Save all your receipts. Anything your company ends up not paying for (and maybe even some of the things they do) are tax deductible if you're moving due to a job.
I've certainly been involved in worse meetings in my career than the one earlier this week where the Logitech CEO and several executives came to our offices to announce the acquisition to the employees.
Certainly time will be the only way to know for sure, but we have a good amount of faith in Sean Adams, our old CEO, to have made sure that Logitech will allow us to do what we need to do to continue making the products we want to make. They seem to have listened well to him and the other people from Slim involved in the negotiations regarding our open-source server software as well, even though Logitech hasn't had any experience with open-source initiatives in the past (that I know of).
And all the Slim Devices employees are still with us, which is good.
In some sense, at a simplified level, Slim Devices was "founded" by Sean wanting to build music players for people who wanted them, and would rather let the users build the software so he could worry about the hardware. At least according to what they've said, Logitech really wants us to continue doing that.
Christopher Owens QA Manager Slim Devices (Now a division of Logitech) Mountain View, California
Okay, pretend I'm CNN. I have text, I have streaming video, I have message boards. I want my readers to be able to get to all my resources quickly, and have good bandwidth.
I'm trying to understand the service BellSouth is offering.
Maybe it would help if I consider what happens if I don't pay up? Are they going to throttle my connection? But am I not already paying for 500 GBps upstream? If I'm paying my ISP (which may well be BellSouth, knowing how big they and CNN both are), are they going to send me a second bill for the same 500 GBps? Are they just going to double my rates for the same service?
If so, wow, I wish them good luck with that. There is still a BIT of competition in the marketplace, for now, although I'm sure BellSouth's K Street division is working overtime on something.
On the other hand, maybe they'll invent some kind of artificial distinction in traffic. I'm paying for 500 GBps, sure, but I'm only paying for 1 customer to get it! If I want 300 million customers, well, that'll cost.
How do I tell I'm getting what I'm paying for? Or is it more like "NICE CUSTOMER BASE YOU GOT THERE. BE A SHAME IF ANYTHING *HAPPENED* TO IT."
I may make some suggestions here that seem obvious, but if they're obvious to you, just ignore them.
I've been working in computers since 1986, in computer audio since 1993, and I know a fair number of people in the game industry.
In my experience, I have never gotten a job that was worth a damn without having contacts on the inside. Never. I have had crummy jobs that I applied for randomly, and I have had cool jobs that I got because I knew someone. Maybe this makes me lame, but I suspect it makes me typical.
Make friends in the game industry, or at least also trying to get in to the game industry. You don't even need to know them in person; this is the era of the Internet. The goal is that sooner or later they'll be in the meeting where the project manager at their game company says "Okay we're shipping in two weeks; it's time to add the music", they'll be able to say "I know this guy..."
They don't even need to be high up in their company. I started at Creative Labs working tech support. Within a few years, I had moved around in the company to marketing, and I was in the meeting where my boss said "We need someone to compose some music for our web site." We hired Paul Godwin because someone in that meeting knew him.
You have a web page up with at least snippets of some of your compositions up, right? If you can't find an open source game to help out with, turn off your PC speakers and compose some music for a game that already exists! Put 'em on your site arranged by genre: fps, rts, driving, puzzle, whatever.
In addition to a sharp looking site, you need to have some demo CDs. I bet you can make even the little business-card CDs in redbook format. I'd make 'em redbook with small song segments since you will be limited to 8-10 minutes of music. You can make them mixed-mode if you feel like, but I bet redbook with a nice printed label with your name and URL would suffice. You don't need to press them on everyone you meet, but keep them around.
If you don't already, spend some time learning about how the industry works. It may be boring and/or trite, but consider this: You meet someone who works for a publisher, and says "yeah we don't actually make any of the games ourselves." Dead end? Hardly! Maybe they don't make the games themselves, but they work with dozens of small software houses, each of which does need composers. "What titles are you publishing right now? Really, who is that by? Are you going to publish any future releases from them? You know I'd love to get in touch with someone there about composing some music for one of their titles."
Are you ready to be self-employed? Lots of small-time game operations are run on a shoestring. They're not going to need a properly-paid composer full time on staff. Get your state business license, come up with a nice looking invoice, learn how consulting contracts work.
And last, save your nickels and dimes, because next March 20-24, no matter what, you need to be here.
My group moved into a new furnished building just a year ago.
I'm sure whoever bought the conference room table thought they were doing a great job putting 4 power outlets and 4 network ports into the surface of the conference table, but I have to say it's a disaster. It has no facility for additional cabling.
In weekly meetings, we typically see 8-10 laptops on the table. So, we have an ethernet switch on the table as well. Naturally, 4 power outlets is far too few, so we have power strips on the table and the floor under and around. Also taking up space on the table is an LCD projector and a fancy conference phone with two remote microphones.
And since my group works on audio products, there's an A/V receiver on a side table, with cables snaking across the floor to its 6 speakers, too.
It is gross and horrifying. Basically if I had to design the perfect hi-tech conference room table, it would be a foot-wide recessed cable tray down the middle, with work surfaces on either side.
And for Pete's sake, mount the LCD projector to the ceiling. They come with remote controls for a reason.
That site is amazing. Who knew that copying data from one digital storage medium to another could introduce errors and "jitter"?
It's amazing that nobody has noticed the errors being introduced by copying data from one hard drive to another one. What kind of jokers do we have for programmers out there? Someone needs to come up with a way to copy digital data without introducing these defects! This could be an international crisis in the making.
I bet that's why my operating system is more stable on my machine at home than on my PC at work. It's the hard drive jitter!
Microsoft Word? FULL OF JITTER!
And that program you wrote that seems to be full of bugs this morning that you didn't notice when you left last night? Blame jitter.
Wow an article on the FUTURE of Digital audio. MP3 phones! Will the miracles of early 2001 never cease?
Andru: [...] I am not expecting huge storage on these phones either, otherwise they become indirect competition to the iPod. Instead, I think we will see the phones able to port about 50 tracks.
ME: Bah! The phones will certainly be strongly branded as iPod phones, and Apple will certainly recieve licensing fees. That's not competition in any meaningful sense. In addition, time has shown that any attempt to limit a music player's usefulness arbitrarily (like a stupid 50-track limit) will certainly backfire. They say themselves later on that hard drives are great because you can store your entire music collection. If musicphones are limited to 50 tracks, I predict abject failure, and I bet the cell phone manufacturers are right with me.
Hector: With the players of the future, we will be able to schedule personal recordings of incoming broadcast music on a given hour, and play it back when we have the free time.
ME: Bah! There's already products that do this, and although they are popular in a small part of the population, Pogo is not going to upset the iPod any time soon. If you really want to see a model of the future, I'm pretty confident it's to be found in Podcasting. As traditional media middlemen grow increasingly desperate to preserve their vanishing way of life, more ways are found to completely bypass them. Podcasters are individuals who make their own audio content, and provide it for download. Why cling tenaciously to traditional audio delivery methods such as radio with its primitive 1-second-of-audio/sec transmit rate when there are better methods available? Imagine instead a few aggregation service providers and recommendation engines with links and software to help find and download the freshest Podcasts you're interested in!
Hector: I'm tired of having to burn CD's if I want to play my files on my car stereo.
ME: I've been using my Nomad Zen in my car for two years. What's your problem, Hector? I'm not disagreeing with your desire to have a nice wireless way to hook up my Zen to my car stereo, but, dude, BO-RING. Think about this instead: When you pull your car into your garage, it uploads information about what you've been skipping over and what you like to listen to during various times and various driving styles to your home media center, which then, next time you log on to shop for music, makes recommendations, which your car stereo downloads wirelessly across your 802.11 net.
ME: Or heck, 802.11 is so ubiquitous nowadays, your car could download a track or two while you're in the supermarket parking lot (because it's a relatively big download) and store it encrypted. When you get back to the car, your heads-up display could ask if you want to buy the song. A quick purchase transaction later, you get the unencryption key, and away you go. New music on the fly.
Andru: One thing I do expect in the future, is to see flash MP3 players slowly diminish from the market. While it is more shock absorbent, I just don't see the cost of the medium as being feasible going forward, especially with hard drive prices plummetting.
ME: Buh? Maybe they haven't noticed that Flash prices are also on the move. Assuming the same size, speed, and reliability, I consider it a non-issue really.
Andru: With convergence coming into play, people are wanting to start putting pictures and video on their portable devices as well.
ME: Yes, just as Sony's Photo Walkman and Video Walkman were follow-on smash successes after the breakthrough cassette player. Oh wait. No, sorry, I was just smoking cr
A3D was two things: an API and an algorithm for positioning a sound in 3D space. The API was essentially the same as Microsoft's DirectSound 3D, which is still used today. The difference, at the time, was the addition of a handful of functions to deal with the fact that Aureal's acceleration was in hardware, which was unsupported by DirectX at the time. These were particularly required due to the fact that the early 3D audio hardware supported an extremely limited number of 3D channels.
Fast forward to the modern era, and you will find some things have changed. Microsoft's software 3D audio rendering takes a much, much smaller slice of the CPU due to faster processors. Microsoft (since DX5) has allowed hardware acceleration to DS3D, utterly obsoleting A3D as an API. Sensaura (recently purchased by Creative) has licensed their 3D positional audio algorithms to a large number of sound card and motherboard companies. Guillemot, Creative, I/O Magic, NVidia, Terratec, Philips, and other companies have continued to make sound cards (and chipsets) with various levels of hardware and software 3D positional audio.
These days it's more difficult to tell where the hardware ends and the software begins due to motherboard design issues.
But if you've been listening to stereo since Aureal went out of business, it's not your soundcard's fault.
I agree the original article missed the point, but in a completely different way. As the audio capabilities of the early PCs and consoles matured, their limitations channeled and forged the creativity of artists in directions where the lack of 'real' instruments was less important.
This generated some very innovative, melodically-driven compositions, but in this I agree with you: it's no use mourning for them.
As for your assertions, maybe I just haven't noticed, but there used to be a term used to describe software like games: Multimedia. Many people are biased towards the sense of vision, but to assert that vision is 'THE focus of the work' (emphasis mine) is incorrect.
There may be more people working on the graphics and textures and animation, but if the audio is rotten, it will be noticed. A good game pays attention to audio and video. It is a synergy. You wouldn't watch the video without the audio, and you wouldn't listen to the audio without the video.
As for the assertion that computer games are the LAST place to expect innovation in audio, computer games are an exceptional environment.
Unlike the other forms of entertainment you blithely equate them with, games are interactive. In TV shows, prerecorded and new compositions are mixed, or transitioned in and out, and in movies, it's not uncommon to have an orchestra and director watching the movie as they record the score! But both of these forms result, eventually, in a static, linear soundtrack.
In games, music transitions are often handled in complex ways. See this article on Adaptive Musical Architectures. I can't seem to find any links, but if I remember, LucasArts made some of the first forays into this area.
Battlefield 1942 has been my favorite audio game lately. Listening to the music as you parachute in over Market Garden, and hearing it drowned out by roar of a B17 flying in low behind you should remove any remaining doubts you may have about the importance of game audio.
Given that the WinZip people were undoubtedly trying to add "real" security without changing the way their users have become accustomed to working with the product, it seems to me like they did a pretty good job.
The solutions to the points raised in the article as far as I can tell pretty much boil down to:
1) Be aware that metadata of the encrypted files is not secure. (The only WinZip-specific flaw, and certainly possible to work around)
2) Be careful how you communicate regarding the transmission of encrypted files.
3) Be careful with your password.
4) Check your PC every time you return to your office to make sure nobody has placed a keylogger between it and your keyboard.
On a Tuesday morning, early in the month, after being at work a half hour or so, I got email calling all employees to a 10AM meeting in the only room big enough to hold us all (~300 probably).
The CEO seemed genuinely aggrieved at having to lay many of us (40%) off, reassured us that even then, at the peak of the dot-com bust, we would be getting 8 weeks of salary as severance, and our health coverage was paid through the end of the month. He asked us to return to our desks, where we would begin having one-on-one meetings with our immediate supervisors to learn the details of our layoffs, or new job responsibilities.
As I returned to my desk, I was considering all the projects I would need to wrap up and hand off if I were among those laid off, but when I got back, my computer no longer had access to the network.
I picked up my phone to call IS, but it, too, was disconnected.
It was by then obvious what was about to happen, and I had a pleasant enough conversation with my boss when my turn came. Turned out he had also been let go, and we discussed people we knew at other companies that might have use for me or him.
1) Early in the day, early in the week. Time to head home and immediately get started on the job hunt.
2) Early in the month, so I didn't have to worry about COBRA for a few weeks.
3) Real severance package.
I'm not sure what they could have done better, other than not laying us off in the first place.
I regularly visit Halted for electronics, and Software Surplus for PC-centric surplus.
However, one of the cooler places locally has got to be TRIANGLE MACHINERY & TOOL COMPANY in San Jose for engineering supplies of all kinds.
* They have no web site.
* They have no air conditioning.
* They have no posted prices.
* They are hard to find.
* Their staff is not helpful. (but their customers are)
* Don't wear nice clothes, because everything they sell is greasy.
* Be prepared for heinous traffic on the weekends, because they're just around the corner from the Berryessa flea market.
But you know all those things in the Grainger catalog that are so cool but so expensive? Triangle has them. You can touch them and play with them. And if you're not afraid to haggle a bit, you can get an awesome price on them.
Liquid's strategy from the beginning was to enable customers to burn their own (standard, redbook audio) CDs of purchased music.
If you have any Liquid tracks you have not yet burned to CD, now would be a good time.
There have been issues with the service not working with all CDR drives. For those customers limited to on-system playback, the Liquid Player should be able to continue playing your (paid, non-expiring) content until some day in the future when OS incompatibilities prevent it from running.
If you substantially change your system, make sure to retain the passport.lqp file. This will NOT allow you to move CDR burn permissions to your new system, but should allow playback.
Liquid's technology is just an envelope that can securely transfer any kind of file. There are even a few non-music files in the system for various specific purposes.
The audio compression types that I was aware of while I was there were mostly Dolby AAC with a handful of MP3s. They were working on WMA when I left the company, so I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the current library is in that format.
Slashdot Mirror
Save all your receipts. Anything your company ends up not paying for (and maybe even some of the things they do) are tax deductible if you're moving due to a job.
t e/yourplace/chi-0701180020jan18,0,7207865.story?co ll=chi-classifiedyourplace-hed
http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/realesta
I can hear the Verizon rep's pre-pubescent voice echoing through the years from primary school math class.
"Ms. Smith? Are we ever going to use decimals in real life?"
I've certainly been involved in worse meetings in my career than the one earlier this week where the Logitech CEO and several executives came to our offices to announce the acquisition to the employees.
Certainly time will be the only way to know for sure, but we have a good amount of faith in Sean Adams, our old CEO, to have made sure that Logitech will allow us to do what we need to do to continue making the products we want to make. They seem to have listened well to him and the other people from Slim involved in the negotiations regarding our open-source server software as well, even though Logitech hasn't had any experience with open-source initiatives in the past (that I know of).
And all the Slim Devices employees are still with us, which is good.
In some sense, at a simplified level, Slim Devices was "founded" by Sean wanting to build music players for people who wanted them, and would rather let the users build the software so he could worry about the hardware. At least according to what they've said, Logitech really wants us to continue doing that.
Christopher Owens
QA Manager
Slim Devices
(Now a division of Logitech)
Mountain View, California
Indeed, North Korea has proven in the past that there are other ways to get things in to and out of Japan than on board a "high tech" missile.
o ns_of_Japanese
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_abducti
Okay, pretend I'm CNN. I have text, I have streaming video, I have message boards. I want my readers to be able to get to all my resources quickly, and have good bandwidth.
I'm trying to understand the service BellSouth is offering.
Maybe it would help if I consider what happens if I don't pay up? Are they going to throttle my connection? But am I not already paying for 500 GBps upstream? If I'm paying my ISP (which may well be BellSouth, knowing how big they and CNN both are), are they going to send me a second bill for the same 500 GBps? Are they just going to double my rates for the same service?
If so, wow, I wish them good luck with that. There is still a BIT of competition in the marketplace, for now, although I'm sure BellSouth's K Street division is working overtime on something.
On the other hand, maybe they'll invent some kind of artificial distinction in traffic. I'm paying for 500 GBps, sure, but I'm only paying for 1 customer to get it! If I want 300 million customers, well, that'll cost.
How do I tell I'm getting what I'm paying for? Or is it more like "NICE CUSTOMER BASE YOU GOT THERE. BE A SHAME IF ANYTHING *HAPPENED* TO IT."
Chris O
http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/volcano.cfm?vnum=0 201-113&volpage=var
Speaking as an amateur geologist, I think I can safely use the geophysical jargon and say, "MAN that is FREAKY!"
I may make some suggestions here that seem obvious, but if they're obvious to you, just ignore them.
I've been working in computers since 1986, in computer audio since 1993, and I know a fair number of people in the game industry.
In my experience, I have never gotten a job that was worth a damn without having contacts on the inside. Never. I have had crummy jobs that I applied for randomly, and I have had cool jobs that I got because I knew someone. Maybe this makes me lame, but I suspect it makes me typical.
Make friends in the game industry, or at least also trying to get in to the game industry. You don't even need to know them in person; this is the era of the Internet. The goal is that sooner or later they'll be in the meeting where the project manager at their game company says "Okay we're shipping in two weeks; it's time to add the music", they'll be able to say "I know this guy..."
They don't even need to be high up in their company. I started at Creative Labs working tech support. Within a few years, I had moved around in the company to marketing, and I was in the meeting where my boss said "We need someone to compose some music for our web site." We hired Paul Godwin because someone in that meeting knew him.
You have a web page up with at least snippets of some of your compositions up, right? If you can't find an open source game to help out with, turn off your PC speakers and compose some music for a game that already exists! Put 'em on your site arranged by genre: fps, rts, driving, puzzle, whatever.
In addition to a sharp looking site, you need to have some demo CDs. I bet you can make even the little business-card CDs in redbook format. I'd make 'em redbook with small song segments since you will be limited to 8-10 minutes of music. You can make them mixed-mode if you feel like, but I bet redbook with a nice printed label with your name and URL would suffice. You don't need to press them on everyone you meet, but keep them around.
If you don't already, spend some time learning about how the industry works. It may be boring and/or trite, but consider this: You meet someone who works for a publisher, and says "yeah we don't actually make any of the games ourselves." Dead end? Hardly! Maybe they don't make the games themselves, but they work with dozens of small software houses, each of which does need composers. "What titles are you publishing right now? Really, who is that by? Are you going to publish any future releases from them? You know I'd love to get in touch with someone there about composing some music for one of their titles."
Are you ready to be self-employed? Lots of small-time game operations are run on a shoestring. They're not going to need a properly-paid composer full time on staff. Get your state business license, come up with a nice looking invoice, learn how consulting contracts work.
And last, save your nickels and dimes, because next March 20-24, no matter what, you need to be here.
Best of luck.
Chris O
San Carlos, California
My group moved into a new furnished building just a year ago.
I'm sure whoever bought the conference room table thought they were doing a great job putting 4 power outlets and 4 network ports into the surface of the conference table, but I have to say it's a disaster. It has no facility for additional cabling.
In weekly meetings, we typically see 8-10 laptops on the table. So, we have an ethernet switch on the table as well. Naturally, 4 power outlets is far too few, so we have power strips on the table and the floor under and around. Also taking up space on the table is an LCD projector and a fancy conference phone with two remote microphones.
And since my group works on audio products, there's an A/V receiver on a side table, with cables snaking across the floor to its 6 speakers, too.
It is gross and horrifying. Basically if I had to design the perfect hi-tech conference room table, it would be a foot-wide recessed cable tray down the middle, with work surfaces on either side.
And for Pete's sake, mount the LCD projector to the ceiling. They come with remote controls for a reason.
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
That site is amazing. Who knew that copying data from one digital storage medium to another could introduce errors and "jitter"?
It's amazing that nobody has noticed the errors being introduced by copying data from one hard drive to another one. What kind of jokers do we have for programmers out there? Someone needs to come up with a way to copy digital data without introducing these defects! This could be an international crisis in the making.
I bet that's why my operating system is more stable on my machine at home than on my PC at work. It's the hard drive jitter!
Microsoft Word? FULL OF JITTER!
And that program you wrote that seems to be full of bugs this morning that you didn't notice when you left last night? Blame jitter.
Learn ye the miracle of the JP1 remote:
http://www.hifi-remote.com/jp1/index.shtml
Wow an article on the FUTURE of Digital audio. MP3 phones! Will the miracles of early 2001 never cease?
Andru: [...] I am not expecting huge storage on these phones either, otherwise they become indirect competition to the iPod. Instead, I think we will see the phones able to port about 50 tracks.
ME: Bah! The phones will certainly be strongly branded as iPod phones, and Apple will certainly recieve licensing fees. That's not competition in any meaningful sense. In addition, time has shown that any attempt to limit a music player's usefulness arbitrarily (like a stupid 50-track limit) will certainly backfire. They say themselves later on that hard drives are great because you can store your entire music collection. If musicphones are limited to 50 tracks, I predict abject failure, and I bet the cell phone manufacturers are right with me.
Hector: With the players of the future, we will be able to schedule personal recordings of incoming broadcast music on a given hour, and play it back when we have the free time.
ME: Bah! There's already products that do this, and although they are popular in a small part of the population, Pogo is not going to upset the iPod any time soon. If you really want to see a model of the future, I'm pretty confident it's to be found in Podcasting. As traditional media middlemen grow increasingly desperate to preserve their vanishing way of life, more ways are found to completely bypass them. Podcasters are individuals who make their own audio content, and provide it for download. Why cling tenaciously to traditional audio delivery methods such as radio with its primitive 1-second-of-audio/sec transmit rate when there are better methods available? Imagine instead a few aggregation service providers and recommendation engines with links and software to help find and download the freshest Podcasts you're interested in!
Hector: I'm tired of having to burn CD's if I want to play my files on my car stereo.
ME: I've been using my Nomad Zen in my car for two years. What's your problem, Hector? I'm not disagreeing with your desire to have a nice wireless way to hook up my Zen to my car stereo, but, dude, BO-RING. Think about this instead: When you pull your car into your garage, it uploads information about what you've been skipping over and what you like to listen to during various times and various driving styles to your home media center, which then, next time you log on to shop for music, makes recommendations, which your car stereo downloads wirelessly across your 802.11 net.
ME: Or heck, 802.11 is so ubiquitous nowadays, your car could download a track or two while you're in the supermarket parking lot (because it's a relatively big download) and store it encrypted. When you get back to the car, your heads-up display could ask if you want to buy the song. A quick purchase transaction later, you get the unencryption key, and away you go. New music on the fly.
Andru: One thing I do expect in the future, is to see flash MP3 players slowly diminish from the market. While it is more shock absorbent, I just don't see the cost of the medium as being feasible going forward, especially with hard drive prices plummetting.
ME: Buh? Maybe they haven't noticed that Flash prices are also on the move. Assuming the same size, speed, and reliability, I consider it a non-issue really.
Andru: With convergence coming into play, people are wanting to start putting pictures and video on their portable devices as well.
ME: Yes, just as Sony's Photo Walkman and Video Walkman were follow-on smash successes after the breakthrough cassette player. Oh wait. No, sorry, I was just smoking cr
Whaaaaat?
A3D was two things: an API and an algorithm for positioning a sound in 3D space. The API was essentially the same as Microsoft's DirectSound 3D, which is still used today. The difference, at the time, was the addition of a handful of functions to deal with the fact that Aureal's acceleration was in hardware, which was unsupported by DirectX at the time. These were particularly required due to the fact that the early 3D audio hardware supported an extremely limited number of 3D channels.
Fast forward to the modern era, and you will find some things have changed. Microsoft's software 3D audio rendering takes a much, much smaller slice of the CPU due to faster processors. Microsoft (since DX5) has allowed hardware acceleration to DS3D, utterly obsoleting A3D as an API. Sensaura (recently purchased by Creative) has licensed their 3D positional audio algorithms to a large number of sound card and motherboard companies. Guillemot, Creative, I/O Magic, NVidia, Terratec, Philips, and other companies have continued to make sound cards (and chipsets) with various levels of hardware and software 3D positional audio.
These days it's more difficult to tell where the hardware ends and the software begins due to motherboard design issues.
But if you've been listening to stereo since Aureal went out of business, it's not your soundcard's fault.
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
I agree the original article missed the point, but in a completely different way. As the audio capabilities of the early PCs and consoles matured, their limitations channeled and forged the creativity of artists in directions where the lack of 'real' instruments was less important.
This generated some very innovative, melodically-driven compositions, but in this I agree with you: it's no use mourning for them.
As for your assertions, maybe I just haven't noticed, but there used to be a term used to describe software like games: Multimedia. Many people are biased towards the sense of vision, but to assert that vision is 'THE focus of the work' (emphasis mine) is incorrect.
There may be more people working on the graphics and textures and animation, but if the audio is rotten, it will be noticed. A good game pays attention to audio and video. It is a synergy. You wouldn't watch the video without the audio, and you wouldn't listen to the audio without the video.
As for the assertion that computer games are the LAST place to expect innovation in audio, computer games are an exceptional environment.
Unlike the other forms of entertainment you blithely equate them with, games are interactive. In TV shows, prerecorded and new compositions are mixed, or transitioned in and out, and in movies, it's not uncommon to have an orchestra and director watching the movie as they record the score! But both of these forms result, eventually, in a static, linear soundtrack.
In games, music transitions are often handled in complex ways. See this article on Adaptive Musical Architectures. I can't seem to find any links, but if I remember, LucasArts made some of the first forays into this area.
Battlefield 1942 has been my favorite audio game lately. Listening to the music as you parachute in over Market Garden, and hearing it drowned out by roar of a B17 flying in low behind you should remove any remaining doubts you may have about the importance of game audio.
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
Given that the WinZip people were undoubtedly trying to add "real" security without changing the way their users have become accustomed to working with the product, it seems to me like they did a pretty good job.
The solutions to the points raised in the article as far as I can tell pretty much boil down to:
1) Be aware that metadata of the encrypted files is not secure. (The only WinZip-specific flaw, and certainly possible to work around)
2) Be careful how you communicate regarding the transmission of encrypted files.
3) Be careful with your password.
4) Check your PC every time you return to your office to make sure nobody has placed a keylogger between it and your keyboard.
Certainly slashdot users can do that!
I wonder how many slashdotters (including me) hooked their MFM hard drive up to an RLL controller to get that extra 50% out of it?
Now that's kickin' it old school.
60MB out of an ST-251, baybee!
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
Not sure it's the right kind of glue?
:-)
http://www.thistothat.com
Tricky-to-find laptop batteries?
http://www.batteryjuice-batteries.com/
So, what OS do you run on that 486SX palmtop?
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
...than Grassroots Motorsports
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
On a Tuesday morning, early in the month, after being at work a half hour or so, I got email calling all employees to a 10AM meeting in the only room big enough to hold us all (~300 probably).
The CEO seemed genuinely aggrieved at having to lay many of us (40%) off, reassured us that even then, at the peak of the dot-com bust, we would be getting 8 weeks of salary as severance, and our health coverage was paid through the end of the month. He asked us to return to our desks, where we would begin having one-on-one meetings with our immediate supervisors to learn the details of our layoffs, or new job responsibilities.
As I returned to my desk, I was considering all the projects I would need to wrap up and hand off if I were among those laid off, but when I got back, my computer no longer had access to the network.
I picked up my phone to call IS, but it, too, was disconnected.
It was by then obvious what was about to happen, and I had a pleasant enough conversation with my boss when my turn came. Turned out he had also been let go, and we discussed people we knew at other companies that might have use for me or him.
1) Early in the day, early in the week. Time to head home and immediately get started on the job hunt.
2) Early in the month, so I didn't have to worry about COBRA for a few weeks.
3) Real severance package.
I'm not sure what they could have done better, other than not laying us off in the first place.
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
Is there a web browser?
Chris O
San Carlos, CA
I for one have little objection to another check on HISD principals inflating their own performance by disowning failing students.
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
However, one of the cooler places locally has got to be TRIANGLE MACHINERY & TOOL COMPANY in San Jose for engineering supplies of all kinds.
* They have no web site.
* They have no air conditioning.
* They have no posted prices.
* They are hard to find.
* Their staff is not helpful. (but their customers are)
* Don't wear nice clothes, because everything they sell is greasy.
* Be prepared for heinous traffic on the weekends, because they're just around the corner from the Berryessa flea market.
But you know all those things in the Grainger catalog that are so cool but so expensive? Triangle has them. You can touch them and play with them. And if you're not afraid to haggle a bit, you can get an awesome price on them.
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
Mod this up, someone! I would like to hear more about this!
This seems to be true from my (limited) knowledge of amateur radio.
Additionally I believe that transmitting encrypted information over amateur radio is similarly prohibited.
Liquid's strategy from the beginning was to enable customers to burn their own (standard, redbook audio) CDs of purchased music.
If you have any Liquid tracks you have not yet burned to CD, now would be a good time.
There have been issues with the service not working with all CDR drives. For those customers limited to on-system playback, the Liquid Player should be able to continue playing your (paid, non-expiring) content until some day in the future when OS incompatibilities prevent it from running.
If you substantially change your system, make sure to retain the passport.lqp file. This will NOT allow you to move CDR burn permissions to your new system, but should allow playback.
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
Liquid's technology is just an envelope that can securely transfer any kind of file. There are even a few non-music files in the system for various specific purposes.
The audio compression types that I was aware of while I was there were mostly Dolby AAC with a handful of MP3s. They were working on WMA when I left the company, so I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the current library is in that format.
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
Of course it would be an even number 'generating revenue'.
Probably they teach students about inflating revenue by 'round tripping' in their freshman year these days!