Cables do make a difference. Consider the difference between the 80-conductor IDE cables and the 40-pin IDE cables. If there was no difference, why are there performance issues? The problem is that bits aren't bits. Even when transmitting 0's and 1's, it's still a question of voltages what is driving that voltage. A lot of science has shown that "all things equal," there shouldn't be a difference in sound quality - but for whatever reasons, all things don't seem to be equal. The problem that clouds everything is that cables are frequently overpriced.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
80-conducter IDE cables still only have 40 pins. The other 40 pins are insulation and grounding, used to space and isolate the active conductors so there isn't any crosstalk. There's not just a performance difference if you plug a modern disk drive into the controller using a 40-conductor cable, there's inevitable data corruption. This has NOTHING to do with expensive speaker cable, or the Monster myth. It's one of the stupidest justifications I've ever seen.
AND THEN they go on about PCM jitter with a straight face. Holy god, people still believe in this?
Huh. local HD's over cable looked like shit compared to the antenna broadcasts, for the two days the cable was left turned on when I moved into my house, and I don't think it was just wishful thinking. They might not be allowed to, but their equipment chain was substandard or something. It looked terrible.
The article is misleading. Digital television is still broadcast over the airwaves, and you won't have to give up your antenna or switch to pay-TV services like cable or satellite in order to receive it. In fact, the best way to receive HD broadcasts from the major networks is likely via an antenna, as cable & satellite providers sacrifice quality by recompressing the video streams.
For Windows, Trillian is lacking in two key areas when compared to Pidgin:
First, the Jabber module is shit. I mean seriously, absolute and complete garbage. It crashes constantly, takes up huge amounts of CPU, and that's when it works at all. This makes Trillian a non-starter for my work, since Jabber is a required service. It also makes Trillian worthless for Google Chat or any other jabber-based service.
Second, Pidgin has OTR as a plugin. OTR messaging (http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/) works with any client if you run it as a proxy, but with Pidgin it's really transparent. OTR is chat's killer app, especially if you're using an employer-owned chat server that might happen to log all traffic.
I'll gladly sacrifice video chat and all the rest of that crap nobody ever asked for in exchange for a deniable, secure encrypted communications.
Seconding the conduit. If you can afford it, run multiple fiber lines and put cat5 transceivers on the end. If you aren't made out of money, do a superbundle, 4 cat5e's and 2 RG6 coax runs to each plate. Team 4 Gigabit NICs and you'll have more bandwidth than your systems can actually move across the internal bus for years, and you can always pair them off into separate networks back at the punchdown if you need to split into voice / data / homeauto / etc.
In-wall speakers can be very nice if you do them correctly, but they can also sound like poop if you aren't careful. There are also in-wall subs. If you do a home theater room, look into soundproofing it under the drywall. It's possible to do a very discreet home theater setup that doesn't look like it's TV oriented until it's time to watch TV, just by having art on the walls and a ceiling-mounted retractable screen w/ a front projector discreetly mounted on the ceiling.
'course none of this matters, because whatever you build is just going to be destroyed again in the next flood anyway.
If you've never watched the DVD with the commentary track on, I highly recommend you do so. It's like getting the film for the first time all over again. The band watches the film in character, and comments on it from their perspective 20 years later. They spend the whole time bitching about what a horrible hatchet job Reiner did on them. "29 shows out of 30 those pods open just fine, but which one makes it into the film? I ask you."
-Loyal Fan-base, willing to spread the word: check.
-Obscurity: Dumped in limited release in the USA on Christmas with no marketing campaign, to a $179,268 opening weekend. Made a total of $35,286,428 over 3 months in US release against a $73mil budget. Check.
-Independence in birth, thought: Debatable, but if you're arguing against this I sincerely doubt you've seen the film. For me, I say Check.
-Longevity: This is the only one we'll have to wait & see about, but early indications such as the unusually long theatrical engagement, huge word-of-mouth buzz among film lovers and critics, and almost total lack of mainstream interest would seem to indicate that this is the sort of film that people will be returning to multiple times over the next few years.
And for the record, Children of Men is way, way, WAY better than Equilibrium.
I'll agree that the original XBox controllers were sub-par, but the 360 controller is pretty much the perfect blend of size, shape, and weight. They got it 99.9% right (I wish start / select were a little further removed from Guide).
I'm a huge believer in the XBox 360 as a platform, and I'm delighted to have owned one since launch day. Wii's anemic release schedule and PS3's pathetic lineup of 360 ports / shitty first-party content (Resistance excepted) means that it's the best system out there.
I'm one of those dorks that buys everything videogame-related, but I'm not motivated to upgrade at all. An HDMI port, quieter operation, and shiny black skin isn't enough to attract me, and I'm an enthusiast for their products. If they'd integrated the HD-DVD drive and the wireless adapter that would be one thing, but this is much too little, far too late.
I mean, the PS3 comes with Blu-ray and wireless built-in on the high-end model. Meanwhile, the 360 costs $100 extra for 802.11 (an adapter that has shit range, by the way, on a shelf next to my wii and ps3 the 360 can't pick up a signal), and $200 extra for a hi-def video drive.
So: Elite 360 + Wireless + HD-DVD = $780. PS3, with built-in wireless and built-in Blu-ray: $600. Way to destroy your price advantage, Microsoft!
Obviously I'm not the target audience for this product, but I can't for the life of me figure out who is.
If operations is up at 1am fixing issues, you better believe the developers should be up at 1am. I'm all for combining development with tech support! Operations can always issue logins on a temporary basis if absolutely necessary, or ship log files and database dumps around for analysis. If operations isn't sleeping, dev shouldn't be either.
2. Unless you had to get up at 1am and fix your process, you (as a developer) had little incentive to create robust processes/software with proper logging and exception handling.
Sure there is. You can do it hierarchically, by giving the operations head the authority to fire developers. Watch how fast robust logging, exception handling, documentation, and software stability become top priority features. It'll blow your mind.
This has its political downsides, though, most notably the 'stifled creativity' argument of the OP. It's really only useful as a temporary measure if you're dealing with an in-house or hosted solution that's wildly out of control. You can solve this without the political drama via headcount if you've got the budget by having 2 QA organizations, one run by development and one smaller group run by operations. This will give you 4-stage development: Dev, Staging dev, staging ops, and prod. Ideally this will put a lag time of 3-4 weeks between when a developer checks in code for an RC and when that code actually goes live. If you don't have headcount for this, you can at least make your single QA group answer to operations instead of development, and shift the emphasis from "sign off so we make this deadline and the team gets their shipped on time bonus" to "don't sign off on this until we're damn sure it's ready, and you and the operations team get your uptime bonus."
Putting the whole show in one guy's hands, though, that's madness.
The answer to your question is that for in-house projects, IT needs to be separated into distinct engineering and operations groups.
IT Engineering is what the OP obviously favors. Designing new technologies, building better solutions to existing problems, and increasing productivity through these incredible meta-tools we call computers. IT Operations is about taking these technologies, cataloging their shortcomings, and doing what is necessary to implement them and keep them implemented. Engineering is about the introduction of new ideas; Operations is about the constant war to keep those ideas safe from entropy.
Often, these goals are in direct conflict. It is only natural for a solution developer to recognize the shortcomings in their product and want to fix it. It is in the best interests of operations that a stable server not be changed unless absolutely necessary, and then only when the changes have been thoroughly tested, put through miles of red tape and human business process, and signed off on by people whose jobs are on the line if the application goes down. The idea that you can write a program and be the person who runs it most effectively is a false one in any mission critical application. When there's money on the line, red tape and paperwork is the only way to make sure that it keeps flowing.
So to be successful in IT, we on the one hand need developers who are free to try radical new ideas in an environment that rewards creative solutions to entrenched problems, and on the other hand we need a static environment ruled by business process and red tape, which stifles unproven concepts and chokes creativity. The only solution to this is to separate these groups completely, and have development treat operations as a very stodgy customer. Too many companies don't realize that this split is necessary to maintain their financial longevity, and have the same people who develop their applications responsible for their day-to-day operations. This situation not only leads to frustrated development staff who feel creatively stifled, it is also in the long term project suicide. In-house developers should not only be relieved of the responsibility for running their code, they should in fact not even have logins to the servers on which their code is running.
Professional standards of code release need apply, too. It's not enough to release code to production via CVS checkout, you need to write an installer with an uninstaller and an upgrade path, just like you would for commercial software. It's not enough to run an ant build on your server via an NFS mount back to the depository, you need to compile a.war or.ear file just like you would for any other customer. As a developer, operations should be your only customer, and your relationship with them should be the same as the relationship you would maintain with your most valuable and critical customer.
But one person wearing the development and operations hat? That leads to nothing but frustration, burnout, entropy, and failure.
So the next question is, how can we use this to our advantage? most XBox live traffic traditionally goes over an encrypted tunnel, but has anyone tried sniffing to see if the ads are being downloaded over the Live connection, or if they're coming from an open internet connection (standard http/https).
If they are, then there's nothing to stop us spoofing our own ads into the games. I don't know about you, but I would LOVE to see Fiestacat staring down at me from a billboard while I rocket juggle some pathetic fucker in Crackdown.
The first rule of operations is, Development does not have any access to the production servers. The second rule of operations is, you can always roll back to the previous version without losing data. The third rule of operations is, you always, always write an installer.
After that, the rules depend on how much money you have. In an ideal world, you've got 4 environments:
1) Dev. Minimal number of servers to build and test the app. Ops has no logins here, dev runs the show, they take care of sysadmin here and they can tweak everything how they want. CVS DOES NOT LIVE HERE. CVS lives on IT-controlled systems.
2) Sandbox (staging1): A staging mirror environment. Dev has logins here, and they handle deployments. Code tweaks to be rolled into the branch can be made here by dev. IT / OPS have logins here. (aka. alpha)
3) QA staging (staging2): A second staging mirror environment. Dev has no login here. IT can log in. Deployments are practiced here. Automated regression testing, bot-based QA, etc. all happens here. (aka. beta)
4) Production: Dev never touches production. Releases are packaged into an installer or an ear file or something similar. Changes are never made in such a way that they can't be backed out without losing customer data.
In an ideal world, the gap between a release leaving dev (step 1) and reaching production (step 4) is 3-4 weeks.
All that said, if you can show me a mid-sized organization that actually follows these rules, then for your next trick, I'd also like a pony and a supermodel to go with it.
My bad. I meant to say that they'll be 50% cheaper.
As far as AACS, all it will take is if the media block for a truly mass-market device (like, say, the ps3) is cracked. Nobody would dare to exclude 50% of the player market in one fell swoop.
Weird, slashdot ate half my post on submission. Here's the whole thing, in its entirety:
Lots of FUD floating around this response thread. I happen to own both a PS3 and an XBox 360 with HD-DVD add-on, along with a television that does them both justice. Here's some facts:
1. The difference in picture and sound quality between HD-DVD / Blu-Ray and DVD is roughly the same as the jump in quality from VHS/LD to DVD. I've run numerous side-by-side comparison tests using the King Kong DVD & HD-DVD, as well as older films like Casablanca and Blazing Saddles. Much depends on the master & source material, but the difference is undeniable.
Now, that might not be enough to save either format. Most people didn't buy DVD for the increased quality, they bought it for the convenience of random access, and the decreased physical size / increased durability of the media vs. VHS tapes. HD-DVD / Blu-Ray don't offer any of these increases over the standard DVD.
2. The formats are almost identical in many key areas. Both play back the same video codecs (MPEG2, VC1, H.264), so when it comes down to it the films available on both formats are often identical. It all comes down to how the source material was mastered. Early blu-ray releases (5th Element) took a lot of knocks because the films are still mastered in the older MPEG2 format. Most newer films are encoded in the nicer Microsoft VC-1 standard, and look absolutely stunning.
3. The Playstation 3 absolutely does 1080p playback for blu-ray movies, when equipped with an HDMI cable. (Get a quality one for less than $10 at monoprice.com.) The XBox 360 absolutely does 1080p playback over component or VGA. Most HDTV's don't support 1080p over component or VGA (even my 2006 model Sony doesn't). Sadly, since the HDMI folks demand that all HDMI connectors be HDMI-only, and they disallow meta-connectors like the one on the 360, it seems unlikely that there will ever be an XBox 360 HDMI connector.
4. Some older HDTV's only do 1080i or 480p, and won't process signals in 720p up to 1080i. The hoohah is because the Playstation 3 also won't process 720p signals up to 1080i, but instead will downprocess these signals to 480p. Sony's already stated that they're working on a fix for this that will be pushed down via mandatory firmware update in the near future.
5. The newer audio formats, Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby TrueHD, are decoded at the player and then sent to the receiver for playback. The lack of analog outputs means that these decoded formats can't be sent from a ps3 or a 360 to an older receiver. With a newer receiver, the PS3 can send these audio formats out via HDMI. The lack of HDMI outputs from the 360 means that these decoded formats can't be sent out from that system at all. That's too bad, because the difference in sound quality is pretty nice, and a definite upgrade over existing DTS / Dolby Digital. However, the 360 does downconvert these new signals to the highest bitrate of Dolby Digital possible (640K). There's an improvement over the sound quality of a DVD here, but not a big enough one you'd notice without listening to A/B comparisons.
6. The 360 HD-DVD drive has nothing to do with gaming. It's for movie playback only. It's also a terrific value. For $200 ($160 with a sneaky coupon last month), you get a $35 remote, a $35 movie, and an external USB2 drive that's recognized by both macs and PCs as well as an XBox 360. This thing has been flying off the shelves since it was released. Since the major argument against using a game console as your primary playback device is that you're putting undue wear on the system's drive, this means that I can now use the 360 as my primary DVD / HD-DVD playback device. That's great, because the 360 is a fantastic DVD player.
7. The formats are far from stillborn. Around 100 titles have been released for each format in the first year. Amazon sales data is tracked at http://www.thedvdwars.com/inde
Lots of FUD floating around this response thread. I happen to own both a PS3 and an XBox 360 with HD-DVD add-on, along with a television that does them both justice. Here's some facts:
1. The difference in picture and sound quality between HD-DVD / Blu-Ray and DVD is roughly the same as the jump in quality from VHS/LD to DVD. I've run numerous side-by-side comparison tests using the King Kong DVD & HD-DVD, as well as older films like Casablanca and Blazing Saddles. Much depends on the master & source material, but the difference is undeniable.
Now, that might not be enough to save either format. Most people didn't buy DVD for the increased quality, they bought it for the convenience of random access, and the decreased physical size / increased durability of the media vs. VHS tapes. HD-DVD / Blu-Ray don't offer any of these increases over the standard DVD.
2. The formats are almost identical in many key areas. Both play back the same video codecs (MPEG2, VC1, H.264), so when it comes down to it the films available on both formats are often identical. It all comes down to how the source material was mastered. Early blu-ray releases (5th Element) took a lot of knocks because the films are still mastered in the older MPEG2 format. Most newer films are encoded in the nicer Microsoft VC-1 standard, and look absolutely stunning.
3. The Playstation 3 absolutely does 1080p playback for blu-ray movies, when equipped with an HDMI cable. (Get a quality one for http://www.thedvdwars.com/index.cfm for both formats. While $20-35 / movie is too steep for my blood, Netflix carries both, and prices are similar to first-gen DVD.
Pure speculation: Combo players are probably going to show up in '07, and once this blue laser shortage horseshit gets resolved, I'd expect prices to fall by 100% in '07, and the $100 combo player will probably arrive in '08. By '09 or '10 you won't even be able to buy a standard DVD player anymore. By this time it won't matter because they'll have been cracked as thoroughly as DVD before them.
I already said this in the last Lumines thread, but it's worth saying again:
Nobody reasonable is pissed off about Lumines being broken up into downloadable content packages. I think the general consensus all around is that selling the game in this way is an interesting and totally acceptable way of doing business. But the base package for Lumines sells for $15, which is a premium price, more than any other piece of content in the XBox Live arcade at this time. For a premium price, people expect a premium product, and they naturally feel like they've been taken advantage of when a product that commands that kind of price is little more than an advertisement for aftermarket add-ons.
Expectation: Premium product for a premium price. Reality: The base package of Lumines ships with half the levels (skins) that the PSP version had. Further, most of these levels are just recycled content from the original PSP release, and they are set to cycle at twice the frequency of the PSP version (presumably in order to encourage you to buy more in an add-on pack). It is possible for a player with minimal skill to see all the content the base package of Lumines Live has to offer in one or two playthroughs. So already, the product is sub-par when compared to existing versions. It's a little disappointing, but everyone's bought easy games before, and this one is a quality ride while it lasts. We could all live with this, except that we know Microsoft is waiting in the wings to sell us more levels for another $7.50. So now we feel ripped off, but at least our faces aren't being rubbed in it. Until...
Expectation: Game modes listed in the main menu are functional and complete. Reality: Three of the single-player game modes are incomplete, but there is no indication of this until you try to play them. Lumines will happily let you play 1 round of vs. CPU, 5 rounds of the 55-round Mission mode, or 5 rounds of the 55-round challenge mode. Then, much like shareware of old, it displays an advertisement for the add-on packs which enable these features.
Expectation: If you're going to play the B-E-S-U-R-E-T-O-D-R-I-N-K-Y-O-U-R-O-V-A-L-T-I-N-E with your customers, have the add-on packs ready to purchase. Reality: It's a cocktease. The add-on packs weren't there to purchase at the time the game was made available for download (the Challenge mode pack, which also contains a lot of new skins, has since been released for $7.50).
Reasonable people expected to pay a reasonable price for a complete game, with optional add-ons available for purchase should they so desire. Instead they got an overpriced, incomplete game that shoved advertisements in their faces for products they couldn't even buy if they wanted to.
Microsoft and Q! could have solved this out the gate by lowering the price to $12.50, which is more in-line with other high-end Arcade content, and removing the ads from the game. Just removing Challenge Mode, vs. CPU, and Mission mode from the main menu altogether unless the add-on packs were purchased would have made a huge difference in people's expectations.
Disappointing your customers is never a good way to do business.
Nobody's pissed off about the downloadable content. Well, nobody reasonable, anyway.
As usual, it's all about expectation management. When people spend $15 on the most expensive XBox Live! game, they expect a complete experience, even without the add-on packs. When people see an option for a game mode in the main menu of this (relatively very) expensive game, they expect to be able to play that game mode without buying an add-on pack. When these expectations aren't met, because that game mode is merely 5 minutes' of play time followed by an advertisement for the add-on pack to unlock the rest of the greyed out menu options, people naturally get pissed off. When this pattern repeats itself multiple times in the same game, people naturally get REALLY pissed off.
Nobody likes paying to receive advertisements. Unfortunately, that's exactly what it feels like to play Lumines on XBox live. If the base Lumines game were cheaper (say, $5), we'd put up with it, but when the game is the most expensive one on the service, people naturally get pretty pissed off about it.
The game died on the vine because of packaging. Nobody in gaming gets the reference in the title, and it's too reminiscent of Black & White, which was a major disappointment. If they'd called it Jade after the main character, it could have done much better.
Next, the box. The cover art features Jade armed with a - camera? She doesn't look sexy, or fierce, or engaging - just a chick wearing green lipstick with a camera over some generic apocalyptic background. None of the interesting aspects of the gameplay or the storyline are conveyed in the cover art, and it emphasizes the parts of the story (the camera!?) that aren't as fun.
The tagline on the back, "Expose the CONSPIRACY. Capture the TRUTH," is way too generic. The blurb is short, and makes the game sound generic and uninteresting: "A government conspiracy wreaks havoc upon the planet Hillys. As the rebellious action-reporter Jade, you must penetrate your leaders' web of lies and expose their horrific secrets. In a world of deception, believe in nothing... except yourself."
Okay, first - it's pretty much clear from the get-go that the government is full of bad guys. Next, there's almost no conspiracy theory aspect to the gameplay, it's a straightforward Zelda for Grownups quest. And last, that blurb sounds BORING. The back of the packaging is just as uninspired. It's just a bunch of fairly unimpressive screenshots, done over to look like they're on strip 35mm film.
BG&E sold for crap because on the shelf, it looks like crap. It failed to distinguish itself from the hundreds of other generic games with generic titles released that year.
Fortunately, Ubi seems to have learned the packaging lesson, by and large. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was a better game than Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, but it sold for crap because the cover art is arguably as bad as BG&E's. Warrior Within, though, sold much better. The cover art for that one? Stark white background, pissed off guy, two giant curved swords dripping with blood. Straight, to the point, interesting enough to make me check out the back of the box.
Team Fortress 2 gets announced for release, with a new graphical style that's reminiscent of nothing so much as the creepy robots from the film Small Soldiers, and the XBox 360 & PS3 ports get top billing in an article that doesn't even make the front page?
Sure, it seems likely it was a prank, but he had a valid serial number, I had his address and a call-back number, and his name matched the record in the system. Also we really did walk through manually changing the ini files with DOS edit in order to change his system back. Even if you think it's a prank, you've got to approach it as a normal call.
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No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
80-conducter IDE cables still only have 40 pins. The other 40 pins are insulation and grounding, used to space and isolate the active conductors so there isn't any crosstalk. There's not just a performance difference if you plug a modern disk drive into the controller using a 40-conductor cable, there's inevitable data corruption. This has NOTHING to do with expensive speaker cable, or the Monster myth. It's one of the stupidest justifications I've ever seen.
AND THEN they go on about PCM jitter with a straight face. Holy god, people still believe in this?
Huh. local HD's over cable looked like shit compared to the antenna broadcasts, for the two days the cable was left turned on when I moved into my house, and I don't think it was just wishful thinking. They might not be allowed to, but their equipment chain was substandard or something. It looked terrible.
The article is misleading. Digital television is still broadcast over the airwaves, and you won't have to give up your antenna or switch to pay-TV services like cable or satellite in order to receive it. In fact, the best way to receive HD broadcasts from the major networks is likely via an antenna, as cable & satellite providers sacrifice quality by recompressing the video streams.
It is from his terrible spelling we can tell he is a GameFAQs forum poster.
For Windows, Trillian is lacking in two key areas when compared to Pidgin:
First, the Jabber module is shit. I mean seriously, absolute and complete garbage. It crashes constantly, takes up huge amounts of CPU, and that's when it works at all. This makes Trillian a non-starter for my work, since Jabber is a required service. It also makes Trillian worthless for Google Chat or any other jabber-based service.
Second, Pidgin has OTR as a plugin. OTR messaging (http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/) works with any client if you run it as a proxy, but with Pidgin it's really transparent. OTR is chat's killer app, especially if you're using an employer-owned chat server that might happen to log all traffic.
I'll gladly sacrifice video chat and all the rest of that crap nobody ever asked for in exchange for a deniable, secure encrypted communications.
Seconding the conduit. If you can afford it, run multiple fiber lines and put cat5 transceivers on the end. If you aren't made out of money, do a superbundle, 4 cat5e's and 2 RG6 coax runs to each plate. Team 4 Gigabit NICs and you'll have more bandwidth than your systems can actually move across the internal bus for years, and you can always pair them off into separate networks back at the punchdown if you need to split into voice / data / homeauto / etc.
In-wall speakers can be very nice if you do them correctly, but they can also sound like poop if you aren't careful. There are also in-wall subs. If you do a home theater room, look into soundproofing it under the drywall. It's possible to do a very discreet home theater setup that doesn't look like it's TV oriented until it's time to watch TV, just by having art on the walls and a ceiling-mounted retractable screen w/ a front projector discreetly mounted on the ceiling.
'course none of this matters, because whatever you build is just going to be destroyed again in the next flood anyway.
If you've never watched the DVD with the commentary track on, I highly recommend you do so. It's like getting the film for the first time all over again. The band watches the film in character, and comments on it from their perspective 20 years later. They spend the whole time bitching about what a horrible hatchet job Reiner did on them. "29 shows out of 30 those pods open just fine, but which one makes it into the film? I ask you."
Great stuff.
-Loyal Fan-base, willing to spread the word: check.
-Obscurity: Dumped in limited release in the USA on Christmas with no marketing campaign, to a $179,268 opening weekend. Made a total of $35,286,428 over 3 months in US release against a $73mil budget. Check.
-Independence in birth, thought: Debatable, but if you're arguing against this I sincerely doubt you've seen the film. For me, I say Check.
-Longevity: This is the only one we'll have to wait & see about, but early indications such as the unusually long theatrical engagement, huge word-of-mouth buzz among film lovers and critics, and almost total lack of mainstream interest would seem to indicate that this is the sort of film that people will be returning to multiple times over the next few years.
And for the record, Children of Men is way, way, WAY better than Equilibrium.
I'll agree that the original XBox controllers were sub-par, but the 360 controller is pretty much the perfect blend of size, shape, and weight. They got it 99.9% right (I wish start / select were a little further removed from Guide).
Try one if you haven't. It's night & day.
I'm a huge believer in the XBox 360 as a platform, and I'm delighted to have owned one since launch day. Wii's anemic release schedule and PS3's pathetic lineup of 360 ports / shitty first-party content (Resistance excepted) means that it's the best system out there.
I'm one of those dorks that buys everything videogame-related, but I'm not motivated to upgrade at all. An HDMI port, quieter operation, and shiny black skin isn't enough to attract me, and I'm an enthusiast for their products. If they'd integrated the HD-DVD drive and the wireless adapter that would be one thing, but this is much too little, far too late.
I mean, the PS3 comes with Blu-ray and wireless built-in on the high-end model. Meanwhile, the 360 costs $100 extra for 802.11 (an adapter that has shit range, by the way, on a shelf next to my wii and ps3 the 360 can't pick up a signal), and $200 extra for a hi-def video drive.
So: Elite 360 + Wireless + HD-DVD = $780.
PS3, with built-in wireless and built-in Blu-ray: $600. Way to destroy your price advantage, Microsoft!
Obviously I'm not the target audience for this product, but I can't for the life of me figure out who is.
If operations is up at 1am fixing issues, you better believe the developers should be up at 1am. I'm all for combining development with tech support! Operations can always issue logins on a temporary basis if absolutely necessary, or ship log files and database dumps around for analysis. If operations isn't sleeping, dev shouldn't be either.
2. Unless you had to get up at 1am and fix your process, you (as a developer) had little incentive to create robust processes/software with proper logging and exception handling.
Sure there is. You can do it hierarchically, by giving the operations head the authority to fire developers. Watch how fast robust logging, exception handling, documentation, and software stability become top priority features. It'll blow your mind.
This has its political downsides, though, most notably the 'stifled creativity' argument of the OP. It's really only useful as a temporary measure if you're dealing with an in-house or hosted solution that's wildly out of control. You can solve this without the political drama via headcount if you've got the budget by having 2 QA organizations, one run by development and one smaller group run by operations. This will give you 4-stage development: Dev, Staging dev, staging ops, and prod. Ideally this will put a lag time of 3-4 weeks between when a developer checks in code for an RC and when that code actually goes live. If you don't have headcount for this, you can at least make your single QA group answer to operations instead of development, and shift the emphasis from "sign off so we make this deadline and the team gets their shipped on time bonus" to "don't sign off on this until we're damn sure it's ready, and you and the operations team get your uptime bonus."
Putting the whole show in one guy's hands, though, that's madness.
The answer to your question is that for in-house projects, IT needs to be separated into distinct engineering and operations groups.
.war or .ear file just like you would for any other customer. As a developer, operations should be your only customer, and your relationship with them should be the same as the relationship you would maintain with your most valuable and critical customer.
IT Engineering is what the OP obviously favors. Designing new technologies, building better solutions to existing problems, and increasing productivity through these incredible meta-tools we call computers. IT Operations is about taking these technologies, cataloging their shortcomings, and doing what is necessary to implement them and keep them implemented. Engineering is about the introduction of new ideas; Operations is about the constant war to keep those ideas safe from entropy.
Often, these goals are in direct conflict. It is only natural for a solution developer to recognize the shortcomings in their product and want to fix it. It is in the best interests of operations that a stable server not be changed unless absolutely necessary, and then only when the changes have been thoroughly tested, put through miles of red tape and human business process, and signed off on by people whose jobs are on the line if the application goes down. The idea that you can write a program and be the person who runs it most effectively is a false one in any mission critical application. When there's money on the line, red tape and paperwork is the only way to make sure that it keeps flowing.
So to be successful in IT, we on the one hand need developers who are free to try radical new ideas in an environment that rewards creative solutions to entrenched problems, and on the other hand we need a static environment ruled by business process and red tape, which stifles unproven concepts and chokes creativity. The only solution to this is to separate these groups completely, and have development treat operations as a very stodgy customer. Too many companies don't realize that this split is necessary to maintain their financial longevity, and have the same people who develop their applications responsible for their day-to-day operations. This situation not only leads to frustrated development staff who feel creatively stifled, it is also in the long term project suicide. In-house developers should not only be relieved of the responsibility for running their code, they should in fact not even have logins to the servers on which their code is running.
Professional standards of code release need apply, too. It's not enough to release code to production via CVS checkout, you need to write an installer with an uninstaller and an upgrade path, just like you would for commercial software. It's not enough to run an ant build on your server via an NFS mount back to the depository, you need to compile a
But one person wearing the development and operations hat? That leads to nothing but frustration, burnout, entropy, and failure.
So the next question is, how can we use this to our advantage? most XBox live traffic traditionally goes over an encrypted tunnel, but has anyone tried sniffing to see if the ads are being downloaded over the Live connection, or if they're coming from an open internet connection (standard http/https).
If they are, then there's nothing to stop us spoofing our own ads into the games. I don't know about you, but I would LOVE to see Fiestacat staring down at me from a billboard while I rocket juggle some pathetic fucker in Crackdown.
The first rule of operations is, Development does not have any access to the production servers.
The second rule of operations is, you can always roll back to the previous version without losing data.
The third rule of operations is, you always, always write an installer.
After that, the rules depend on how much money you have. In an ideal world, you've got 4 environments:
1) Dev. Minimal number of servers to build and test the app. Ops has no logins here, dev runs the show, they take care of sysadmin here and they can tweak everything how they want. CVS DOES NOT LIVE HERE. CVS lives on IT-controlled systems.
2) Sandbox (staging1): A staging mirror environment. Dev has logins here, and they handle deployments. Code tweaks to be rolled into the branch can be made here by dev. IT / OPS have logins here. (aka. alpha)
3) QA staging (staging2): A second staging mirror environment. Dev has no login here. IT can log in. Deployments are practiced here. Automated regression testing, bot-based QA, etc. all happens here. (aka. beta)
4) Production: Dev never touches production. Releases are packaged into an installer or an ear file or something similar. Changes are never made in such a way that they can't be backed out without losing customer data.
In an ideal world, the gap between a release leaving dev (step 1) and reaching production (step 4) is 3-4 weeks.
All that said, if you can show me a mid-sized organization that actually follows these rules, then for your next trick, I'd also like a pony and a supermodel to go with it.
My bad. I meant to say that they'll be 50% cheaper.
As far as AACS, all it will take is if the media block for a truly mass-market device (like, say, the ps3) is cracked. Nobody would dare to exclude 50% of the player market in one fell swoop.
Sure does. http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2006/11/8303/
Weird, slashdot ate half my post on submission. Here's the whole thing, in its entirety:
Lots of FUD floating around this response thread. I happen to own both a PS3 and an XBox 360 with HD-DVD add-on, along with a television that does them both justice. Here's some facts:
1. The difference in picture and sound quality between HD-DVD / Blu-Ray and DVD is roughly the same as the jump in quality from VHS/LD to DVD. I've run numerous side-by-side comparison tests using the King Kong DVD & HD-DVD, as well as older films like Casablanca and Blazing Saddles. Much depends on the master & source material, but the difference is undeniable.
Now, that might not be enough to save either format. Most people didn't buy DVD for the increased quality, they bought it for the convenience of random access, and the decreased physical size / increased durability of the media vs. VHS tapes. HD-DVD / Blu-Ray don't offer any of these increases over the standard DVD.
2. The formats are almost identical in many key areas. Both play back the same video codecs (MPEG2, VC1, H.264), so when it comes down to it the films available on both formats are often identical. It all comes down to how the source material was mastered. Early blu-ray releases (5th Element) took a lot of knocks because the films are still mastered in the older MPEG2 format. Most newer films are encoded in the nicer Microsoft VC-1 standard, and look absolutely stunning.
3. The Playstation 3 absolutely does 1080p playback for blu-ray movies, when equipped with an HDMI cable. (Get a quality one for less than $10 at monoprice.com.) The XBox 360 absolutely does 1080p playback over component or VGA. Most HDTV's don't support 1080p over component or VGA (even my 2006 model Sony doesn't). Sadly, since the HDMI folks demand that all HDMI connectors be HDMI-only, and they disallow meta-connectors like the one on the 360, it seems unlikely that there will ever be an XBox 360 HDMI connector.
4. Some older HDTV's only do 1080i or 480p, and won't process signals in 720p up to 1080i. The hoohah is because the Playstation 3 also won't process 720p signals up to 1080i, but instead will downprocess these signals to 480p. Sony's already stated that they're working on a fix for this that will be pushed down via mandatory firmware update in the near future.
5. The newer audio formats, Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby TrueHD, are decoded at the player and then sent to the receiver for playback. The lack of analog outputs means that these decoded formats can't be sent from a ps3 or a 360 to an older receiver. With a newer receiver, the PS3 can send these audio formats out via HDMI. The lack of HDMI outputs from the 360 means that these decoded formats can't be sent out from that system at all. That's too bad, because the difference in sound quality is pretty nice, and a definite upgrade over existing DTS / Dolby Digital. However, the 360 does downconvert these new signals to the highest bitrate of Dolby Digital possible (640K). There's an improvement over the sound quality of a DVD here, but not a big enough one you'd notice without listening to A/B comparisons.
6. The 360 HD-DVD drive has nothing to do with gaming. It's for movie playback only. It's also a terrific value. For $200 ($160 with a sneaky coupon last month), you get a $35 remote, a $35 movie, and an external USB2 drive that's recognized by both macs and PCs as well as an XBox 360. This thing has been flying off the shelves since it was released. Since the major argument against using a game console as your primary playback device is that you're putting undue wear on the system's drive, this means that I can now use the 360 as my primary DVD / HD-DVD playback device. That's great, because the 360 is a fantastic DVD player.
7. The formats are far from stillborn. Around 100 titles have been released for each format in the first year. Amazon sales data is tracked at http://www.thedvdwars.com/inde
Lots of FUD floating around this response thread. I happen to own both a PS3 and an XBox 360 with HD-DVD add-on, along with a television that does them both justice. Here's some facts:
1. The difference in picture and sound quality between HD-DVD / Blu-Ray and DVD is roughly the same as the jump in quality from VHS/LD to DVD. I've run numerous side-by-side comparison tests using the King Kong DVD & HD-DVD, as well as older films like Casablanca and Blazing Saddles. Much depends on the master & source material, but the difference is undeniable.
Now, that might not be enough to save either format. Most people didn't buy DVD for the increased quality, they bought it for the convenience of random access, and the decreased physical size / increased durability of the media vs. VHS tapes. HD-DVD / Blu-Ray don't offer any of these increases over the standard DVD.
2. The formats are almost identical in many key areas. Both play back the same video codecs (MPEG2, VC1, H.264), so when it comes down to it the films available on both formats are often identical. It all comes down to how the source material was mastered. Early blu-ray releases (5th Element) took a lot of knocks because the films are still mastered in the older MPEG2 format. Most newer films are encoded in the nicer Microsoft VC-1 standard, and look absolutely stunning.
3. The Playstation 3 absolutely does 1080p playback for blu-ray movies, when equipped with an HDMI cable. (Get a quality one for http://www.thedvdwars.com/index.cfm for both formats. While $20-35 / movie is too steep for my blood, Netflix carries both, and prices are similar to first-gen DVD.
Pure speculation: Combo players are probably going to show up in '07, and once this blue laser shortage horseshit gets resolved, I'd expect prices to fall by 100% in '07, and the $100 combo player will probably arrive in '08. By '09 or '10 you won't even be able to buy a standard DVD player anymore. By this time it won't matter because they'll have been cracked as thoroughly as DVD before them.
Any other questions, I'll be happy to answer.
I already said this in the last Lumines thread, but it's worth saying again:
Nobody reasonable is pissed off about Lumines being broken up into downloadable content packages. I think the general consensus all around is that selling the game in this way is an interesting and totally acceptable way of doing business. But the base package for Lumines sells for $15, which is a premium price, more than any other piece of content in the XBox Live arcade at this time. For a premium price, people expect a premium product, and they naturally feel like they've been taken advantage of when a product that commands that kind of price is little more than an advertisement for aftermarket add-ons.
Expectation: Premium product for a premium price.
Reality: The base package of Lumines ships with half the levels (skins) that the PSP version had. Further, most of these levels are just recycled content from the original PSP release, and they are set to cycle at twice the frequency of the PSP version (presumably in order to encourage you to buy more in an add-on pack). It is possible for a player with minimal skill to see all the content the base package of Lumines Live has to offer in one or two playthroughs. So already, the product is sub-par when compared to existing versions. It's a little disappointing, but everyone's bought easy games before, and this one is a quality ride while it lasts. We could all live with this, except that we know Microsoft is waiting in the wings to sell us more levels for another $7.50. So now we feel ripped off, but at least our faces aren't being rubbed in it. Until...
Expectation: Game modes listed in the main menu are functional and complete.
Reality: Three of the single-player game modes are incomplete, but there is no indication of this until you try to play them. Lumines will happily let you play 1 round of vs. CPU, 5 rounds of the 55-round Mission mode, or 5 rounds of the 55-round challenge mode. Then, much like shareware of old, it displays an advertisement for the add-on packs which enable these features.
Expectation: If you're going to play the B-E-S-U-R-E-T-O-D-R-I-N-K-Y-O-U-R-O-V-A-L-T-I-N-E with your customers, have the add-on packs ready to purchase.
Reality: It's a cocktease. The add-on packs weren't there to purchase at the time the game was made available for download (the Challenge mode pack, which also contains a lot of new skins, has since been released for $7.50).
Reasonable people expected to pay a reasonable price for a complete game, with optional add-ons available for purchase should they so desire. Instead they got an overpriced, incomplete game that shoved advertisements in their faces for products they couldn't even buy if they wanted to.
Microsoft and Q! could have solved this out the gate by lowering the price to $12.50, which is more in-line with other high-end Arcade content, and removing the ads from the game. Just removing Challenge Mode, vs. CPU, and Mission mode from the main menu altogether unless the add-on packs were purchased would have made a huge difference in people's expectations.
Disappointing your customers is never a good way to do business.
I always buy new. Not because I like the publishers, but because I fucking hate EB Games.
Nobody's pissed off about the downloadable content. Well, nobody reasonable, anyway.
As usual, it's all about expectation management. When people spend $15 on the most expensive XBox Live! game, they expect a complete experience, even without the add-on packs. When people see an option for a game mode in the main menu of this (relatively very) expensive game, they expect to be able to play that game mode without buying an add-on pack. When these expectations aren't met, because that game mode is merely 5 minutes' of play time followed by an advertisement for the add-on pack to unlock the rest of the greyed out menu options, people naturally get pissed off. When this pattern repeats itself multiple times in the same game, people naturally get REALLY pissed off.
Nobody likes paying to receive advertisements. Unfortunately, that's exactly what it feels like to play Lumines on XBox live. If the base Lumines game were cheaper (say, $5), we'd put up with it, but when the game is the most expensive one on the service, people naturally get pretty pissed off about it.
The game died on the vine because of packaging. Nobody in gaming gets the reference in the title, and it's too reminiscent of Black & White, which was a major disappointment. If they'd called it Jade after the main character, it could have done much better.
Next, the box. The cover art features Jade armed with a - camera? She doesn't look sexy, or fierce, or engaging - just a chick wearing green lipstick with a camera over some generic apocalyptic background. None of the interesting aspects of the gameplay or the storyline are conveyed in the cover art, and it emphasizes the parts of the story (the camera!?) that aren't as fun.
The tagline on the back, "Expose the CONSPIRACY. Capture the TRUTH," is way too generic. The blurb is short, and makes the game sound generic and uninteresting:
"A government conspiracy wreaks havoc upon the planet Hillys. As the rebellious action-reporter Jade, you must penetrate your leaders' web of lies and expose their horrific secrets. In a world of deception, believe in nothing... except yourself."
Okay, first - it's pretty much clear from the get-go that the government is full of bad guys. Next, there's almost no conspiracy theory aspect to the gameplay, it's a straightforward Zelda for Grownups quest. And last, that blurb sounds BORING. The back of the packaging is just as uninspired. It's just a bunch of fairly unimpressive screenshots, done over to look like they're on strip 35mm film.
BG&E sold for crap because on the shelf, it looks like crap. It failed to distinguish itself from the hundreds of other generic games with generic titles released that year.
Fortunately, Ubi seems to have learned the packaging lesson, by and large. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was a better game than Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, but it sold for crap because the cover art is arguably as bad as BG&E's. Warrior Within, though, sold much better. The cover art for that one? Stark white background, pissed off guy, two giant curved swords dripping with blood. Straight, to the point, interesting enough to make me check out the back of the box.
Marketing counts for more than you'd think.
I hear you on the mass thing, but I think the clever boys over at Hasbro have this one licked. Check out the Alternators line. They're amazing.
Team Fortress 2 gets announced for release, with a new graphical style that's reminiscent of nothing so much as the creepy robots from the film Small Soldiers, and the XBox 360 & PS3 ports get top billing in an article that doesn't even make the front page?
Way to prioritize.
Sure, it seems likely it was a prank, but he had a valid serial number, I had his address and a call-back number, and his name matched the record in the system. Also we really did walk through manually changing the ini files with DOS edit in order to change his system back. Even if you think it's a prank, you've got to approach it as a normal call.