Most jobs I have applied for as an Electrical Engineer make it quite clear that overtime is not given and that you may be required to work 50 or 60 hr weeks.
Wow. That's a vacation.
I interviewed at a place once (I won't name names... Ok, Atari) that had checked with their lawyer to make sure it was OK to require all employees to stay a MINIMUM of 60 hours every week (not including lunch) as a routine part of employment. If you fell under 60 hours, you were fired. Even assuming your father's commute was instantaneous and he never took a lunch, he still would have been fired from Atari for underperforming. And this was minimum... most people were expected to stay longer.
I was hired on a company once to help finish a project. It was supposed to be a one-month job, but lasted for half of a year. During that time, I never worked less than 60 hours a week, and never saw both days of a weekend. My real average was in the mid 70's. for... six... loooooooooooooooo... oooooooooooooooo... oooooooooooooo... oooooooooooo... oooooooooooooo... ooooooooooooong.... months.
One of my friends in the industry (whom I actually met on that job) has been crunching for most of the past year. I've only managed to see him once in this entire time, and only then I incidentally bumped into him while driving home.
And these are independent companies. Big studios are notoriously worse. At least my crunch time ended after 6 months, and my friend's is within a realistic month or two of ending. At a studio like EA or Activision, they shuttle people around as they are needed for projects. And they're needed for projects as crunch time kicks in. Employees / slaves call it "permacrunch" or "crunchopping", the act of being bounced from one paniced 70 hour a week team to another paniced 70 hour a week position permanently for the rest of your life.
Now remember that you take about a 50% pay cut below market rates to work in the game industry, and some of these companies are highly profitable, and you can see where the dissatisfaction arises.
I hope we unionize. It was union labors that ensured for example that electrical engineers wouldn't have to abandon their families to work 70 hours a week every week for low pay no healthcare and and zero security.
And if you don't know how bad it is in the gaming industry... do a little research before you judge us. We're not grocery store clerks that want healthcare, or graduate students lobbying for better pay. We're one of the last great slaveries in the so-called free market. And we deserve to be treated like human beings.
A competant group should be able to make a movie "out of" anything.
Great videogame inspired movies have been made before. There was Tron. There was The Matrix. There was Advent Children.
Resident Evil should have been a shoe-in movie, and except for some mediocre acting, bad CG, and dogs covered in ham, it would have been. But the game was clearly based upon the tradition of Romero's zombie movies, like Dawn of the Dead and more modern versions like Dead Alive. And had they pulled form that source, they should have no problem coming up with something interesting.
Same with the Alone in the Dark movie. The game was a story about a person doing paranormal investigations and getting in way over his head. You can go basically anywhere with that, from the X-Files to Constantine and still be within the space of the game.
Game movies aren't bad because games can't be rich source material. Game movies are bad because they're consistently given to bad filmmakers to make.
Micropayments and alternative transaction numbers have the possibility of really changing the way games are played. Imagine a version of DDR where the characters are dancing in licensed clothes. But the trade off is that as you play you acquire points that allow you to download other songs for free. You buy the game once, and you are supplied with a steady stream of content for the life of the system.
Or look at PC games that are given away for free, but which cost money for upgrades / etc. Imagine downloading the Tomb Raider demo, deciding you like it, and paying for an upgrade to the full version. Or maybe you just download a level at a time, and after three levels you get tired and give up. Or a free car racing game that you start out with a beat-up little beamer you can race, but upgrades to other cars cost money. You can completely exploit the First-hit-is-free style payment structure which ensures that more people play more games, are more satisfied, and not ironically pay more into their hobby. The MMPORPG I play has no monthly fee, no retail fee, but charges you for items. And if it weren't for the zero-commitment, I never would have tried it. Now I spend on average 20 dollars a month to play a game which you can subscribe to for 10, but with the control in my hands I'm loving every minute of it.
I do think "raping the microtransactions" is an apt metaphor, and certainly I've talked to some studio executives that I've wanted to strangle. "Imagine... people buy a 50 dollar game! Then they download armor and equipment for 2 dollars each! Then they subscribe to the in-game radio system! Then they give us blood, their bank account information, and their first-born child!" Not to sound too graphic, but that part is just the guys in marketing masterbating, and I like to think that the people who actually produce the games know that. But alternative funding methods can bring the overall barrier to entry to the end player down.
As far as I've seen Microsoft is still working on ways of getting user-created content into marketplace. But they're still making major fixes to their existing system (background downloading, anyone?). And so the process is going slower than it should.
People get involved in things. Engineers get involved in their projects. Filmmakers get involved in their films. They make a million decisions, and spend thousands of hours invested in getting this thing to work perfectly.
On the other end of things, people will walk away if they can't figure out your gadget in 15 seconds or so. 15 seconds. It's very difficult to keep perspective when you've gotten the equivalent of a Masters Degree in something, but the user needs to know how to use it intuitively.
I'm guilty of this as well. I know there were some decisions I've made in my career that made sense from the perspective of someone who has worked on something for 10 hours a day for 300 days, but didn't make sense to anyone else. Those games were my life for that year of development, but to a user they may just be 1/100th of their time in a week, and 1/100th of their attention.
KISS. Simplify it. Simplify it some more. Then when you think you've made it as simple as possible, simplify it some more. Then put it in the hands of an average 40 year old office worker. I guarantee you will find that it is still too complicated.
The next gen console race is over. It has been over for months and months. Just like every other console market cycle. The battles are won and lost months to years before the actual hardware hits the shelves.
I'm sorry, can you back that up a little? Basically every other console cycle has been a beat-down, dragged-out bloodbath. The SNES vs Genesis wars. The PS1 vs Saturn wars. I won't even get into Atari days. These were won and lost based upon the strength of games developed after the systems had shipped. The PS2 era was unique in that Sony had a commanding lead going in, but it was no foregone conclusion. And now Sony has had their two systems (no console manufacturer has every held the #1 spot for more than two systems), it looks to be... interesting to see if they can hold on for another ride.
Especially in the face of the competition. 'screw specs, the competition is Halo 3 and Metroid with a VR-like wand. The X360 got a hell of a lot of buzz, as the X was the hardcore system of choice for a lot of heavy gamers last generation. And Live has developed into a must-have feature of its own. The Weevolution looks like it might deliver games that nobody else can do, and for damned cheap. And the PS3 has the legacy of the PS1 and PS2 behind it.
The X360 may be selling generally low numbers, but they're still selling out. Low numbers due to lack of demand is terrible. Low numders due to lack of supply on launch? Welcome to Japan.
It is anything but a foregone war. When the PS3 and Wii^H^H^H Revolution ships, then we'll see who has the best games, who has the best marketing, and who can capture the most eyes and hearts.
Opera has been following the same pattern for years.
Major releases are terribly buggy with lots of new stuff. Except that every-other major release is purely for marketing reasons, and isn't really a major release.
If I remember correctly, the real upgrades were 7, 6, 4, and 2, which means that 9 as a buggy mess is long over due. Opera 1 was never released, so it's probably safe to call 2 the major release.
The fidgety numbered ones are stable. 8.54 will probably be the most stable opera for a while. I still have fond memories of 3.62, though I'll be damned if I could find a site that would let you on with it.
Opera also has close buttons on tabs. But you can Undo closing of windows, and everything restores including text box. I was under the impression that Firefox did this now as well.
On a side note, notice how all of those games are FPS?
Cellfactor seems to really take advantage of the idea of using physics as
The ghost recon videos could easily be replicated by using non-colliding particle systems which simply transpose through geometry before wearing out. Heck, add a dirt-cheap ground level collision plane, and you're all set. In the heat of an explosion, it would look just about as realistic, and without the additional hundred dollars in hardware to upgrade every year. As is they disappear after about 3 seconds anyway.
And Bet On Soldier's glowing particle systems are neat, but the gameplay doesn't change one bit.
Cellfactor seems to really take advantage of the hardware, and is a game I'd buy at launch to boot (Even though the time to crate is about 1 second). The rest of what they're showing is nice, but not what you would want physics for. Realistic debreis? Come on, we can do better.
What would you expect Nintendo to say in the case that this were true? What would you expect Nintendo to say in the case that this were false? Every other system I've seen has had their trademarks registered and searchable long before the announcement of the system name. Even the USPTO doesn't find it.
But maybe they really did make a quick decision, and that it didn't filter through the trademark system yet. However, they also didn't register any websites about the name, which should have shown up in the amount of time that it took to create the Wii animation. And since they didn't, wii related websites are already thoroughly squatted.
You would create the name for the japanese by combining the standalone U and I sounds written out in Katakana (foreign word writing system). Even though it is the fault of a japanese company, thus making it a sort of Japanese word and prone to Hiragana (native word writing system), Katakana is the modern accepted way of writing that sound.
Check the katakana table at Wikipedia. Wi is listed. Unfortunatley, Slashdot ate the unicode, so you'll have to see the glyphs yourself. Wi is completely acceptable / pronouncable Japanese.
I distinctly remember when "Dreamcast" was released that everyone thought it was a terrible, touchy-feely name. And when the iPod came out, we all thought Apple was smoking the eCrack. Even the PlayStation was a pretty dumb sounding name, and was proof that Sony's SNES CD was never going to amount to anything. For that matter, the Super NES sounded incredibly bad to US ears.
Now all of these names are recognized worldwide. They gained traction on the strength of the systems, and are now highly recognizable and much loved. It's theoretically possible that the same will happen to Wii.
Kotaku has a better breakdown of the situation, which includes the nugget that nobody prior to the announcement had registered any tradmarks or websites with the Wii name.
The company that I work at is about 25% female, which is an exceptionally good number for the industry.
Only one of the programmers is female. But quite a few artists, sound engineers, and producers are. Some of them come from traditionally female-strong fields like Art and Web Development. Others came in through their strong project management skills. Still other just got jobs in QA like the rest of us, and worked their way up.
And in fact, far less than half of the company consists of coders.
There are other jobs in the gaming industry besides programming.
I have my theories about why women don't get into gaming as a career, and in fact why both men and women leave in droves after brief stints, but both of the above should be obvious by now.
I used to have a 3 hour (each way) commute from San Jose to San Rafael (north of San Fransisco). I was on the night shift, but that happened to have me leave at the "going home" rush hours and coming back a bit before the "leaving home" rush hours.
I first started by avoiding the city entirely... hitting 237 to 880 and up. But the milpitas junction was always such a crawl that it took far longer than just driving through the city. Then I took 101 up, which would slow to a predictable crawl and take a very long time. Then I started taking the secret route: 280 up through the foothills. Speeds are always in the 90's and there is never a jam unless someone flipped their porche. It still dumps you out in the city, but you avoid the 101 SF traffic jam.
Going back, that route is a nightmare of drunk drivers and morning traffic. Ironically, coming up 580 to 880 to 237 gets you in at ludicrous speeds... I've been going 110 and getting passed by cops on a fully empty 5-lane road.
A three hour commute chopped down to just one hour by judicious exploration of possible routes.
The same has been true in Boston. I used to drive my girlfriend to work from Porter Square to the Cambridgeside Galleria. After experimenting with Mass Ave, Memorial Drive, and a few other routes, it became clear that the fastest way to get there was by taking Somerville to McGrath Highway... both underutilized throughfares that nobody needs to commute on in the morning. A 1 hour commute chopped down to 1/2 hour.
I guess what I'm saying is experiment with your drive. Every place I've lived, from Boston to LA to the silicon valley, has had alternate routes that (once discovered) chopped commute time down tremendously.
I think maybe we should wait until the current standards are, erm, standard.
If we waited until an implementation was perfect before moving on to the next thing, we'd still be stuck using DOS on a 20th generation 486.
Re:Games are getting ported to mobile devices
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Abandoned Games
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At least two of the games on their list of titles to rescue are available on phones: Prince of Persia and Lemmings.
Not that I don't agree with them. These pieces of cultral history should be released onto the world. But there are areas where they are still available.
They really haven't made a compelling argument why the money-grubbing rights holders should release these games.
If you're working for the good of a client you care about, you'll make great stuff. If you're working just for your boss up the hall, you'll do work in proportion to how often he comes and complains to you.
If you're doing work for your outsourcing company for a remote client's client more than 7,000 miles away, you have as little personally invested in the success of that project as possible. You're going to produce whatever crap keeps you the job, in direct proportion to how much the complaining of the remote client's client actually makes it back to your ears. Translated, of course.
You never get good work unless the people doing the work have some stake in its success. Farming that out overseas is not a route to getting production-level code. It can be done, but it is neither cheap nor easy.
We must remember that the IT industry in this country is moving forward, not backward, upward not sideways, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards project management.
That's true. I'm not used to working with unlicensed developers, and am not familiar with the process of getting licensed (though I've heard it is less painful and more expensive than one would expect).
However, if you're planning next-gen content, a PC build should be convincing to a publisher, especially for X360 content. DS compatibility has been achieved for some time in the homebrew scene, so it would be possible to create a demo of a DS game that would actually play on the DS, and for little outlay in hardware development (compared to the wetware outlay).
Of course, 'get yourself licensed' is always easy to say for someone who only works in these companies, but every company I've worked for has gone through the process at some point or another.
Really, what's needed is a second mail system. This communications system would take advantage of all we've learned in the 30 years or so since the first e-mail system was implemented. It would include voice, video, and IM communications as hooks to try to get people to join. Communication would necessarily be secure, signed, and verified along the channel to protect against attack. It would be somewhat decentralized, well-routed, and wouldn't fall prey to the middle-of-the-day mail floods.
In short, it would look to the end user a lot like AIM with a reliable delayed-send function.
It wouldn't be required, it wouldn't solve the problem short-term. But it can't just be "e-mail without spam" It needs to not just solve the problem elegantly but add functionality so that people actually use it.
Why was the Usenet abandoned? It wasn't just because it was a crapflood... it always was a crapflood. It was abandoned because something better came along: the high culture that are the forums of the Internet.
Replace e-mail with something that makes it utterly obsolete, or come up with solutions that don't require users to change. People aren't going to change their behaviors unless something tremendously better is available to them.
Only on Slashdot is a comment about banging 17 year olds considered "insightful."
It's not wrong, mind you. Don't be so concerned about your future that when you get there you regret your past. But do choose better verbs, or it's not going to happen.
Try to get your independent game ported and distributed on any set-top console or any handheld system, and tell me it's not a collusive oligopoly. Got any hints?
In set-top land, you've got Live Arcade. That the "easy" way in. If you're willing to compromise more on the design and beef up the budget, lots of platform publishers right about now are hunting for quirky independent titles to distinguish their next-gen platform from the others in exchange for an exclusive oddity or two. They're not even looking for success at this point, really, just something they can point towards to distinguish their overpowered black box from everyone else's overpowered black box.
On handhelds, you have a lot of companies that are looking for cheap titles to milk... err, bring out. THQ is always on the prowl. Nintendo proper can help hook you up with people. Sony is enviously eyeing the success of the DS in cheap, profitable, and quirky land.
And then you have the PC, which is a cornacopia of possible options.
You should probably buy some development hardware yourself, then create the working demo with a team in an attempt to prove to the publisher A: you can do it B: you can do it in the time that you specify and C: the game won't suck. Of course, this takes a lot of guts and frequently a lot of relatives willing to morgage their homes for you. Hey, Turbine was founded on a lawsuit settlement from someone getting run over by a taxi.
I'm not saying it isn't difficut. The sheer volume of money required for a successful non-PC distribution is staggering. But every company that I've worked for in the gaming industry has been independent, as is nearly all of the gaming companies in Boston.
Really, independent studios make up about 1/2 of the development houses in this industry, with the major 10 publishers accounting for having bought the rest. It can be disenchanting, and highly business-like. But if you perservere, there are ways in.
But most companies who buy Photoshop licenses don't need Photoshop. A lot of them need a glorified version of MS paint, if that. Some of them just need the basic white balance functionality or other retouching capabilities that come standard with most cameras. Others just need to cut and paste mockups quickly so that the real art department can get to work. Others have it around "just in case."
There is definitely nothing that is as fully functional as the CS2 suite out there for image professionals. But Photoshop seems as prevalant as Word in office environments, and is utterly unnecessary for 90% - 99% of those people.
And you have to ask yourself, why isn't there anything else out there? If history is any indication, if a smaller, less functional suite gained traction amongst users as a low-cost alternative, it would eventually add all of the features (and then some) becoming viable competition. But nobody can even get in on the ground floor, because everyone uses PS/ILL, from the teenager trying to get the red eye out of her photos to the MOD map maker trying to make good looking wall textures to the graphics professional working with 300 MB image files. Break that monoculture, and you'd have competition again.
And maybe with competition we'd finally get delayed rendering or non-crappy vector editing in Photoshop.
Slashdot Mirror
Most jobs I have applied for as an Electrical Engineer make it quite clear that overtime is not given and that you may be required to work 50 or 60 hr weeks.
Wow. That's a vacation.
I interviewed at a place once (I won't name names... Ok, Atari) that had checked with their lawyer to make sure it was OK to require all employees to stay a MINIMUM of 60 hours every week (not including lunch) as a routine part of employment. If you fell under 60 hours, you were fired. Even assuming your father's commute was instantaneous and he never took a lunch, he still would have been fired from Atari for underperforming. And this was minimum... most people were expected to stay longer.
I was hired on a company once to help finish a project. It was supposed to be a one-month job, but lasted for half of a year. During that time, I never worked less than 60 hours a week, and never saw both days of a weekend. My real average was in the mid 70's. for... six... loooooooooooooooo... oooooooooooooooo... oooooooooooooo... oooooooooooo... oooooooooooooo... ooooooooooooong.... months.
One of my friends in the industry (whom I actually met on that job) has been crunching for most of the past year. I've only managed to see him once in this entire time, and only then I incidentally bumped into him while driving home.
And these are independent companies. Big studios are notoriously worse. At least my crunch time ended after 6 months, and my friend's is within a realistic month or two of ending. At a studio like EA or Activision, they shuttle people around as they are needed for projects. And they're needed for projects as crunch time kicks in. Employees / slaves call it "permacrunch" or "crunchopping", the act of being bounced from one paniced 70 hour a week team to another paniced 70 hour a week position permanently for the rest of your life.
Now remember that you take about a 50% pay cut below market rates to work in the game industry, and some of these companies are highly profitable, and you can see where the dissatisfaction arises.
I hope we unionize. It was union labors that ensured for example that electrical engineers wouldn't have to abandon their families to work 70 hours a week every week for low pay no healthcare and and zero security.
And if you don't know how bad it is in the gaming industry... do a little research before you judge us. We're not grocery store clerks that want healthcare, or graduate students lobbying for better pay. We're one of the last great slaveries in the so-called free market. And we deserve to be treated like human beings.
A competant group should be able to make a movie "out of" anything.
Great videogame inspired movies have been made before. There was Tron. There was The Matrix. There was Advent Children.
Resident Evil should have been a shoe-in movie, and except for some mediocre acting, bad CG, and dogs covered in ham, it would have been. But the game was clearly based upon the tradition of Romero's zombie movies, like Dawn of the Dead and more modern versions like Dead Alive. And had they pulled form that source, they should have no problem coming up with something interesting.
Same with the Alone in the Dark movie. The game was a story about a person doing paranormal investigations and getting in way over his head. You can go basically anywhere with that, from the X-Files to Constantine and still be within the space of the game.
Game movies aren't bad because games can't be rich source material. Game movies are bad because they're consistently given to bad filmmakers to make.
Micropayments and alternative transaction numbers have the possibility of really changing the way games are played. Imagine a version of DDR where the characters are dancing in licensed clothes. But the trade off is that as you play you acquire points that allow you to download other songs for free. You buy the game once, and you are supplied with a steady stream of content for the life of the system.
Or look at PC games that are given away for free, but which cost money for upgrades / etc. Imagine downloading the Tomb Raider demo, deciding you like it, and paying for an upgrade to the full version. Or maybe you just download a level at a time, and after three levels you get tired and give up. Or a free car racing game that you start out with a beat-up little beamer you can race, but upgrades to other cars cost money. You can completely exploit the First-hit-is-free style payment structure which ensures that more people play more games, are more satisfied, and not ironically pay more into their hobby. The MMPORPG I play has no monthly fee, no retail fee, but charges you for items. And if it weren't for the zero-commitment, I never would have tried it. Now I spend on average 20 dollars a month to play a game which you can subscribe to for 10, but with the control in my hands I'm loving every minute of it.
I do think "raping the microtransactions" is an apt metaphor, and certainly I've talked to some studio executives that I've wanted to strangle. "Imagine... people buy a 50 dollar game! Then they download armor and equipment for 2 dollars each! Then they subscribe to the in-game radio system! Then they give us blood, their bank account information, and their first-born child!" Not to sound too graphic, but that part is just the guys in marketing masterbating, and I like to think that the people who actually produce the games know that. But alternative funding methods can bring the overall barrier to entry to the end player down.
As far as I've seen Microsoft is still working on ways of getting user-created content into marketplace. But they're still making major fixes to their existing system (background downloading, anyone?). And so the process is going slower than it should.
People get involved in things. Engineers get involved in their projects. Filmmakers get involved in their films. They make a million decisions, and spend thousands of hours invested in getting this thing to work perfectly.
On the other end of things, people will walk away if they can't figure out your gadget in 15 seconds or so. 15 seconds. It's very difficult to keep perspective when you've gotten the equivalent of a Masters Degree in something, but the user needs to know how to use it intuitively.
I'm guilty of this as well. I know there were some decisions I've made in my career that made sense from the perspective of someone who has worked on something for 10 hours a day for 300 days, but didn't make sense to anyone else. Those games were my life for that year of development, but to a user they may just be 1/100th of their time in a week, and 1/100th of their attention.
KISS. Simplify it. Simplify it some more. Then when you think you've made it as simple as possible, simplify it some more. Then put it in the hands of an average 40 year old office worker. I guarantee you will find that it is still too complicated.
The next gen console race is over. It has been over for months and months. Just like every other console market cycle. The battles are won and lost months to years before the actual hardware hits the shelves.
I'm sorry, can you back that up a little? Basically every other console cycle has been a beat-down, dragged-out bloodbath. The SNES vs Genesis wars. The PS1 vs Saturn wars. I won't even get into Atari days. These were won and lost based upon the strength of games developed after the systems had shipped. The PS2 era was unique in that Sony had a commanding lead going in, but it was no foregone conclusion. And now Sony has had their two systems (no console manufacturer has every held the #1 spot for more than two systems), it looks to be... interesting to see if they can hold on for another ride.
Especially in the face of the competition. 'screw specs, the competition is Halo 3 and Metroid with a VR-like wand. The X360 got a hell of a lot of buzz, as the X was the hardcore system of choice for a lot of heavy gamers last generation. And Live has developed into a must-have feature of its own. The Weevolution looks like it might deliver games that nobody else can do, and for damned cheap. And the PS3 has the legacy of the PS1 and PS2 behind it.
The X360 may be selling generally low numbers, but they're still selling out. Low numbers due to lack of demand is terrible. Low numders due to lack of supply on launch? Welcome to Japan.
It is anything but a foregone war. When the PS3 and Wii^H^H^H Revolution ships, then we'll see who has the best games, who has the best marketing, and who can capture the most eyes and hearts.
Opera has been following the same pattern for years.
Major releases are terribly buggy with lots of new stuff. Except that every-other major release is purely for marketing reasons, and isn't really a major release.
If I remember correctly, the real upgrades were 7, 6, 4, and 2, which means that 9 as a buggy mess is long over due. Opera 1 was never released, so it's probably safe to call 2 the major release.
A timeline can be found here.
The fidgety numbered ones are stable. 8.54 will probably be the most stable opera for a while. I still have fond memories of 3.62, though I'll be damned if I could find a site that would let you on with it.
Opera also has close buttons on tabs. But you can Undo closing of windows, and everything restores including text box. I was under the impression that Firefox did this now as well.
It's called blow, and it was outlawed in the 90's.
On a side note, notice how all of those games are FPS?
Cellfactor seems to really take advantage of the idea of using physics as
The ghost recon videos could easily be replicated by using non-colliding particle systems which simply transpose through geometry before wearing out. Heck, add a dirt-cheap ground level collision plane, and you're all set. In the heat of an explosion, it would look just about as realistic, and without the additional hundred dollars in hardware to upgrade every year. As is they disappear after about 3 seconds anyway.
And Bet On Soldier's glowing particle systems are neat, but the gameplay doesn't change one bit.
Cellfactor seems to really take advantage of the hardware, and is a game I'd buy at launch to boot (Even though the time to crate is about 1 second). The rest of what they're showing is nice, but not what you would want physics for. Realistic debreis? Come on, we can do better.
What would you expect Nintendo to say in the case that this were true? What would you expect Nintendo to say in the case that this were false? Every other system I've seen has had their trademarks registered and searchable long before the announcement of the system name. Even the USPTO doesn't find it.
But maybe they really did make a quick decision, and that it didn't filter through the trademark system yet. However, they also didn't register any websites about the name, which should have shown up in the amount of time that it took to create the Wii animation. And since they didn't, wii related websites are already thoroughly squatted.
Chances: possible, but unlikely.
You would create the name for the japanese by combining the standalone U and I sounds written out in Katakana (foreign word writing system). Even though it is the fault of a japanese company, thus making it a sort of Japanese word and prone to Hiragana (native word writing system), Katakana is the modern accepted way of writing that sound.
Check the katakana table at Wikipedia. Wi is listed. Unfortunatley, Slashdot ate the unicode, so you'll have to see the glyphs yourself. Wi is completely acceptable / pronouncable Japanese.
Wiiiiiiii!
I distinctly remember when "Dreamcast" was released that everyone thought it was a terrible, touchy-feely name. And when the iPod came out, we all thought Apple was smoking the eCrack. Even the PlayStation was a pretty dumb sounding name, and was proof that Sony's SNES CD was never going to amount to anything. For that matter, the Super NES sounded incredibly bad to US ears.
Now all of these names are recognized worldwide. They gained traction on the strength of the systems, and are now highly recognizable and much loved. It's theoretically possible that the same will happen to Wii.
Kotaku has a better breakdown of the situation, which includes the nugget that nobody prior to the announcement had registered any tradmarks or websites with the Wii name.
The company that I work at is about 25% female, which is an exceptionally good number for the industry.
Only one of the programmers is female. But quite a few artists, sound engineers, and producers are. Some of them come from traditionally female-strong fields like Art and Web Development. Others came in through their strong project management skills. Still other just got jobs in QA like the rest of us, and worked their way up.
And in fact, far less than half of the company consists of coders.
There are other jobs in the gaming industry besides programming.
I have my theories about why women don't get into gaming as a career, and in fact why both men and women leave in droves after brief stints, but both of the above should be obvious by now.
I used to have a 3 hour (each way) commute from San Jose to San Rafael (north of San Fransisco). I was on the night shift, but that happened to have me leave at the "going home" rush hours and coming back a bit before the "leaving home" rush hours.
I first started by avoiding the city entirely... hitting 237 to 880 and up. But the milpitas junction was always such a crawl that it took far longer than just driving through the city. Then I took 101 up, which would slow to a predictable crawl and take a very long time. Then I started taking the secret route: 280 up through the foothills. Speeds are always in the 90's and there is never a jam unless someone flipped their porche. It still dumps you out in the city, but you avoid the 101 SF traffic jam.
Going back, that route is a nightmare of drunk drivers and morning traffic. Ironically, coming up 580 to 880 to 237 gets you in at ludicrous speeds... I've been going 110 and getting passed by cops on a fully empty 5-lane road.
A three hour commute chopped down to just one hour by judicious exploration of possible routes.
The same has been true in Boston. I used to drive my girlfriend to work from Porter Square to the Cambridgeside Galleria. After experimenting with Mass Ave, Memorial Drive, and a few other routes, it became clear that the fastest way to get there was by taking Somerville to McGrath Highway... both underutilized throughfares that nobody needs to commute on in the morning. A 1 hour commute chopped down to 1/2 hour.
I guess what I'm saying is experiment with your drive. Every place I've lived, from Boston to LA to the silicon valley, has had alternate routes that (once discovered) chopped commute time down tremendously.
I think maybe we should wait until the current standards are, erm, standard.
If we waited until an implementation was perfect before moving on to the next thing, we'd still be stuck using DOS on a 20th generation 486.
At least two of the games on their list of titles to rescue are available on phones: Prince of Persia and Lemmings.
Not that I don't agree with them. These pieces of cultral history should be released onto the world. But there are areas where they are still available.
They really haven't made a compelling argument why the money-grubbing rights holders should release these games.
If you're working for the good of a client you care about, you'll make great stuff. If you're working just for your boss up the hall, you'll do work in proportion to how often he comes and complains to you.
If you're doing work for your outsourcing company for a remote client's client more than 7,000 miles away, you have as little personally invested in the success of that project as possible. You're going to produce whatever crap keeps you the job, in direct proportion to how much the complaining of the remote client's client actually makes it back to your ears. Translated, of course.
You never get good work unless the people doing the work have some stake in its success. Farming that out overseas is not a route to getting production-level code. It can be done, but it is neither cheap nor easy.
We must remember that the IT industry in this country is moving forward, not backward, upward not sideways, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards project management.
That's true. I'm not used to working with unlicensed developers, and am not familiar with the process of getting licensed (though I've heard it is less painful and more expensive than one would expect).
However, if you're planning next-gen content, a PC build should be convincing to a publisher, especially for X360 content. DS compatibility has been achieved for some time in the homebrew scene, so it would be possible to create a demo of a DS game that would actually play on the DS, and for little outlay in hardware development (compared to the wetware outlay).
Of course, 'get yourself licensed' is always easy to say for someone who only works in these companies, but every company I've worked for has gone through the process at some point or another.
To be nitpicky:
A: A 10 GB drive will not store 10 GB worth of stuff. After formatting and other inevibible marketing losses, you're really looking at about 8 GB.
B: Always rip at least at 160k for MP3's. 128 is OK if you're talking about OGG, but Nanos don't play OGG.
Really, what's needed is a second mail system. This communications system would take advantage of all we've learned in the 30 years or so since the first e-mail system was implemented. It would include voice, video, and IM communications as hooks to try to get people to join. Communication would necessarily be secure, signed, and verified along the channel to protect against attack. It would be somewhat decentralized, well-routed, and wouldn't fall prey to the middle-of-the-day mail floods.
In short, it would look to the end user a lot like AIM with a reliable delayed-send function.
It wouldn't be required, it wouldn't solve the problem short-term. But it can't just be "e-mail without spam" It needs to not just solve the problem elegantly but add functionality so that people actually use it.
Why was the Usenet abandoned? It wasn't just because it was a crapflood... it always was a crapflood. It was abandoned because something better came along: the high culture that are the forums of the Internet.
Replace e-mail with something that makes it utterly obsolete, or come up with solutions that don't require users to change. People aren't going to change their behaviors unless something tremendously better is available to them.
Only on Slashdot is a comment about banging 17 year olds considered "insightful."
It's not wrong, mind you. Don't be so concerned about your future that when you get there you regret your past. But do choose better verbs, or it's not going to happen.
Try to get your independent game ported and distributed on any set-top console or any handheld system, and tell me it's not a collusive oligopoly. Got any hints?
In set-top land, you've got Live Arcade. That the "easy" way in. If you're willing to compromise more on the design and beef up the budget, lots of platform publishers right about now are hunting for quirky independent titles to distinguish their next-gen platform from the others in exchange for an exclusive oddity or two. They're not even looking for success at this point, really, just something they can point towards to distinguish their overpowered black box from everyone else's overpowered black box.
On handhelds, you have a lot of companies that are looking for cheap titles to milk... err, bring out. THQ is always on the prowl. Nintendo proper can help hook you up with people. Sony is enviously eyeing the success of the DS in cheap, profitable, and quirky land.
And then you have the PC, which is a cornacopia of possible options.
You should probably buy some development hardware yourself, then create the working demo with a team in an attempt to prove to the publisher A: you can do it B: you can do it in the time that you specify and C: the game won't suck. Of course, this takes a lot of guts and frequently a lot of relatives willing to morgage their homes for you. Hey, Turbine was founded on a lawsuit settlement from someone getting run over by a taxi.
I'm not saying it isn't difficut. The sheer volume of money required for a successful non-PC distribution is staggering. But every company that I've worked for in the gaming industry has been independent, as is nearly all of the gaming companies in Boston.
Really, independent studios make up about 1/2 of the development houses in this industry, with the major 10 publishers accounting for having bought the rest. It can be disenchanting, and highly business-like. But if you perservere, there are ways in.
But most companies who buy Photoshop licenses don't need Photoshop. A lot of them need a glorified version of MS paint, if that. Some of them just need the basic white balance functionality or other retouching capabilities that come standard with most cameras. Others just need to cut and paste mockups quickly so that the real art department can get to work. Others have it around "just in case."
There is definitely nothing that is as fully functional as the CS2 suite out there for image professionals. But Photoshop seems as prevalant as Word in office environments, and is utterly unnecessary for 90% - 99% of those people.
And you have to ask yourself, why isn't there anything else out there? If history is any indication, if a smaller, less functional suite gained traction amongst users as a low-cost alternative, it would eventually add all of the features (and then some) becoming viable competition. But nobody can even get in on the ground floor, because everyone uses PS/ILL, from the teenager trying to get the red eye out of her photos to the MOD map maker trying to make good looking wall textures to the graphics professional working with 300 MB image files. Break that monoculture, and you'd have competition again.
And maybe with competition we'd finally get delayed rendering or non-crappy vector editing in Photoshop.