One thing that got me is that he seems to solely blame the marketing department for Def Jam's failure, even though all the reviews of it seem to suggest that the game just plain sucked. Sure, marketing may have overhyped it, but that doesn't make them responsible for the technical issues that likely contributed heavily to poor sales.
I've worked at EA. Marketing doesn't just sell the game, they pick the damn features. They set the release date. Sometimes, they even dictate the technology you will use, if it means a back-of-the-box bulletpoint.
People seem to be stuck on the idea that EA is a game company. Wrong! Electronic Arts Inc. is a titanic marketing company, which has somehow rolled up some talented coders and artists, Katamari-style. The dev team can be super-skilled and still get bulldozed along with the rest of the crap-wad. If Def Jam sucks, I wouldn't be suprised if it's because the marketing department was desperate to shove it out the door in time for the MTV Music Awards, or Dr. Dre's new album.
So, China stops buying software from american-owned companies. Microsoft, Adobe, Norton, etc are now off-limits to the average chinese consumer. What's going to take the place of all that software? Well, China DOES have a little project called Red Flag Linux... If they stick to the principles of the GPL (i can't see why they wouldn't), then all linux users everwhere will benefit eventually. No more Photoshop? No problem, the Gimp is getting pretty close to that level of usability. A few million new users/developers wouldn't hurt that project either. Oracle wouldn't be loosing existing customers, they'd be loosing POTENTIAL FUTURE customers. I see that as a big difference, but software industry lobbyists often gloss it over. This is similar to arguments made by the RIAA about how much money they "loose" due to piracy every year.
So, to summarize my little conspiracy theory: Chinese lockout of Foreign software is not so much money lost to Microsoft and pals, as it is development resources added to the Free Software movement. (Yeah yeah, commies bad, cowboys good... get over the cold war already. sheesh.)
There are plenty of supremely brilliant people doing quite well in this world... I even work with some of them. The Einstein-level braniacs who can't keep a steady job (yes, there are plenty) like to blame society for not being in tune with their greatness.
In reality, you just need to keep in mind this one simple fact: Suck-ass personal skill will usually cancel out about 130 perceived IQ points.
If you're a brilliant student wondering what to concentate on in college, try student government, model UN, or something else that requires you to interact with people and make them like you. If you're a bitter genius with a festering ulcer from the hundreds of rejections you get every year, try to wrap your brain around the possibility that either a) you're not as smart as you think you are... or b) people don't feel stupid around you, they feel annoyed.
Live in your mom's basement. Work at the highest paying job you can find for a year. (It will probably suck). Use the money you saved on rent and food to start your own business.
Even if you fall on your face, the dedication and self-discipline you showed will stand out on a resume, and make a great story during interviews.
For a prime example of this strategy, check out a book called "Rebel Without a Crew"... it's the true story of how a penniless film student sold his body to science for 7 grand and used the money to make himself a million dollar directing career.
I am also a professional programmer, so I can relate to your worries about development restrictions on a non-PC platform. I've been running VirtualPC on my second-hand TiBook for awhile now, and I can testify that it works quite well for PC development purposes.
On a 667 Mhz laptop, i can use visual studio without complaints. Yes, it's slower than it would be on a P4 notebook. Let me tell you why I don't care: optimization!...I find I write better code on trailing-edge hardware, because any speed issues become extremely obvious where the same code would SEEM fine on my Athlon box.
But then again, maybe I'm a maniac.;-)
Anyway, based on my experience, I'd suggest that you not rule Apple out yet... Unless you're doing hardware drivers or video games, the emulation won't be a huge issue... And the reliability and design on these laptops are almost everything the zealots say they are:-). Check out the Connectix web site if you're interested in more info.
Wine helps Linux break out of the Chicken / Egg stage, where nobody wants to try the OS because there aren't enough well-known applications that run on it, and nobody wants to port their apps to Linux because not enough people have switched.
Since buying a 3-month subscription to WineX, I can now use enough of my old apps (and new games) that I have deleted my windows partition. Furthermore, I've been slowly converting my friends and family to Linux. This is ONLY possible because they can run the apps they know and love as-is.
I think BeOS proved that a great OS won't survive without plenty of apps... we should make it as easy as possible to port applications from Windows to Linux. If that means Wine, then fine. I agree that it's not as nice as a source-level rebuild, but your grandparents don't care HOW their copy of GenericWindowsApp2000 works... they just want it to work.
Working in the insurance industry, I once saw a similar speed increase.
The financial analysis software we used took an average of 23 hours to process it's data. When I upgraded from a pentium 90 to a pentium pro 200 (yeah, this was back in the day), the processing time dropped to 17 minutes.
"Well," I thought to myself, "This doesn't sound quite right". After a little investigation, I discovered that my predecessor disabled disk caching on the previous system, and I had neglected to copy this problem onto the new machine.
The moral of this story? a) Never underestimate the importance of I/O speed when upgrading, and b) Never underestimate the stupidity of the people who came before you.;-)
I had a program once which flipped the value of a boolean every time the inner loop executed. You would think that "x = !x" would acheive this effect nicely, but it didn't.... x always remained true.
Eventually, I discovered that the compiler I was using "x = x XOR 1" instead of "x = (x==0)" for it's logical NOT operation. Because I didn't initialize my boolean, there were some upper bits set in the (16-bit) boolean I was using. The "!" operator was only flipping the last bit and ingnoring all the other bits... which is why the variable never became false.
Maybe this technology could be used for GOOD! Instead of adding 30 seconds of commercials, they could squeeze one or two more jokes in the the Drew Cary show? Or one more idiotic plot twist into the X-Files?
You guys are always naysaying! Why don't you come up with an invention like inward sing--- oh wait, wrong rant....
It seems to me that the exhastive checking of every "gene" could be accelerated by quantum computing techniques... After all, why analyze ten thousand configurations to determine fitness, when you could theoretically analyze ALL possible configurations simultaneously? (Assuming we had an arbitrary number of qubits, of course...)
I'm sure there's a hole in my logic here... can anyone point it out for me?
Yes, the average game cost millions to produce.
Think of this, though: The average MOVIE costs $50M to produce, yet Robert Rodreguez produced "El Marachi" for $7000 and made millions off of it.
And do I even need to mention "The Blair Witch Project"? Movie production: $4000. Advertising through sneaky web-hoaxes: $0. Making millions upon millions of dollars with your micro-budget indie flick: priceless.
Spare time programming is difficult and slow, but it's free. Artists WILL donate graphics and sound for your project, if it's cool enough (and especially if they're still in college).
When I found out it was now possible to program your own games on a Dreamcast, I bought two. This, combined with free 3D raytracers like blender and povray save approx. $45000 off the cost of a traditional development system.
The video game industry is bloated. Billions of dollars are wasted on copycat titles. We are long overdue for some guys in a garage to blow the big boys away with a game that embodies what the industry SHOULD be all about... creativity.
From my research on the net, I've discovered that Dell laptops have a quite decent track record with linux.
Here's the system I recently configured and bought on the Dell website (it's an Inspiron 4000):
700 MHz Celeron
14.1" XGA TFT
128MB SDRAM
Internal 56k Modem (supported!)
Internal 10/100 ethernet (supported!)
10GB HD
8X DVD
Modular Floppy
100MB Zip
I especially like the fact that onboard modem and ethernet are supported, so I don't have to waste PC card slots for my network access.
Check out the Linux on Laptops site to see how others have tweaked out their laptops for linux.
I've met some Dell tech support people in the past, and they seem to know their chicken. Between that and the 3-year warranty I purchased, The only thing I expect to have trouble with is my wireless network at home (There are no linux drivers for Acer Warplink cards *sigh*)
(And no, I don't work for them, so don't flame me...:-)
Last weekend I was forced to install NT 4.0 on a FAT16 partition. (Please don't ask why, it was a long, ugly, embarassing story).
When it came time to install drivers for my wireless network card, I realized I was screwed... because even though the driver disk said "NT Compatable" on it, the long filenames in the driver binaries got mangled in the trip over to FAT16.
So is the problem a company who doesn't do a test install in ALL possible environments, or is it a "Backward compatable" filename system which isnt? YES.
Why can't we break out of this endless cycle of scientific/religious antagonism?
Scientists: No amount of physical evidence, mathematical formulae, or deductive reasoning will ever be able to PROVE that we were or were not created by God, Allah, YWEH, etc. There were no eye witnesses, and just because you have a theory that fits current evidence does not mean that theory is correct. I'm hearing more and more legitimate scientists discuss the idea of panspermia, which was scoffed at as little as 10 years ago. Do not worship your data. Do not worship your theories.
Christians: If you truly beleive in God, then the most importaint thing for you to worry about is "Love one another". No amount of arguing about the geneology of the species will bring new followers to the church, nor will it improve the condition of your fellow man. Worship your God, not your dogma.
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I've worked at EA. Marketing doesn't just sell the game, they pick the damn features. They set the release date. Sometimes, they even dictate the technology you will use, if it means a back-of-the-box bulletpoint.
People seem to be stuck on the idea that EA is a game company. Wrong! Electronic Arts Inc. is a titanic marketing company, which has somehow rolled up some talented coders and artists, Katamari-style. The dev team can be super-skilled and still get bulldozed along with the rest of the crap-wad. If Def Jam sucks, I wouldn't be suprised if it's because the marketing department was desperate to shove it out the door in time for the MTV Music Awards, or Dr. Dre's new album.
Let's think about this for a minute.
So, China stops buying software from american-owned companies. Microsoft, Adobe, Norton, etc are now off-limits to the average chinese consumer. What's going to take the place of all that software? Well, China DOES have a little project called Red Flag Linux... If they stick to the principles of the GPL (i can't see why they wouldn't), then all linux users everwhere will benefit eventually. No more Photoshop? No problem, the Gimp is getting pretty close to that level of usability. A few million new users/developers wouldn't hurt that project either. Oracle wouldn't be loosing existing customers, they'd be loosing POTENTIAL FUTURE customers. I see that as a big difference, but software industry lobbyists often gloss it over. This is similar to arguments made by the RIAA about how much money they "loose" due to piracy every year.
So, to summarize my little conspiracy theory: Chinese lockout of Foreign software is not so much money lost to Microsoft and pals, as it is development resources added to the Free Software movement. (Yeah yeah, commies bad, cowboys good... get over the cold war already. sheesh.)
Holy fuck, this guy's bitter.
There are plenty of supremely brilliant people doing quite well in this world... I even work with some of them. The Einstein-level braniacs who can't keep a steady job (yes, there are plenty) like to blame society for not being in tune with their greatness.
In reality, you just need to keep in mind this one simple fact: Suck-ass personal skill will usually cancel out about 130 perceived IQ points.
If you're a brilliant student wondering what to concentate on in college, try student government, model UN, or something else that requires you to interact with people and make them like you. If you're a bitter genius with a festering ulcer from the hundreds of rejections you get every year, try to wrap your brain around the possibility that either a) you're not as smart as you think you are... or b) people don't feel stupid around you, they feel annoyed.
Live in your mom's basement. Work at the highest paying job you can find for a year. (It will probably suck). Use the money you saved on rent and food to start your own business.
Even if you fall on your face, the dedication and self-discipline you showed will stand out on a resume, and make a great story during interviews.
For a prime example of this strategy, check out a book called "Rebel Without a Crew"... it's the true story of how a penniless film student sold his body to science for 7 grand and used the money to make himself a million dollar directing career.
good luck!
I am also a professional programmer, so I can relate to your worries about development restrictions on a non-PC platform. I've been running VirtualPC on my second-hand TiBook for awhile now, and I can testify that it works quite well for PC development purposes.
...I find I write better code on trailing-edge hardware, because any speed issues become extremely obvious where the same code would SEEM fine on my Athlon box.
;-)
:-). Check out the Connectix web site if you're interested in more info.
On a 667 Mhz laptop, i can use visual studio without complaints. Yes, it's slower than it would be on a P4 notebook. Let me tell you why I don't care: optimization!
But then again, maybe I'm a maniac.
Anyway, based on my experience, I'd suggest that you not rule Apple out yet... Unless you're doing hardware drivers or video games, the emulation won't be a huge issue... And the reliability and design on these laptops are almost everything the zealots say they are
Wine helps Linux break out of the Chicken / Egg stage, where nobody wants to try the OS because there aren't enough well-known applications that run on it, and nobody wants to port their apps to Linux because not enough people have switched.
Since buying a 3-month subscription to WineX, I can now use enough of my old apps (and new games) that I have deleted my windows partition. Furthermore, I've been slowly converting my friends and family to Linux. This is ONLY possible because they can run the apps they know and love as-is.
I think BeOS proved that a great OS won't survive without plenty of apps... we should make it as easy as possible to port applications from Windows to Linux. If that means Wine, then fine. I agree that it's not as nice as a source-level rebuild, but your grandparents don't care HOW their copy of GenericWindowsApp2000 works... they just want it to work.
Working in the insurance industry, I once saw a similar speed increase.
The financial analysis software we used took an average of 23 hours to process it's data. When I upgraded from a pentium 90 to a pentium pro 200 (yeah, this was back in the day), the processing time dropped to 17 minutes.
"Well," I thought to myself, "This doesn't sound quite right".
After a little investigation, I discovered that my predecessor disabled disk caching on the previous system, and I had neglected to copy this problem onto the new machine.
The moral of this story? a) Never underestimate the importance of I/O speed when upgrading, and b) Never underestimate the stupidity of the people who came before you.;-)
I had a program once which flipped the value of a boolean every time the inner loop executed. You would think that "x = !x" would acheive this effect nicely, but it didn't.... x always remained true.
Eventually, I discovered that the compiler I was using "x = x XOR 1" instead of "x = (x==0)" for it's logical NOT operation. Because I didn't initialize my boolean, there were some upper bits set in the (16-bit) boolean I was using. The "!" operator was only flipping the last bit and ingnoring all the other bits... which is why the variable never became false.
my head was spinning for days after this one.
Maybe this technology could be used for GOOD! Instead of adding 30 seconds of commercials, they could squeeze one or two more jokes in the the Drew Cary show? Or one more idiotic plot twist into the X-Files?
You guys are always naysaying! Why don't you come up with an invention like inward sing--- oh wait, wrong rant....
It seems to me that the exhastive checking of every "gene" could be accelerated by quantum computing techniques... After all, why analyze ten thousand configurations to determine fitness, when you could theoretically analyze ALL possible configurations simultaneously? (Assuming we had an arbitrary number of qubits, of course...)
I'm sure there's a hole in my logic here... can anyone point it out for me?
Yes, the average game cost millions to produce. Think of this, though: The average MOVIE costs $50M to produce, yet Robert Rodreguez produced "El Marachi" for $7000 and made millions off of it.
And do I even need to mention "The Blair Witch Project"? Movie production: $4000. Advertising through sneaky web-hoaxes: $0. Making millions upon millions of dollars with your micro-budget indie flick: priceless.
Spare time programming is difficult and slow, but it's free. Artists WILL donate graphics and sound for your project, if it's cool enough (and especially if they're still in college).
When I found out it was now possible to program your own games on a Dreamcast, I bought two. This, combined with free 3D raytracers like blender and povray save approx. $45000 off the cost of a traditional development system.
The video game industry is bloated. Billions of dollars are wasted on copycat titles. We are long overdue for some guys in a garage to blow the big boys away with a game that embodies what the industry SHOULD be all about... creativity.
Here's the system I recently configured and bought on the Dell website (it's an Inspiron 4000):
700 MHz Celeron
14.1" XGA TFT
128MB SDRAM
Internal 56k Modem (supported!)
Internal 10/100 ethernet (supported!)
10GB HD
8X DVD
Modular Floppy
100MB Zip
I especially like the fact that onboard modem and ethernet are supported, so I don't have to waste PC card slots for my network access. Check out the Linux on Laptops site to see how others have tweaked out their laptops for linux.
I've met some Dell tech support people in the past, and they seem to know their chicken. Between that and the 3-year warranty I purchased, The only thing I expect to have trouble with is my wireless network at home (There are no linux drivers for Acer Warplink cards *sigh*)
(And no, I don't work for them, so don't flame me...:-)
Last weekend I was forced to install NT 4.0 on a FAT16 partition. (Please don't ask why, it was a long, ugly, embarassing story).
When it came time to install drivers for my wireless network card, I realized I was screwed... because even though the driver disk said "NT Compatable" on it, the long filenames in the driver binaries got mangled in the trip over to FAT16.
So is the problem a company who doesn't do a test install in ALL possible environments, or is it a "Backward compatable" filename system which isnt? YES.
(Grrr......)
Scientists: No amount of physical evidence, mathematical formulae, or deductive reasoning will ever be able to PROVE that we were or were not created by God, Allah, YWEH, etc. There were no eye witnesses, and just because you have a theory that fits current evidence does not mean that theory is correct. I'm hearing more and more legitimate scientists discuss the idea of panspermia, which was scoffed at as little as 10 years ago. Do not worship your data. Do not worship your theories.
Christians: If you truly beleive in God, then the most importaint thing for you to worry about is "Love one another". No amount of arguing about the geneology of the species will bring new followers to the church, nor will it improve the condition of your fellow man. Worship your God, not your dogma.
"Sudy the moon, not the finger pointing at it"