & vertex shaders, while a modern single general purpose cpu core is at most 3 execution units wide. Even if the CPU is 4x the MHZ, it's still slower, and the performance ratio will even be worse than indicated because the GPU's logic is more specialized. Plus it is better not to have to go back and forth over the speed limited PCIex16 bus.
So you won't see anyone implement things this way, not even intel.
No kidding. It was abundantly clear that the death march was reducing total productivity, but no one would listen to reason.
In the end I got severely punished for my daring to work only 80 hours when the bonus money came around, and as a result, I basically invested 3 of my most productive years for no return. To say it was a bitter experience is an understatement, yet I haven't any better words to describe it.
Now I work for a nice sane company that basically forbids anyone in dev from working over 40. I miss making games a bit, so I've gone back to doing that in my spare time, which seems much more rewarding.
You're basically right on for what I'm describing except:
1) input is commonly in its own thread, and the inputs are queued for reading by the main loop. 2) network is usually in its own thread for the same reasons.
Do the same thing for sound and music, and you're up to 5 threads already.
Diablo II went to the unusual length of doing some disk loading in a background thread as well. Now you're up to 6.
But the key problem is that rendering/simulation is where 95+% of your cpu goes, and those are probably in the same single thread.
I pointed this out mainly to counter this prevailing notion that game developers don't know how to write simple multithreaded code. They in fact do know how to do so, and have done all of the relatively easy or even medium difficulty multithreading already. Multithreading a 3d renderer is really hard work, and likewise so is multithreading a complex simulation.
The OS task scheduler tells each thread when to run, and can stop each thread from running at any time.
It does not tell a thread what operations to perform, nor what resources to use, other than time. And it doesn't even tell the thread what time to use: the thread has no awareness of what the task scheduler is doing.
There are a couple of ways I'm familiar with to break into the game industry.
#1: I don't recommend this one. Go into game testing. It doesn't pay much, but it will put you in a position to make connections with the developers. It's job hell too. It might sound like fun to test games that aren't even on the market yet, but try to imagine being the guy who verified that a barbarian picking up each of the 100 or so uniquely rendered weapons looked correct. Then imagine doing that on each major patch release. Then imagine you've got to do that plus the other character classes, and all the armor combos, etc.
#2: Look for an entry level job at a lesser developer. Most people at blizzard or Id are not on their first game job. Instead, they worked (successfully) at some lesser developer, and then got hired at blizzard based on their successful release of some title. This is how you get the experience even though a top tier game maker won't hire you.
#3: Make games in your spare time. Mods for existing games are a popular way to prove yourself. I had 3 significant self published games before getting hired at blizzard, so this is the route I took. I made a shareware mode 13 game for dos (way back when) followed by a significant but relatively unsuccessful mod for quake 1, followed by a PC Gamer mod of the year for quake 2. My quake 2 mod was played and enjoyed by a number of people at blizzard, and that was what got me the interview. The other 2 games helped sell my credentials as someone seriously into games.
As a final note, don't have a wife or girlfriend. The games industry is absolutely murderous on relationships. Diablo II resulted in 3 divorces, 3 affairs (with at least one affair pregnancy), and 5 breakups (that I know of). My own relationship barely survived, and that was only because I cut back to 80 hours a week, even though people were bitching at me for the laziness. (Why couldn't I take my work seriously like the people who slept in their company provided sleeping bags under their desks 6 hours a night?)
Spishak Spokesman- Pat Kilbane Ron- Andrew Bowen Wife- Nicole Sullivan
Ron: So what do ya think honey, do i look like a first rate professional business man?
Wife: Honey did you even shave?
Ron: Twice. Its those damn triple blade razors they just dont give me the close shave i need to make me a first rate professional business man.
Wife: Ron if you dont get a promotion today, im leaving you.
Ron: Its the thoughts(??) of those damn triple blade razors. I wish there was a better razor, a way better one, ya know?
(Spishak Spokesman steps out from behind the shower curtain)
Spishak Spokesman: Well now there is! Spishak presents the Mach 20 with twenty blades we guarantee you the closest shave of your life.
Ron: That could be the edge i need to make me a first rate professional business man.
Spishak Spokesman: It sure could. Watch this.
(Shows an animation of the razor as each blade runs over the face)
Spishak Spokesman: (Voiceover) You see the first blade cuts the facial hair but before the hair can snap back the second blade cuts it again, the third blade cuts it once more, the forth blade cuts it again, the fifth blade goes deeper digging below the first layer of skin to remove the hair follicle, the sixth blade cuts away that pesky second layer of skin where there might be some renegade hair follicles, the seventh blade cuts away six more layers of skin ensuring that hair will never ever grow there. The eighth blade sends an electronic pulse to the centre of the brain which destroys the part of the brain responsible for hair growth and four other non essential functions. The ninth blade gently smoothes out the jaw bone to give your face a more even appearance. The tenth blade removes cavity causing tartar and the eleventh blade starts the process all over again. By the time the twentith blade passes over your face your a first rate professional business man. That promotion is as good as yours.
(Shows Ron with his face covered in bloody bandages)
Wife: Thanks Spishak, you saved our marriage.
Ron: Hmmm?
Spishak Spokesman: The Spishak Mach 20. Coming soon the ladies Spishak Mach 20 for all your most personal female shaving needs.
The software strategy for taking advantage of multicore is fairly straightforward, though not simple:
Find your cpu bound code areas. Make them multithreaded. When your application launches, ask the OS how many cores there are, and launch that number of threads.
The challenge of course is in 'make them multithreaded'. This takes a lot of hard engineering work.
I assume you meant funny but you got moderated insightful, so I'll point out just in case that there is no optimal number of cores. What the industry should want, in its own best interest, is for software not to be able to assume the number of cores (particularly the assumption that #cores == 1). Instead, your software should be able to ask the OS how many cores are available, and scale up its threading to that number for optimal performance.
Most game software is multithreaded. However, it is not multi-threaded in a way that will significantly increase performance given multiple cpus.
As one example, I worked on Diablo II, and it had at least 5 threads (there might have been even more, but I can remember what 5 threads did). I've talked to plenty of other people in the industry, and the story is the same everywhere: multithreaded, but not parallelized in the most cpu intensive areas.
Do you want to have to install lead lining for your home when one of your neighbors decides to do this?
And risk your children licking it?
Or do you want to trust the same crazy neighbor who wants to run one of these things in a residential rather than industrial zoned area to install and maintain proper shielding?
I'm just telling people what would be legal, not what I'd do. The law has separated itself far from both ethics and morals. I'm an ethical and moral person, but not a legally obedient one.
Yeah, for a while I used to append;-) to all my humorous posts, but that started to seem too blatant to me. Ruins the fun of having that moment of 'is this person serious?' run through your head.:-)
I'm pretty sure that's how the law reads right now, unfortunately. Though you can act in defense of your property: file a lawsuit. And of course if the virus doesn't identify the rights owner, then I think you are off the hook also.
Sure, you didn't turn into an axe murderer. But should we really be allowing a product in society that turns even one in ten people into an axe murderer like D&D did, or video games do now? What if the rate is one in a hundred? Where do you draw the line?
I don't think any of that changes my central point: the court can and does go to any length it wants beyond what is clearly defined in the constitution. You seem to be claiming it's all constitutional, since the 9th amendment says: there's lots of stuff we left out. That's fine, but it does clearly indicate that pretty much anything then could be found to be constitutional. The notion of 'strict' interpretation is just utter rubbish in my opinion.
If you discover spyware is on your system, and your state has laws against that, you may pursue a suit against the spyware vendor.
If the spyware is protected by anti-circumvention devices, you are not permitted to remove it yourself.
Ergo, include removal as part of your recompense for damages in the suit. Sony will need to provide for the removal of the spyware, and at its discretion could give you permission to remove the spyware using a 3rd party tool.
I think a better analogy might be to ask whether the landlord does or should have a right to evict you if you commit a crime on or using the rented property. As an example, imagine that instead of decorating with hideous furniture, you decorated with a meth lab.
Slashdot Mirror
Even better, I suspect there are no where near 100,000 10 letter words in any dictionary. The OED is only about 600,000 words total, and I'm guessing that far less than 1 in 6 words is ten letters long.
o nary
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dicti
And a computer program trying to perform this analysis can clearly do a lot of cleverness about things like hashing all the valid 3 letter combinations so I bet an exhaustive search could be performed in 50,000 ^ 5 or less. That's in the range of only 10^23. That'd be computible by a million computers in a few years.
1) Unfortunately, we were really pushing the limits of distributed development with the amount of data we were pushing around. The artwork was horrendously huge, and so to a great extent source control was more expensive time wise than compile. We invested in fast disks and 100mbit ethernet which was the best you could reasonably get at the time (1gbit existed, but it would have meant upgrading all the computers and would have been horrendously expensive). We should have made a source control system change, VSS was very poorly performing, but we could never bite the bullet on making that change. I actually wrote a vss replacement client to fix some performance issues on the client side, but that only improved the situation by about 2x and we needed more like 100x.
2) Management was the key problem. They were just some guys who developed games because they liked it at one point, and got sucked up into management roles because they founded the company. They didn't actually know anything about being managers, and they did it very badly.
3) Thankfully, I didn't get divorced, and no, I don't think anyone who did thought it was worth it. It was just really hard to escape. The bitterness for me comes from having worked even as hard as I did, and then not getting paid like I was promised. I trusted the wrong people. At least one of the bosses did wind up with a divorce though. But that doesn't make me happy, I don't like people to suffer.
4) That's exactly who the game business is built on the backs of. And the problem is that there are more than enough desperate and talented under 25 guys who want to make games to make it work. It's also why quality control on games is so poor.
They lick walls for sure. From age 1ish to about age 4 you get to spend all the time you'd care to trying to keep track of what goes into their mouths.
I'm glad if my posts have helped you. To be fair to the industry in general: not every company demands 80 hour weeks. However, to work less than 50 per week is rare enough that I don't know anyone able to keep their hours that low. Having kids in particular I think makes you much better off sticking with someplace where you can work reasonable hours and spend more of your time with them.
It's an unfortunate problem (for those of us with families who would like to make games). A lot of kids grow up thinking making video games would be cool, and enough of them have the talent and are willing to throw their whole lives into it, for a while. I think as long as that remains true, game development will continue to be an ultra high burn rate career for young single men.
Every so often I dream about putting together a team of older people with the right experience to develop games in a saner way, but it will never be reality unless I get lucky with stocks or find myself a venture capital angel.
The solution which works much better is to have the litigant pay standard rate legal fees of both sides if they lose. Then if someone big sues you, a lawyer can take your case and defend you, offering only to charge you if he succeeds in your defense (and then he gets paid by the litigator, eg RIAA rather than you).
You might think that more is always better, but when it comes to frikken sharks with frikken laser beams on their head, you eventually reach a point where the frikken sharks are immobilized by the pressure in the shark tank, and then what use are they?
GPUs are commonly already 16 processor units wide in the pixel & vertex shaders, while a modern single general purpose cpu core is at most 3 execution units wide. Even if the CPU is 4x the MHZ, it's still slower, and the performance ratio will even be worse than indicated because the GPU's logic is more specialized. Plus it is better not to have to go back and forth over the speed limited PCIex16 bus.
So you won't see anyone implement things this way, not even intel.
No kidding. It was abundantly clear that the death march was reducing total productivity, but no one would listen to reason.
In the end I got severely punished for my daring to work only 80 hours when the bonus money came around, and as a result, I basically invested 3 of my most productive years for no return. To say it was a bitter experience is an understatement, yet I haven't any better words to describe it.
Now I work for a nice sane company that basically forbids anyone in dev from working over 40. I miss making games a bit, so I've gone back to doing that in my spare time, which seems much more rewarding.
You're basically right on for what I'm describing except:
1) input is commonly in its own thread, and the inputs are queued for reading by the main loop.
2) network is usually in its own thread for the same reasons.
Do the same thing for sound and music, and you're up to 5 threads already.
Diablo II went to the unusual length of doing some disk loading in a background thread as well. Now you're up to 6.
But the key problem is that rendering/simulation is where 95+% of your cpu goes, and those are probably in the same single thread.
I pointed this out mainly to counter this prevailing notion that game developers don't know how to write simple multithreaded code. They in fact do know how to do so, and have done all of the relatively easy or even medium difficulty multithreading already. Multithreading a 3d renderer is really hard work, and likewise so is multithreading a complex simulation.
The OS task scheduler tells each thread when to run, and can stop each thread from running at any time.
It does not tell a thread what operations to perform, nor what resources to use, other than time. And it doesn't even tell the thread what time to use: the thread has no awareness of what the task scheduler is doing.
There are a couple of ways I'm familiar with to break into the game industry.
#1: I don't recommend this one. Go into game testing. It doesn't pay much, but it will put you in a position to make connections with the developers. It's job hell too. It might sound like fun to test games that aren't even on the market yet, but try to imagine being the guy who verified that a barbarian picking up each of the 100 or so uniquely rendered weapons looked correct. Then imagine doing that on each major patch release. Then imagine you've got to do that plus the other character classes, and all the armor combos, etc.
#2: Look for an entry level job at a lesser developer. Most people at blizzard or Id are not on their first game job. Instead, they worked (successfully) at some lesser developer, and then got hired at blizzard based on their successful release of some title. This is how you get the experience even though a top tier game maker won't hire you.
#3: Make games in your spare time. Mods for existing games are a popular way to prove yourself. I had 3 significant self published games before getting hired at blizzard, so this is the route I took. I made a shareware mode 13 game for dos (way back when) followed by a significant but relatively unsuccessful mod for quake 1, followed by a PC Gamer mod of the year for quake 2. My quake 2 mod was played and enjoyed by a number of people at blizzard, and that was what got me the interview. The other 2 games helped sell my credentials as someone seriously into games.
As a final note, don't have a wife or girlfriend. The games industry is absolutely murderous on relationships. Diablo II resulted in 3 divorces, 3 affairs (with at least one affair pregnancy), and 5 breakups (that I know of). My own relationship barely survived, and that was only because I cut back to 80 hours a week, even though people were bitching at me for the laziness. (Why couldn't I take my work seriously like the people who slept in their company provided sleeping bags under their desks 6 hours a night?)
With the Spishak Mach 20, the ninth blade gently smoothes out the jaw bone!
= 80bc606b8fa2332c757d683589fe4189&threadid=3745
http://www.planetmadtv.com/forum/showthread.php?s
Spishak: Mach 20 (#413)
Spishak Spokesman- Pat Kilbane
Ron- Andrew Bowen
Wife- Nicole Sullivan
Ron: So what do ya think honey, do i look like a first rate professional business man?
Wife: Honey did you even shave?
Ron: Twice. Its those damn triple blade razors they just dont give me the close shave i need to make me a first rate professional business man.
Wife: Ron if you dont get a promotion today, im leaving you.
Ron: Its the thoughts(??) of those damn triple blade razors. I wish there was a better razor, a way better one, ya know?
(Spishak Spokesman steps out from behind the shower curtain)
Spishak Spokesman: Well now there is! Spishak presents the Mach 20 with twenty blades we guarantee you the closest shave of your life.
Ron: That could be the edge i need to make me a first rate professional business man.
Spishak Spokesman: It sure could. Watch this.
(Shows an animation of the razor as each blade runs over the face)
Spishak Spokesman: (Voiceover) You see the first blade cuts the facial hair but before the hair can snap back the second blade cuts it again, the third blade cuts it once more, the forth blade cuts it again, the fifth blade goes deeper digging below the first layer of skin to remove the hair follicle, the sixth blade cuts away that pesky second layer of skin where there might be some renegade hair follicles, the seventh blade cuts away six more layers of skin ensuring that hair will never ever grow there. The eighth blade sends an electronic pulse to the centre of the brain which destroys the part of the brain responsible for hair growth and four other non essential functions. The ninth blade gently smoothes out the jaw bone to give your face a more even appearance. The tenth blade removes cavity causing tartar and the eleventh blade starts the process all over again. By the time the twentith blade passes over your face your a first rate professional business man. That promotion is as good as yours.
(Shows Ron with his face covered in bloody bandages)
Wife: Thanks Spishak, you saved our marriage.
Ron: Hmmm?
Spishak Spokesman: The Spishak Mach 20. Coming soon the ladies Spishak Mach 20 for all your most personal female shaving needs.
The software strategy for taking advantage of multicore is fairly straightforward, though not simple:
Find your cpu bound code areas. Make them multithreaded. When your application launches, ask the OS how many cores there are, and launch that number of threads.
The challenge of course is in 'make them multithreaded'. This takes a lot of hard engineering work.
I assume you meant funny but you got moderated insightful, so I'll point out just in case that there is no optimal number of cores. What the industry should want, in its own best interest, is for software not to be able to assume the number of cores (particularly the assumption that #cores == 1). Instead, your software should be able to ask the OS how many cores are available, and scale up its threading to that number for optimal performance.
Most game software is multithreaded. However, it is not multi-threaded in a way that will significantly increase performance given multiple cpus.
As one example, I worked on Diablo II, and it had at least 5 threads (there might have been even more, but I can remember what 5 threads did). I've talked to plenty of other people in the industry, and the story is the same everywhere: multithreaded, but not parallelized in the most cpu intensive areas.
Because he called it 'risk via google maps'. If he had called it 'Gelzam via google maps' and described it as a risk-like game, he'd have been fine.
Of course it is normal. Normal is about the average experience. The average computer user needs to do this, so it is normal.
Not that it's good that we have to do this, in any way.
Do you want to have to install lead lining for your home when one of your neighbors decides to do this?
And risk your children licking it?
Or do you want to trust the same crazy neighbor who wants to run one of these things in a residential rather than industrial zoned area to install and maintain proper shielding?
I'm just telling people what would be legal, not what I'd do.
The law has separated itself far from both ethics and morals. I'm an ethical and moral person, but not a legally obedient one.
Yeah, for a while I used to append ;-) to all my humorous posts, but that started to seem too blatant to me. Ruins the fun of having that moment of 'is this person serious?' run through your head. :-)
I'm pretty sure that's how the law reads right now, unfortunately. Though you can act in defense of your property: file a lawsuit. And of course if the virus doesn't identify the rights owner, then I think you are off the hook also.
Sure, you didn't turn into an axe murderer. But should we really be allowing a product in society that turns even one in ten people into an axe murderer like D&D did, or video games do now? What if the rate is one in a hundred? Where do you draw the line?
I don't think any of that changes my central point: the court can and does go to any length it wants beyond what is clearly defined in the constitution. You seem to be claiming it's all constitutional, since the 9th amendment says: there's lots of stuff we left out. That's fine, but it does clearly indicate that pretty much anything then could be found to be constitutional. The notion of 'strict' interpretation is just utter rubbish in my opinion.
The process is clear as defined by current law:
If you discover spyware is on your system, and your state has laws against that, you may pursue a suit against the spyware vendor.
If the spyware is protected by anti-circumvention devices, you are not permitted to remove it yourself.
Ergo, include removal as part of your recompense for damages in the suit. Sony will need to provide for the removal of the spyware, and at its discretion could give you permission to remove the spyware using a 3rd party tool.
I think a better analogy might be to ask whether the landlord does or should have a right to evict you if you commit a crime on or using the rented property. As an example, imagine that instead of decorating with hideous furniture, you decorated with a meth lab.