I did a stint in customer service. Tough job. It's impossible to please both the customers and the company you work for.
That having been said, the cell phone industry in the US has a lot to answer for. The fact of the matter is that everyone has been hit with at least 1 100 dollar phone bill in their lives, if not routinely. And while getting hit with that once a year means the company makes 8 dollars more per month for that subscriber, the customer suddenly feels like they're owed.
What other industry forces you to estimate the amount of something you are going to use, pay for services that may or may not be rendered, and make you pay through the nose if you guess low? This isn't a business relationship, this is The Price is Right. Do you think you will or will not roam? Will you be making any long distance calls? Do you think you will roam off our network in your home calling area? Planning on recieving any text messages? Are you sure you're only going to use 300 minutes with the holidays coming up? *DING!* The player guessed wrong. The phone company wins!
I got hit with a 100 dollar bill one month because I switched to "unlimited nationwide coverage" at a 15 dollar a month premium, traveled out to California, and mysteriously dropped off of AT&T's network. If I had paid an additional additional 10 dollars that month I would have had "unlimited nationwide coverage with off-network roaming" and recieved the same service from the same people for 90% less. They charged me 10 times the amount for the same service. That's 90 bucks they owe me. My girlfriend has to ask people to call her house long distance, because while her cellular phone company's landline long distance is only about 15 cents per minute (a high total these days, I might add), cellphone long distance is 60 cents per minute no matter which way the call is going. So if I pay 15 cents to get a call to the switching station of her cell phone company, and she pays a monthly fee to get it from the switch to her cell phone, she still has to pay a stupidly high fee for the priviledge of receiving the call.
If cell phone service were like power, you would pay X cents per minute. Maybe there would be variables like X cents per minute local, or X cents per minute off-prime, but they would be linear variables. None of this exploding-bill-for-the-same-service BS.
I buy a gallon of milk. It costs me 2 dollars. I buy another gallon of milk. It costs me 2 more dollars. I buy 400 minutes of talk time. It costs me 40 dollars. I buy another 400 minutes of talk time. It costs me 240 more dollars. Where else would we put up with this?
If the cellular companies didn't try to screw their users, maybe their users wouldn't try to get everything they can out of them.
Again, I know that isn't you. But you have to realize that the system you work for is not working for its users. BTW, cry not a tear for Verizon Wireless, it's making a healthy 10% return on capital. I'm convinced wireless companies could be making a lot more than that with a simple, fair pay-as-you-go non-prepaid no expiring minutes bullshit.
Roll-out of cellular products in the US is terribly, terribly slow. For one, uptake in the US is slow, with many people holding on to their phones until they break. For another, the US market is quite large but needs to be supported as a cohesive whole... As such if Verizon wants to try something out, they will wait until success is reasonably assured then do a full nationwide roll out. Japan is a smaller, less-risky market which has traditionally used cell phones in roles that in the west would have been filled by computers... as computer uptake was somewhat slower over there and internet access was more spotty.
Plus the carriers out here get to say what their customers use as phones, not vice-versa. Up until recently phones had to be flashed to a specific network provider and a specific user... the idea of buying a general purpose cell phone and finding a provider later is laughable here, despite being a perfectly functional model in Europe.
We expect the carrier to subsidise the cost of the phones, and then are shocked that we can't get any phone that has features they don't want us to have. Sigh. I'd say vote with your dollars, but we really don't have any choice here.
BTW, the film mentioned in the second link, votergate, is worth downloading. A torrent is available if the main site is going slowly, though they seem to have upgraded their bandwidth.
No, I didn't intend it as news. I actually thought it was neat... I work on the PS2, so a lot of your sweat goes into making my sweat look better. I just figured someone was going to google you, and I rathered it be a simpathetic someone. Besides, you asked a question about game development and gave an official playstation e-mail address... who wouldn't be curious?
I always thought of the Nexialists as a better focused version of the renaissance men, but with a touch of existentialism thrown in.
Let me know if you change your mind, we have a pretty big gamer audience.
they're not my audience.
Maybe not your intended audience, but they are certainly listening.
I couldnt care less if theyre listening
And yet, a short while ago...
Therefore since they will not listen to reason, since they won't even communicate with me and others, we will destroy them, it's that simple.
Of course, there is one more quote that should be added to this list. This one from Dictionary.com
\Hyp"o*crite\, n. [F., fr. L. hypocrita, Gr. ? one who plays a part on the stage, a dissembler, feigner. See Hypocrisy.] One who plays a part; especially, one who, for the purpose of winning approbation of favor, puts on a fair outside seeming; one who feigns to be other and better than he is; a false pretender to virtue or piety; one who simulates virtue or piety.
The hypocrite's hope shall perish. --Job viii. 13.
Stats for FPS serve the same purpose that experience points do in RPG's... They bridge single momentary experiences into an overarching experience with wider goals. As such, I'd like to see that I've played 150 games, and have gone from a 3% to a 55% kill to death ratio.
While I'd much rather have more interesting externalities involved (earning cash, switching to advanced servers, getting more control over game settings, etc), stats in some progressive form or another are a great thing to have.
Even if the US army drops bombs and kills some civilians, it was for a military objective such as taking control of a city, or bridge. 9/11 was an action, like most "terrorist" actions, that was not towards a military objective, but rather just an act to get attention and cause fear in the populace affected.
How about if it was an indiscriminate kill free-fire zone, like we had in Vietnam? Or what if the ojective really was to get attention and cause fear, like Hiroshima and Nagasaki? What if we started arbitrarily kidnapping and holding people hostage without any form of due process, like Guantanamo? What if we shoved people into roofless huts until they froze to death, like we did to the Japanese in WW2? You can say that's all in the past now, but as we are repeating most of the same pattern it really isn't.
The "terrorists" didn't do what they did because to "get attention and cause fear." They did what they did as an attempt to dislodge us from our complete financial support of Israel's occupation of Palestine. The "terrorists" didn't occupy the school in Russia to get attention and cause fear, they were attempting to convince Russia to dislodge their troops from Chechnia. Heck, the Basque sepratists didn't blow up the Madrid underground to cause fear, they did it to change the cost-benefit equation of continuing to occupy the territory.
It's not a big difference. If anything the terrorists are more noble in their cause, as they are spending their lives for an ideology they believe in, as opposed to the current administration who is merely risking other people's lives for financial gain.
We live in a morally ambiguous universe. Not because "They" are clean, but because "We" are dirtier than we imagine.
"Developed single-pixel particle demonstration, covering physics based particle motion, use of alpha blending and optimized rendering of this type of particle using VU1 microcode on Playstation II Developed demonstration of high-speed texture loading (10 megabytes per frame) and presented the technique at Playstation II developers conference and several smaller gatherings. Developed application to do "zoom from orbit" going from a full-earth weather satellite photo down to a 1 meter resolution image of San Francisco in one continuous zoom. This included development of a new (so far as I know) technique for mapping corrected or uncorrected satellite photos onto a globe with a minimum of distortion. Research on the consumer ease-of-use, economic and technical issues surrounding downloadable music and music subscription services. Early testing of a number of Playstation II code libraries in development. Participation in internal Sony groups dealing with networking and interoperation of Sony products. Support of misc Sony developers. One Patent pending"
He's also doing something with macs, though that might be unrelated to his work at Sony. He's also a nexistentialist and a commie.
Isn't google fun?
Anyway, I'm not trying to rain on your parade, Greg, I just hope this wraps up questions about who you are.
USB flash drives are pretty small... less than 512 mb max, generally 128 mb normally. I'm assuming, then, that you need to store about 128 MB of stuff. I'll also assume from your statement about external drives that you've got a laptop with very little room inside.
The best option for you would be network backup. Seriously. Either pay a little for a little space on a remote server somewhere, or squeeze a folder out of your friendly publisher network technician / techy friend / college kid / local bum. Either way A: your data is safely backed up on a system more stable than yours, itself probably backed up elsewhere, and B: your data is offsite, making recovering from a stolen suitcase / fire much easier. Other options are possible too, like using G-mail as your remote file store, or starting a "backup pool" with a colleague, etc.
The other option is a raid of mirrored ATA drives, much cheaper these days than you would think assuming you have a desktop... really no more expensive than getting a USB HDD.
What about frailty? CD pits are large enough to operate in an environment where dust, dirt, tiny scratches, and other things get onto the surface of the media. But the higher you go, the tighter your tollerances have to go, and the dirt factor isn't going to just go away.
Ultimately, though, I suspect traditional optical disks will progress for a few more years until they are usurped by holographic or other techniques. It wasn't too long ago that magnetoptical was cutting edge, and magnetic tape was before that. We now have a large number of promising techniques at our fingertips, any one of which may win the day.
Unfortunately, you can't open-source DRM. At a fundamental level, you can't prevent the computer from having enough information to decrypt a file, without the user also having enough information to decrypt the file. The only way to do that would be to store the key in the decryption hardware in a write/decrypt only location. Even then you'd have to have special hardware to intercept the decryption key as it is transmitted to the machine and before it hits the processor, in order to deflect it to the proper area without the machine having any say. Even then you have man-in-the-middle attacks, which would require a layer of communication encryption that the processor doesn't have control over, etc.
In other words, you fundamentally cannot give the user full knowledge without relinquishing full control.
Re:Actually MS did buy it.
on
Halo 2 Reviews
·
· Score: 1
now as a result we have lackluster PC ports of XBox games instead of what Could Have Been.
You mean, moderate success at selling Mac games with no PC ports? That's What Was (tm).
You mean, a studio shouldn't have the right to tell Michael Moore that they have no interest in providing material for another admittedly heavily slanted movie?
Not if it is a piece of history. Zapruder shouldn't have the right to prevent someone from making a documentary saying that JFK was assassinated by communist teamsters on the grassy knoll, and neither should FOX be able to tell any documentary filmmaker that they don't want unflattering footage of the president to be used in a documentary. We're no longer talking about justifiable financial recompense for effort invested, we're now talking about controlling history for political reasons. No studio should weild exclusive control over images of public figures for their own purposes.
Most people I know involved in the generation of IP are also chafed by its limitations. Videogame makers looking to get popular songs into their games need to try to license hundreds, as one in ten will actually get through the tedious and difficult rights process. Filmmakers wishing to make documentaries from existing sources frequently bump into arbitrary, demeaning decisions, like Fox's refusal to allow a documentary filmmaker to use footage of President Bush in an upcoming film. And IBM weilds its patent war chest like a shield against others who would attempt to intimidate the big blue with their patents. Basically everyone in the software industry has bumped into some ridiculous patent or another, even if they are busy generating ridiculous patents of their own.
IP law is like lawyers: for every one on the right side, there is another one on the wrong side.
That's not necessarily true. You'd be surprised how hard it is to buy a glowing review these days in a non-"official" magazine (I.E. the Official XBox magazine). As we're down to basically 5 companies, E.A. Activision Sony Atari Microsoft, they would basically have to report glowing reviews of everything. Sometimes they glow more than they should, as the person who likes a genre is going to get games of that genre to review. Would you put the FPS guy on Winning 11 8 and expect them to give a comprehensive, well-thought out review? No, you give it to the guy who has played every other Winning 11 game, as well as every soccer game in existence and some that aren't, who will have perspective on where Winning 11 fits into the universe of soccer games and will probably love it.
One of the other reasons why most of the games people would look up are reviewed favorably is because comparatively reviewers have to wade through a tremendous amount of real crap. No matter what you may feel about the redundancy and lack of innovation of GTA: San Andreas, it is in no where near the same category of junk as Big Motha' Truckers. Likewise, Fifa may not be as hot as some of the top soccer games coming out of japan, but compared to Atari's Backyard Soccer series it's Pulitzer material. On the other hand, give them a truly mediocre game that you spent years working on, and they will crush it ruthlessly. The press can be quite cold sometimes... I've read more than one review of a project I've worked on where the reviewer complained of the lack of a feature that was actually there.
No matter what your personal opinions on the subject, Halo 2 is unarguably one of the most polished and destined to be one of the most enjoyed games of the year. Microsoft didn't buy that with their ads, Bungee bought that with their sweat. And good for them: Bungee has always released quality games and deserves success.
we are burdening ourselves with higher costs that don't leead to higher productivity. This reduces the USA overall prosperity, and tips the comparative advantage of many of our goods and services toward countries where they don't have to watch their output as strongly.
This is definitely arguable. Lowered productivity due to sick days, sick kids, asthma attacks, etc can really hurt a company, especially when the person who is sick is essential to the functioning of an organization. Plus you have the issue of the increased cost of recruiting talent to live in a shithole.
The solution to fending off environmental disaster probably lies in economic incentives, not social regulation.
And where would economic incentives come from if not social regulation? That's like waying you want to drive a car, but you don't want a car that comes from a car dealer. Let the government regulate these types of things... that's what it was setup to do!
Why would you ever use a signed int in a voting machine? Obviously they should have used a much larger available counting variable, but how could someone writing the code think "Eh, maybe we'll need negatives"?
Another reason voiceovers are frequently bad is that often times the one with the resources to setup a voice recording session, hire talent, and get everything running for a one-day session is the publisher, who frequently hasn't the slightest clue who the characters are or what they are supposed to be doing. Many a game development team put their faith in the publisher that vetting good voice actors was enough, only to have things come back completely flat, unemotionative, too emotive, or just plain wrong.
I don't think I've ever seen a VO go less than three iterations before being right (Stand-in, first totally wrong take, second livable take).
I must point out that most LCD monitors are terrible for 2D games. If it involves a lot of sideways-scrolling text (Marquee style), they will ghost to heck. If you have sharp, crisp, bright lines moving next to dark lines, they will ghost on the best monitors. If you're moving around in 3D space trying to shoot other marines, you'll probably be OK. Generally you don't get as sharp a contrast between adjacent pixels in 3D games as you do in 2D games, and when you do lose that little bit of image quality while moving it just looks like cheap anti-aliasing. I generally find the lower resolution of LCD's to be worse than any ghosting loss in those situations, but I still play battlefield 1942 pretty regularly on an LCD, and enjoy it thoroughly.
"8 months to write an original engine from scratch relying upon unproven technology in a genre which we have no experience and have to radically change? Sure, sign us up."
I don't know how we did it, but we actually did hit that one. Somewhat ironically, at a previous company where the producer said "We can fix these bugs by friday" we were still slaving away 6 months later, trying to get the thing out the door.
Slashdot Mirror
I did a stint in customer service. Tough job. It's impossible to please both the customers and the company you work for.
That having been said, the cell phone industry in the US has a lot to answer for. The fact of the matter is that everyone has been hit with at least 1 100 dollar phone bill in their lives, if not routinely. And while getting hit with that once a year means the company makes 8 dollars more per month for that subscriber, the customer suddenly feels like they're owed.
What other industry forces you to estimate the amount of something you are going to use, pay for services that may or may not be rendered, and make you pay through the nose if you guess low? This isn't a business relationship, this is The Price is Right. Do you think you will or will not roam? Will you be making any long distance calls? Do you think you will roam off our network in your home calling area? Planning on recieving any text messages? Are you sure you're only going to use 300 minutes with the holidays coming up? *DING!* The player guessed wrong. The phone company wins!
I got hit with a 100 dollar bill one month because I switched to "unlimited nationwide coverage" at a 15 dollar a month premium, traveled out to California, and mysteriously dropped off of AT&T's network. If I had paid an additional additional 10 dollars that month I would have had "unlimited nationwide coverage with off-network roaming" and recieved the same service from the same people for 90% less. They charged me 10 times the amount for the same service. That's 90 bucks they owe me. My girlfriend has to ask people to call her house long distance, because while her cellular phone company's landline long distance is only about 15 cents per minute (a high total these days, I might add), cellphone long distance is 60 cents per minute no matter which way the call is going. So if I pay 15 cents to get a call to the switching station of her cell phone company, and she pays a monthly fee to get it from the switch to her cell phone, she still has to pay a stupidly high fee for the priviledge of receiving the call.
If cell phone service were like power, you would pay X cents per minute. Maybe there would be variables like X cents per minute local, or X cents per minute off-prime, but they would be linear variables. None of this exploding-bill-for-the-same-service BS.
I buy a gallon of milk. It costs me 2 dollars. I buy another gallon of milk. It costs me 2 more dollars. I buy 400 minutes of talk time. It costs me 40 dollars. I buy another 400 minutes of talk time. It costs me 240 more dollars. Where else would we put up with this?
If the cellular companies didn't try to screw their users, maybe their users wouldn't try to get everything they can out of them.
Again, I know that isn't you. But you have to realize that the system you work for is not working for its users. BTW, cry not a tear for Verizon Wireless, it's making a healthy 10% return on capital. I'm convinced wireless companies could be making a lot more than that with a simple, fair pay-as-you-go non-prepaid no expiring minutes bullshit.
Well, 1 minute is all the worthwile content Fox puts into it's programming anyway, and that's as long as it's on the air before they cancel it.
Think of it this way, for a few dollars you can see an entire season of bad programming in just a few minutes. Isn't your time worth that much?
Roll-out of cellular products in the US is terribly, terribly slow. For one, uptake in the US is slow, with many people holding on to their phones until they break. For another, the US market is quite large but needs to be supported as a cohesive whole... As such if Verizon wants to try something out, they will wait until success is reasonably assured then do a full nationwide roll out. Japan is a smaller, less-risky market which has traditionally used cell phones in roles that in the west would have been filled by computers... as computer uptake was somewhat slower over there and internet access was more spotty.
Plus the carriers out here get to say what their customers use as phones, not vice-versa. Up until recently phones had to be flashed to a specific network provider and a specific user... the idea of buying a general purpose cell phone and finding a provider later is laughable here, despite being a perfectly functional model in Europe.
We expect the carrier to subsidise the cost of the phones, and then are shocked that we can't get any phone that has features they don't want us to have. Sigh. I'd say vote with your dollars, but we really don't have any choice here.
BTW, the film mentioned in the second link, votergate, is worth downloading. A torrent is available if the main site is going slowly, though they seem to have upgraded their bandwidth.
Agreed. I donated 20.
No, I didn't intend it as news. I actually thought it was neat... I work on the PS2, so a lot of your sweat goes into making my sweat look better. I just figured someone was going to google you, and I rathered it be a simpathetic someone. Besides, you asked a question about game development and gave an official playstation e-mail address... who wouldn't be curious?
I always thought of the Nexialists as a better focused version of the renaissance men, but with a touch of existentialism thrown in.
This week he says...
Let me know if you change your mind, we have a pretty big gamer audience.
they're not my audience.
Maybe not your intended audience, but they are certainly listening.
I couldnt care less if theyre listening
And yet, a short while ago...
Therefore since they will not listen to reason, since they won't even communicate with me and others, we will destroy them, it's that simple.
Of course, there is one more quote that should be added to this list. This one from Dictionary.com
\Hyp"o*crite\, n. [F., fr. L. hypocrita, Gr. ? one who plays a part on the stage, a dissembler, feigner. See Hypocrisy.] One who plays a part; especially, one who, for the purpose of winning approbation of favor, puts on a fair outside seeming; one who feigns to be other and better than he is; a false pretender to virtue or piety; one who simulates virtue or piety.
The hypocrite's hope shall perish. --Job viii. 13.
Here. And please do, it's worth every penny, even if just to confirm the ability / inability of the machines.
Stats for FPS serve the same purpose that experience points do in RPG's... They bridge single momentary experiences into an overarching experience with wider goals. As such, I'd like to see that I've played 150 games, and have gone from a 3% to a 55% kill to death ratio.
While I'd much rather have more interesting externalities involved (earning cash, switching to advanced servers, getting more control over game settings, etc), stats in some progressive form or another are a great thing to have.
Even if the US army drops bombs and kills some civilians, it was for a military objective such as taking control of a city, or bridge. 9/11 was an action, like most "terrorist" actions, that was not towards a military objective, but rather just an act to get attention and cause fear in the populace affected.
How about if it was an indiscriminate kill free-fire zone, like we had in Vietnam? Or what if the ojective really was to get attention and cause fear, like Hiroshima and Nagasaki? What if we started arbitrarily kidnapping and holding people hostage without any form of due process, like Guantanamo? What if we shoved people into roofless huts until they froze to death, like we did to the Japanese in WW2? You can say that's all in the past now, but as we are repeating most of the same pattern it really isn't.
The "terrorists" didn't do what they did because to "get attention and cause fear." They did what they did as an attempt to dislodge us from our complete financial support of Israel's occupation of Palestine. The "terrorists" didn't occupy the school in Russia to get attention and cause fear, they were attempting to convince Russia to dislodge their troops from Chechnia. Heck, the Basque sepratists didn't blow up the Madrid underground to cause fear, they did it to change the cost-benefit equation of continuing to occupy the territory.
It's not a big difference. If anything the terrorists are more noble in their cause, as they are spending their lives for an ideology they believe in, as opposed to the current administration who is merely risking other people's lives for financial gain.
We live in a morally ambiguous universe. Not because "They" are clean, but because "We" are dirtier than we imagine.
Maybe his resume Moby Games profile would shed more light on what is going on? How about his projects list?
He's R&D at Sony, in other words.
"Developed single-pixel particle demonstration, covering physics based particle motion, use of alpha blending and optimized rendering of this type of particle using VU1 microcode on Playstation II
Developed demonstration of high-speed texture loading (10 megabytes per frame) and presented the technique at Playstation II developers conference and several smaller gatherings.
Developed application to do "zoom from orbit" going from a full-earth weather satellite photo down to a 1 meter resolution image of San Francisco in one continuous zoom. This included development of a new (so far as I know) technique for mapping corrected or uncorrected satellite photos onto a globe with a minimum of distortion.
Research on the consumer ease-of-use, economic and technical issues surrounding downloadable music and music subscription services.
Early testing of a number of Playstation II code libraries in development.
Participation in internal Sony groups dealing with networking and interoperation of Sony products.
Support of misc Sony developers.
One Patent pending"
He's also doing something with macs, though that might be unrelated to his work at Sony. He's also a nexistentialist and a commie.
Isn't google fun?
Anyway, I'm not trying to rain on your parade, Greg, I just hope this wraps up questions about who you are.
USB flash drives are pretty small... less than 512 mb max, generally 128 mb normally. I'm assuming, then, that you need to store about 128 MB of stuff. I'll also assume from your statement about external drives that you've got a laptop with very little room inside.
The best option for you would be network backup. Seriously. Either pay a little for a little space on a remote server somewhere, or squeeze a folder out of your friendly publisher network technician / techy friend / college kid / local bum. Either way A: your data is safely backed up on a system more stable than yours, itself probably backed up elsewhere, and B: your data is offsite, making recovering from a stolen suitcase / fire much easier. Other options are possible too, like using G-mail as your remote file store, or starting a "backup pool" with a colleague, etc.
The other option is a raid of mirrored ATA drives, much cheaper these days than you would think assuming you have a desktop... really no more expensive than getting a USB HDD.
What about frailty? CD pits are large enough to operate in an environment where dust, dirt, tiny scratches, and other things get onto the surface of the media. But the higher you go, the tighter your tollerances have to go, and the dirt factor isn't going to just go away.
Ultimately, though, I suspect traditional optical disks will progress for a few more years until they are usurped by holographic or other techniques. It wasn't too long ago that magnetoptical was cutting edge, and magnetic tape was before that. We now have a large number of promising techniques at our fingertips, any one of which may win the day.
Unfortunately, you can't open-source DRM. At a fundamental level, you can't prevent the computer from having enough information to decrypt a file, without the user also having enough information to decrypt the file. The only way to do that would be to store the key in the decryption hardware in a write/decrypt only location. Even then you'd have to have special hardware to intercept the decryption key as it is transmitted to the machine and before it hits the processor, in order to deflect it to the proper area without the machine having any say. Even then you have man-in-the-middle attacks, which would require a layer of communication encryption that the processor doesn't have control over, etc.
In other words, you fundamentally cannot give the user full knowledge without relinquishing full control.
now as a result we have lackluster PC ports of XBox games instead of what Could Have Been.
You mean, moderate success at selling Mac games with no PC ports? That's What Was (tm).
You mean, a studio shouldn't have the right to tell Michael Moore that they have no interest in providing material for another admittedly heavily slanted movie?
Not if it is a piece of history. Zapruder shouldn't have the right to prevent someone from making a documentary saying that JFK was assassinated by communist teamsters on the grassy knoll, and neither should FOX be able to tell any documentary filmmaker that they don't want unflattering footage of the president to be used in a documentary. We're no longer talking about justifiable financial recompense for effort invested, we're now talking about controlling history for political reasons. No studio should weild exclusive control over images of public figures for their own purposes.
Most people I know involved in the generation of IP are also chafed by its limitations. Videogame makers looking to get popular songs into their games need to try to license hundreds, as one in ten will actually get through the tedious and difficult rights process. Filmmakers wishing to make documentaries from existing sources frequently bump into arbitrary, demeaning decisions, like Fox's refusal to allow a documentary filmmaker to use footage of President Bush in an upcoming film. And IBM weilds its patent war chest like a shield against others who would attempt to intimidate the big blue with their patents. Basically everyone in the software industry has bumped into some ridiculous patent or another, even if they are busy generating ridiculous patents of their own.
IP law is like lawyers: for every one on the right side, there is another one on the wrong side.
That's not necessarily true. You'd be surprised how hard it is to buy a glowing review these days in a non-"official" magazine (I.E. the Official XBox magazine). As we're down to basically 5 companies, E.A. Activision Sony Atari Microsoft, they would basically have to report glowing reviews of everything. Sometimes they glow more than they should, as the person who likes a genre is going to get games of that genre to review. Would you put the FPS guy on Winning 11 8 and expect them to give a comprehensive, well-thought out review? No, you give it to the guy who has played every other Winning 11 game, as well as every soccer game in existence and some that aren't, who will have perspective on where Winning 11 fits into the universe of soccer games and will probably love it.
One of the other reasons why most of the games people would look up are reviewed favorably is because comparatively reviewers have to wade through a tremendous amount of real crap. No matter what you may feel about the redundancy and lack of innovation of GTA: San Andreas, it is in no where near the same category of junk as Big Motha' Truckers. Likewise, Fifa may not be as hot as some of the top soccer games coming out of japan, but compared to Atari's Backyard Soccer series it's Pulitzer material. On the other hand, give them a truly mediocre game that you spent years working on, and they will crush it ruthlessly. The press can be quite cold sometimes... I've read more than one review of a project I've worked on where the reviewer complained of the lack of a feature that was actually there.
No matter what your personal opinions on the subject, Halo 2 is unarguably one of the most polished and destined to be one of the most enjoyed games of the year. Microsoft didn't buy that with their ads, Bungee bought that with their sweat. And good for them: Bungee has always released quality games and deserves success.
we are burdening ourselves with higher costs that don't leead to higher productivity. This reduces the USA overall prosperity, and tips the comparative advantage of many of our goods and services toward countries where they don't have to watch their output as strongly.
This is definitely arguable. Lowered productivity due to sick days, sick kids, asthma attacks, etc can really hurt a company, especially when the person who is sick is essential to the functioning of an organization. Plus you have the issue of the increased cost of recruiting talent to live in a shithole.
The solution to fending off environmental disaster probably lies in economic incentives, not social regulation.
And where would economic incentives come from if not social regulation? That's like waying you want to drive a car, but you don't want a car that comes from a car dealer. Let the government regulate these types of things... that's what it was setup to do!
Would that be the evil twin or the good twin?
I'm so confused.
How's this?
A method of bypassing lawyers in the patent process by stepping through every current patent and adding the words "with a computer," with a computer.
Why would you ever use a signed int in a voting machine? Obviously they should have used a much larger available counting variable, but how could someone writing the code think "Eh, maybe we'll need negatives"?
Now that's incompetence you can count on.
Another reason voiceovers are frequently bad is that often times the one with the resources to setup a voice recording session, hire talent, and get everything running for a one-day session is the publisher, who frequently hasn't the slightest clue who the characters are or what they are supposed to be doing. Many a game development team put their faith in the publisher that vetting good voice actors was enough, only to have things come back completely flat, unemotionative, too emotive, or just plain wrong.
I don't think I've ever seen a VO go less than three iterations before being right (Stand-in, first totally wrong take, second livable take).
I must point out that most LCD monitors are terrible for 2D games. If it involves a lot of sideways-scrolling text (Marquee style), they will ghost to heck. If you have sharp, crisp, bright lines moving next to dark lines, they will ghost on the best monitors. If you're moving around in 3D space trying to shoot other marines, you'll probably be OK. Generally you don't get as sharp a contrast between adjacent pixels in 3D games as you do in 2D games, and when you do lose that little bit of image quality while moving it just looks like cheap anti-aliasing. I generally find the lower resolution of LCD's to be worse than any ghosting loss in those situations, but I still play battlefield 1942 pretty regularly on an LCD, and enjoy it thoroughly.
"8 months to write an original engine from scratch relying upon unproven technology in a genre which we have no experience and have to radically change? Sure, sign us up."
I don't know how we did it, but we actually did hit that one. Somewhat ironically, at a previous company where the producer said "We can fix these bugs by friday" we were still slaving away 6 months later, trying to get the thing out the door.