When you say "The pity is", it's almost like you suggest there's some advantage to the strategy. It seems to me like this isn't really a strategy at all; he was really just shirking his duties as a professor (i.e. responsibility to judge student performance).
OSX currently has a 3d interface, and Longhorn also will. That is to say, both of them use 3d acceleration rather than writing directly into the framebuffer. This lets them manipulate windows in a much more flexible manner.
Sure, it's not a fancy 3d interface, but I'll take it over the old way of doing things.
...that I happen to have worked on a little bit is the following:
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/pervasive/multim od al/
It's basically an attempt to bring voice I/O into the Web application framework, by integrating voice I/O components into the XHTML. The desktop browser version is availabe for free, while the main target market (portable devices) isn't. It uses a version of the ViaVoice engine tailored for embedded systems that requires no training; it's designed for small sets of vocabulary rather than the large set that dictation requires, so it doesn't work all that poorly.
Granted, a programming language structured through XML is a bit of a hassle, but...:|
I haven't exactly followed on the trend of V-chips, but are those regularly installed in new televisions these days? Do these let parents force filtering of content they don't want their children to see?
If they do, then is the problem that they're not sophisticated enough to work well, or that people are just too lazy/stupid to figure out their operation? I seem to recall there are a hue and a cry about the V-chip at one point, but I think it'd be a reasonable way to deal with issues like this, basically once and for all.
I see large messageboards clogged with posts from people who bought the game and can't play it (even now, with this latest release). Yet, a friend of mine who never seems to pay for games was playing HL2 a day or two after its release.
Maybe Valve should stick with Steam as a content delivery system, and not screw around with single player authentification.
The Unreal engine does look like it has some pretty amazing stuff up its sleave, but you may wish to keep in mind that the basic Doom 3 rendering engine has been finalized for a good three or four years now, with the exception of what constituted minor tweaking along the way.
Certainly Carmack has been devoting a lot of his time to rocketry, and it's probably also fair to say that he's sometimes been narrow-minded in his approach to everything that isn't bread-and-butter first person shooter stuff (fast graphics rendering, core networking capabilities, etc., but not physics, deformable geometry, etc.). But you can bet he hasn't been resting on his laurels with regard to next-gen game engine technology.
I don't think anyone's ever created a Machinima "movie" that actually requires a viewer to own the game or platform.
Wrong. Quake movies are/were pretty popular. See link: http://www.quaketerminus.com/movies.htm
Basically, a ton of content (as well as a palpable universe) is available for an author to work with, without much more than some tinkering (i.e. Quake demo editing). So you can put out something creative and engaging without needing a huge amount of content creation background. No, it's not Pixar quality stuff. But like RvB (which is an offshoot of the idea pioneered by Quake demo editing), it's entertaining.
As far as I know, this was the earliest example of this mode of entertainment. Of course, it was really weak compared to its sequel:
http://machinima.com/qml/quake/rgb2.htm...which was actually pretty entertaining, and in that day in age, pretty revolutionary. They even went ahead and created some QuakeC mods to help them through the "filming" process (which was all done over the Internet, I think with a number of latency-challenged modem users).
The Rangers were one of the most well-recognized clans following the release of the original Quake, mostly for their contributions of fiction pieces and, eventually, these two movies. A cool bunch of guys. I joined up with them a little after their heyday, just in time to spend a little time working on the filming of Ranger Gone Bad 3. In spite of being a really neat effort with a lot of custom Quake content, it was so ambitious for its time that it just never got completed.
While I'm at it, I'll give a little footnote to how great the original Quake was. People sometimes deride it as being nothing drastically innovative from a gameplay standpoint, which was a little bit true in the single player game. However, the multiplayer component forged pretty much all of online multiplayer gaming as we know it. It was the moment of critical mass for the formation of long distance social gaming, and the multiplayer model was good enough that virtually every first person shooter since then is based on it (although these days they tend to incorporate a built-in server browsing utility, which was an independent addition called QuakeSpy back then).
In closing, a little write-up that I happened to enjoy reading: http://www.muppetclan.com/history/
On a somewhat unrelated topic...
on
NYT on EA Games
·
· Score: 1
Maybe someone can comment on something that's been bugging me for quite some time.
As we move forward, we find ourselves in a position where we can automate a lot of the work that *needs* to get done. This isn't new; it's been happening since the Industrial Revolution in one degree or another.
It's pretty much obvious that a lot of people (in *any* large group) just aren't that well-suited for work requiring intelligence. It's been the case in the past that that these people could find tasks that need accomplishing and get paid to do them, even if they didn't get paid a whole lot.
I think we can safely say that, barring any major cataclysms, it won't be too long before the various mechanisms are in place to put together robots that can handle most all menials tasks (i.e. image processing systems being capable of recognizing distinct objects, robotic limbs capable of manipulating free-form objects in an intelligent way), from manufacturing to agriculture.
So what exactly is going to happen with the part of the population that isn't all that well-suited to thinking through things that computers aren't? Can we even come up with enough non-menial tasks to keep the people who *can* do them busy? Since the *last* thing anyone seems to want to do is reduce the average number of hours anyone works, and since in at least in the United States we don't really feel that people deserve to have food on the table unless they're doing *something* for a set number of hours per week, how are we going to account for the growing number of people that aren't really needed for anything? Some enormous service economy? Office Space-style meaningless busywork?
Re:So why the US don't follow Canada's steps...
on
NYT on EA Games
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You've obviously missed a memo or two. In spite of the United States having no protection for tech workers, American companies are shipping jobs overseas anyway. So what's your argument? That they'll just ship *more* of them overseas if we had any labor regulations? While I think a few more jobs would end up overseas, I think the difference wouldn't be significant.
Realistically, most firms who've shipped work overseas have regretted the quality of work. The fact that so many other firms still consider doing it is indicative of a couple of nasty social problems, as I see it. Firstly, executives these days give too much weight to the opinions of accountants and too little to the people with common sense. Secondly, there's just an overwhelming lack of respect for technical workers here in the United States. That comes from so many different things I wouldn't even know where to begin.
Well, you're right about the lack of innovation, and I think the reasons for this are relatively simply. Since they're constantly firing guys with any experience, there's probably an awful lot of wheel reinvention going on. Rather than being able to build on/extend the hard work of previous generations, the staff spends most of its time just duct-taping stuff together. When you spend so much time *getting it to work* (which takes much longer than if you'd already done it before, as most programmers can attest), there's not a lot of time left for innovation.
Money always seems like a great motivator initially, but after working those kinds of death marches for long enough, I'm guessing your family gets tired of it even before you do. The salary (which I don't think is competitive with what these guys would get working in other industries) certainly doesn't account for losing touch with your family in the long run.
But it looks like EA has a policy of getting rid of their employees right about the time their spouses start to cheat on them anyway.
Re:How Free Markets Work
on
NYT on EA Games
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Thanks for the economics lecture. You might be surprised to learn that many Slashdot readers, many EA employees, and even many New York Times journalists have taken an economics course at one point or another, and yet don't see that as a reasonable excuse for EA policy of employee mistreatment.
Here's the interesting fact: The United States (along with the rest of the world) doesn't operate on a free market. We tend pretty strongly towards capitalism, but not totally. Just like we tend pretty strongly towards democracy, but not totally. The framers of the Constitution established a system of majority rule with minority rights, since they knew that free-thinking people can't always be trusted to make humane decisions. In a pretty analagous way, the United States government has intervened throughout the years to amend egregious human rights deficiencies (coal miners, Industrial Revolution factory workers, etc.).
This is really a fundamental prerequisite of social systems. A society that doesn't protect its members from extremes is hardly a society at all. It's an element of the social contract that defines the benefit for individuals of working within the society.
The burden of competition should be (and easily can be, as it is in most other professional fields) on the talent of the employees, not on how brutally they'll willing to sacrifice their mental health. It's not a step I would recommend, but hypothetically, if the government were to mandate tomorrow that all employees in this industry aren't allowed to work more than 40 hours a week, then EA would probably stay in business. They'd have to make their organization operate more intelligently, by doing things like retaining experienced workers rather than burning everyone out before they have said experience. The game industry, probably even more so than the rest of the programming industry, responds well to intelligent workers.
Your last statement is a little bit fallacious on a few levels. Firstly, as I hope I've indicated, you only get what you're worth within the confines of social edicts. Secondly, EA is not necessarily paying employees what they're worth or what they deserve. From what I've read, they're taking an approach of paying employees less than they're worth and making a concerted effort to make their employees think that they deserve even less than what they're getting. Economics doesn't justify this kind of psychological abuse.
Maybe part of the reason for this is that no talented tech guys ever stick with EA long enough for them to put out decent software (i.e. portable, stable, etc.). For all the bright young guys they recruit, none of them ever get to reap the benefits of a few years experience.
Of course, I'm sure the EA top brass just attributes poor software quality to employee incompetence/laziness (as they snort crack off a hooker's ass).
"You can't complain, there are lots of people in this situation!"
Yet in spite of people starving in Africa, I still get a bit cranky if I haven't eaten in 12 hours, and I think it's valid.
I don't know a whole lot about the medical profession, but it seems to me there's a certain amount of personal choice involved in working extremely long hours, assuming you've completed the first few years on the job.
Judging from my experience with network admins, I think there would be a serious problem with mentors scaring off the entire next generation of talented IT candidates.
Slashdot Mirror
When you say "The pity is", it's almost like you suggest there's some advantage to the strategy. It seems to me like this isn't really a strategy at all; he was really just shirking his duties as a professor (i.e. responsibility to judge student performance).
Obviously, few people could get away with this.
OSX currently has a 3d interface, and Longhorn also will. That is to say, both of them use 3d acceleration rather than writing directly into the framebuffer. This lets them manipulate windows in a much more flexible manner.
Sure, it's not a fancy 3d interface, but I'll take it over the old way of doing things.
I'll have to write id Software and ask them to stop rendering a 1d forward/backward environment in 3d.
Is this... a joke? I can't even tell.
Would it have been more effective if the movie had actually made one of them die? Because it did indicate that they were all pretty hungry.
...that I happen to have worked on a little bit is the following:
m od al/
:|
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/pervasive/multi
It's basically an attempt to bring voice I/O into the Web application framework, by integrating voice I/O components into the XHTML. The desktop browser version is availabe for free, while the main target market (portable devices) isn't. It uses a version of the ViaVoice engine tailored for embedded systems that requires no training; it's designed for small sets of vocabulary rather than the large set that dictation requires, so it doesn't work all that poorly.
Granted, a programming language structured through XML is a bit of a hassle, but...
I haven't exactly followed on the trend of V-chips, but are those regularly installed in new televisions these days? Do these let parents force filtering of content they don't want their children to see?
If they do, then is the problem that they're not sophisticated enough to work well, or that people are just too lazy/stupid to figure out their operation? I seem to recall there are a hue and a cry about the V-chip at one point, but I think it'd be a reasonable way to deal with issues like this, basically once and for all.
Interesting.
I see large messageboards clogged with posts from people who bought the game and can't play it (even now, with this latest release). Yet, a friend of mine who never seems to pay for games was playing HL2 a day or two after its release.
Maybe Valve should stick with Steam as a content delivery system, and not screw around with single player authentification.
The Unreal engine does look like it has some pretty amazing stuff up its sleave, but you may wish to keep in mind that the basic Doom 3 rendering engine has been finalized for a good three or four years now, with the exception of what constituted minor tweaking along the way.
Certainly Carmack has been devoting a lot of his time to rocketry, and it's probably also fair to say that he's sometimes been narrow-minded in his approach to everything that isn't bread-and-butter first person shooter stuff (fast graphics rendering, core networking capabilities, etc., but not physics, deformable geometry, etc.). But you can bet he hasn't been resting on his laurels with regard to next-gen game engine technology.
I don't think anyone's ever created a Machinima "movie" that actually requires a viewer to own the game or platform.
Wrong. Quake movies are/were pretty popular. See link: http://www.quaketerminus.com/movies.htm
Basically, a ton of content (as well as a palpable universe) is available for an author to work with, without much more than some tinkering (i.e. Quake demo editing). So you can put out something creative and engaging without needing a huge amount of content creation background. No, it's not Pixar quality stuff. But like RvB (which is an offshoot of the idea pioneered by Quake demo editing), it's entertaining.
...as well as a plug for my old Quake clan.
...which was actually pretty entertaining, and in that day in age, pretty revolutionary. They even went ahead and created some QuakeC mods to help them through the "filming" process (which was all done over the Internet, I think with a number of latency-challenged modem users).
http://machinima.com/qml/quake/rgb.htm
As far as I know, this was the earliest example of this mode of entertainment. Of course, it was really weak compared to its sequel:
http://machinima.com/qml/quake/rgb2.htm
The Rangers were one of the most well-recognized clans following the release of the original Quake, mostly for their contributions of fiction pieces and, eventually, these two movies. A cool bunch of guys. I joined up with them a little after their heyday, just in time to spend a little time working on the filming of Ranger Gone Bad 3. In spite of being a really neat effort with a lot of custom Quake content, it was so ambitious for its time that it just never got completed.
While I'm at it, I'll give a little footnote to how great the original Quake was. People sometimes deride it as being nothing drastically innovative from a gameplay standpoint, which was a little bit true in the single player game. However, the multiplayer component forged pretty much all of online multiplayer gaming as we know it. It was the moment of critical mass for the formation of long distance social gaming, and the multiplayer model was good enough that virtually every first person shooter since then is based on it (although these days they tend to incorporate a built-in server browsing utility, which was an independent addition called QuakeSpy back then).
In closing, a little write-up that I happened to enjoy reading: http://www.muppetclan.com/history/
Criminal charges?!
Vigilante justice!
Maybe someone can comment on something that's been bugging me for quite some time.
As we move forward, we find ourselves in a position where we can automate a lot of the work that *needs* to get done. This isn't new; it's been happening since the Industrial Revolution in one degree or another.
It's pretty much obvious that a lot of people (in *any* large group) just aren't that well-suited for work requiring intelligence. It's been the case in the past that that these people could find tasks that need accomplishing and get paid to do them, even if they didn't get paid a whole lot.
I think we can safely say that, barring any major cataclysms, it won't be too long before the various mechanisms are in place to put together robots that can handle most all menials tasks (i.e. image processing systems being capable of recognizing distinct objects, robotic limbs capable of manipulating free-form objects in an intelligent way), from manufacturing to agriculture.
So what exactly is going to happen with the part of the population that isn't all that well-suited to thinking through things that computers aren't? Can we even come up with enough non-menial tasks to keep the people who *can* do them busy? Since the *last* thing anyone seems to want to do is reduce the average number of hours anyone works, and since in at least in the United States we don't really feel that people deserve to have food on the table unless they're doing *something* for a set number of hours per week, how are we going to account for the growing number of people that aren't really needed for anything? Some enormous service economy? Office Space-style meaningless busywork?
You've obviously missed a memo or two. In spite of the United States having no protection for tech workers, American companies are shipping jobs overseas anyway. So what's your argument? That they'll just ship *more* of them overseas if we had any labor regulations? While I think a few more jobs would end up overseas, I think the difference wouldn't be significant.
Realistically, most firms who've shipped work overseas have regretted the quality of work. The fact that so many other firms still consider doing it is indicative of a couple of nasty social problems, as I see it. Firstly, executives these days give too much weight to the opinions of accountants and too little to the people with common sense. Secondly, there's just an overwhelming lack of respect for technical workers here in the United States. That comes from so many different things I wouldn't even know where to begin.
Well, you're right about the lack of innovation, and I think the reasons for this are relatively simply. Since they're constantly firing guys with any experience, there's probably an awful lot of wheel reinvention going on. Rather than being able to build on/extend the hard work of previous generations, the staff spends most of its time just duct-taping stuff together. When you spend so much time *getting it to work* (which takes much longer than if you'd already done it before, as most programmers can attest), there's not a lot of time left for innovation.
Money always seems like a great motivator initially, but after working those kinds of death marches for long enough, I'm guessing your family gets tired of it even before you do. The salary (which I don't think is competitive with what these guys would get working in other industries) certainly doesn't account for losing touch with your family in the long run.
But it looks like EA has a policy of getting rid of their employees right about the time their spouses start to cheat on them anyway.
Thanks for the economics lecture. You might be surprised to learn that many Slashdot readers, many EA employees, and even many New York Times journalists have taken an economics course at one point or another, and yet don't see that as a reasonable excuse for EA policy of employee mistreatment.
Here's the interesting fact: The United States (along with the rest of the world) doesn't operate on a free market. We tend pretty strongly towards capitalism, but not totally. Just like we tend pretty strongly towards democracy, but not totally. The framers of the Constitution established a system of majority rule with minority rights, since they knew that free-thinking people can't always be trusted to make humane decisions. In a pretty analagous way, the United States government has intervened throughout the years to amend egregious human rights deficiencies (coal miners, Industrial Revolution factory workers, etc.).
This is really a fundamental prerequisite of social systems. A society that doesn't protect its members from extremes is hardly a society at all. It's an element of the social contract that defines the benefit for individuals of working within the society.
The burden of competition should be (and easily can be, as it is in most other professional fields) on the talent of the employees, not on how brutally they'll willing to sacrifice their mental health. It's not a step I would recommend, but hypothetically, if the government were to mandate tomorrow that all employees in this industry aren't allowed to work more than 40 hours a week, then EA would probably stay in business. They'd have to make their organization operate more intelligently, by doing things like retaining experienced workers rather than burning everyone out before they have said experience. The game industry, probably even more so than the rest of the programming industry, responds well to intelligent workers.
Your last statement is a little bit fallacious on a few levels. Firstly, as I hope I've indicated, you only get what you're worth within the confines of social edicts. Secondly, EA is not necessarily paying employees what they're worth or what they deserve. From what I've read, they're taking an approach of paying employees less than they're worth and making a concerted effort to make their employees think that they deserve even less than what they're getting. Economics doesn't justify this kind of psychological abuse.
Maybe part of the reason for this is that no talented tech guys ever stick with EA long enough for them to put out decent software (i.e. portable, stable, etc.). For all the bright young guys they recruit, none of them ever get to reap the benefits of a few years experience.
Of course, I'm sure the EA top brass just attributes poor software quality to employee incompetence/laziness (as they snort crack off a hooker's ass).
"You can't complain, there are lots of people in this situation!"
Yet in spite of people starving in Africa, I still get a bit cranky if I haven't eaten in 12 hours, and I think it's valid.
I don't know a whole lot about the medical profession, but it seems to me there's a certain amount of personal choice involved in working extremely long hours, assuming you've completed the first few years on the job.
Unparalleled brilliance.
I can't even tell if you're being sarcastic or intentionally being a jackass.
Game developer: "My fingers hurt! They're bleeding!"
Game consumer: "WORK HARDER!!!"
"There are faster algorithms on the net, but these algorithms are within the reach of mere mortals and are fully explained."
Well jeebus Mildred!!
I'm going to take a stab in the dark on this one... Maybe because you're pretty likely to kill one of your own people, or some innocent bystander?
It's a little hard to discuss games with friends when they stopped caring about the game years ago.
Judging from my experience with network admins, I think there would be a serious problem with mentors scaring off the entire next generation of talented IT candidates.