He knows a winner when he see's one... Xbox is going to tranform the console market.
John Carmack is the deity of high-end PC geek gaming. He doesn't know anything about the mass market.
A crash is possible, but for different reasons
on
Gaming Crash up Ahead
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· Score: 5
One of the great hidden secrets of the video game industry is that 50% of all products lose money, 40% break even, and 10% make a profit. Of those 10%, only a handful make what could be considered a spectacular profit.
I think the author is off base about what would cause another video game crash (something that comes up every couple of years, going back to at least 1990). This time around the issue that development is hugely expensive, takes two to three years, and games have to do exceptionally well just to make up development costs. The next time you read a poor or mediocre review of a game, consider that a team of 20 was slaving away on that game, day in and day out, since 1998. This is in a different class than a band spending two months to write and record a weak album. Daikatana is a high profile example of a failed game, but the sad truth is that most games follow the same path; it's just that they don't have a well-known figure managing the team.
Maybe "video game rock stars" would have been a more appropriate phrase. You're right Kojima didn't do the actual programming, but he did bring the whole thing together. Can anybody name who actually operated the cameras on Hitchcock's films? Actually, I'm sure someone can. But you get the point.
You don't understand video game development. There's much more in common with pumping out commodity items, like toys and WB sitcoms, than there is with creating art. Mr. Kojima is a _manager_. Most days he probably works on budgets, looks at sales projections, runs meetings, makes sure the project is sticking to milestones, etc. This is business, not idealistically created art.
And with them, the programmers will become what I call "programming rock stars".
Where have you been? This concept is at least 18 years old, right down to the phrase "rock stars." This is what Electronic Arts was created to do. See how long it lasted?
Interestingly, of all the people you mentioned, only two are programmers (Sweeney and Carmack). Mr. Kojima is not a programmer. He is part designer, part manager (more the latter than the former). Games are created by large teams of 10 to 200 people, with a rough average of 25. Maybe 30% of those people are programmers. Can you name *anyone* doing programming for Metal Gear Solid 2? Or should the manager take all the credit?
The trouble isn't language advocacy so much as with people who don't understand that not using one language for everything is okay. I like Perl a bunch for certain types of text processing. For other types of text processing, I find languages with more of a Lispy feel to be more suitable. I also recommend Python to people who want to learn programming, because I think it is less fiddly than Perl. This doesn't mean I want to have Guido's baby.
Periodically I've mentioned a shortcoming of a language, and I've been railed by people who are personally insulted. Why is it so hard to say language X is good here and language Y is good there?
This is similar to the OS "wars." If I say something good about Windows, I'm branded as a clueless Microsoftie. If I say something bad about Linux, I get flamed. Why I can't I use both?
I think the root of the problem is narrowness of experience. People advocate what they know and put down what they don't. That's stupid. Linux advocacy is being hurt by people who don't know anything about operating systems other than Linux and Windows. I would hardly listen to someone with such shallow knowledge. Similarly, people who get bent out of shape over programming language choice are not worth talking to.
I always try to be fair to Mr. Katz, but this article is superficial. It reads like an attempt to vindicate gamers from all the bad press games have been receiving. It doesn't reach below the surface or attempt to look for the truth.
At the moment, there is a schism in gaming. The traditional hardcore players are becoming more and more inbred and negative, while being almost entirely separated from the surge in video game popularity. On the web you see ravings from people who seem obsessed with aliasing and polygon throughput and so on, as if this is somehow related to fun. At the same time, hardcore gamers are hugely conservative. If you develop an RPG or FPS that at all deviates from the norm, then you take heavy flak for it. Heck, you can't even get away from gothic, sci fi, or midieval settings, because no one will stand for it. Or try to do a first person shooter that doesn't include a rocket launcher, and you get grilled.
So I'd consider most people who consider themselves gamers to be behind the curve in a big way, in that they're handicapped with a narrow view. There's no reason to call them any kind of cultural force, any more than people who think that Lethal Weapon 4 is, like, the most awesome movie ever.
Games Programmers, that's who. Just like we now talk of Bradd Pitt and Alfred Hitchcock in Hushed tones, soon we shall be talking of hotshot young games programmers in the same reverential way.
This has already been tried in the past, and it hasn't worked. Thing is, there can be 20 to 200 people working on one project. And the people who you usually hear about, like John Romero and Dave Perry, don't actually do programming. They're more managers than anything. John Carmack is one of the few exceptions to this rule.
And if you can't name some examples, then you really can't back up your statement, so it's a moot point.;-)
A few examples: NASM, Free Pascal, Open Scheme, most window managers (note: WMs are different than desktop environments). gcc is actually pretty horrible inside, but it does have a regression test suite (one of the few).
Lanier's paper, One Half of a Manifesto, is actually several months old. The article referenced at Slashdot is a fluffy interview with the author which includes out-of-context fragments of the original paper. Please read the full paper rather than posting about how shallow the article is.
Did you read the original paper at edge.org or did you just read the fluffy overview that this story references? The original paper is several months old and is much more detailed. It's somewhat surprising that the Slashdot guys missed the original paper completely.
Now, now, now, don't take that as a flame. But what's the average age of a Slashdot reader? 20? What's the average age of a gung-ho Open Source development team? 21? Realistically, you don't have much software engineering experience at that age. Heck, how many Open Source projects have regression test suites? Two?
I'm not talking about old standbys like Perl and Apache and so on, but most of the other projects that get started by young coders and garner press simply for being "open source" without code quality ever being an issue. I don't want to name names, but examples are plentiful. Having a relatively simple project with 5 megabytes of *compressed* source code should scare anyone off.
I see a lot of posts which view Plex86 as a triumph for Linux, something that will make it so that Linux users can use Windows applications.
This is missing the mark.
Plex86 is in effect its own operating system. It provides a "meta-os" that lets other operating systems run at the same time. So, yes, it will let Linux and Windows co-exist in a way that's cleaner than constant rebooting. But more than anything, Plex86 is opening the door to other choices beside the old tech of Windows and Linux. New OSes won't be as out in the cold, because they can be sampled alongside current software. Even better, developing new OS software will now be much easier. Possibly this means that it will detract from both Linux and Windows in the long run, but that's not the issue. The issue is that it is a stepping stone for future advances, rather than forcing everyone to cling to current technology because there are no alternatives.
No offense to anyone intended, but a good many of the replies here, including many moderated up to 4 and 5, could have been pulled from piracy discussions in 1982. It's amazing how little things change!
Personally, I bought a DC over the PS2. Why? 'Cos the games are better. Listen... 1. Soul Calibur 2. Crazy Taxi 3. Quake III: Arena 4. Unreal Tournament 5. Half-Life 6. Phantasy Star Online And ya got all the modem-related greatness. All for half the price of a PS2.I won't be getting a PS2, because of the difficulty of programming thw machine. By the time the programmers have got up to speed on the PS2, the X-Box will be out and stompin' all over it. Hooray for X-Box.
Thank you for a picture perfect example of mindless and annoying advocacy.
Am I the only person who gets really annoyed by all the over-zealous Dreamcast advocates who apparently run to the web-connected machines in the library during lunch period so they can defend Sega's honor? Shudder. I mean, yeah, the DC is a nice machine with nice games. So are all the other consoles I've ever played. But the raving and mindlessness really turns me off on the DC. I want a game system. I don't want to buy into a phony counter-culture.
This is THE game I`ve seen quickies on that really raised my appetite for getting one of those ps2`s (but I didn`t). Silent Hill 2 being the close second. Where are THOSE reviews?
MGS2 is vaporware. A release date hasn't even been announced yet. And the number one rule of gaming, BTW, is never, never, NEVER advocate a game that you have not actually played. Even after being repeatedly burned by over-hyped games that turned out to be disappointing, some people just never learn.
Low power consumption has not been a goal in recent years, especially in regard to the computer industry. A few years ago, a power supply for a top of the line machine was 200W. Now we're seeing 450W. The Voodoo 5 from 3dfx even comes with an external power supply, because it draws too much power for an AGP slot.
Yes, the article is talking about industrial power usage, but it sure would be nice for low power consumption to filter down thoughout the PC world. The big speed increases we've been seeing lately aren't coming for free. We just jack up the transistor count and die size and get performance in return. That's on par with putting a 16 cylinder engine in a car. Of *course* it will be faster, but there's more to cars than raw horsepower, you know?
Personally, I think low power and reliability should be the two goals for the computing industry. Does a secretary really need an 800MHz Athlon? Do students? Heck, I've done commercial game development with much, much less than that.
Re:The Author of this article just doesn't get it.
on
The Future Of The GUI?
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· Score: 2
No start bar. No task bar. No stupid menu bar stuck across the top of my screen. No silly pull out control bar. No shortcut bar. BUT a configurable start-type menu that appears anywhere on the background that I left-click. How much more innovative should Linux be before it is released from this myth that the Linux GUI is nothing more than a copy of windows & macintosh.
What you are describing is the standard X interface from 1987. The trouble is that raw X--or raw X prettied up with alpha-blended windows--is not close to the usability level of the Windows or Mac, primarily because there are no interface standards. Desktop environments, like KDE and Gnome, are attempts to make Linux more luxurious and pleasant. But that movement, from raw X to desktop environment, is pretty much a "Microsoft is doing it so we will too!" game. That's what this thread is about.
And having Linux in cash registers benefits Linux because...?
Simple answer: It doesn't have any benefit for desktop users. Do you normally think about the various embedded OSs that are used in cars and industrial facilities?
Re:The Author of this article just doesn't get it.
on
The Future Of The GUI?
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· Score: 5
What a pud. More innovation has come out of development on Linux than from M$ and crApple combined.
What are you talking about? Completely objectively (I am a user of Windows, Linux, and the Macintosh), the GUIs for Linux are more attempts to outdo Windows than anything else. You won't find much in terms of amazing human engineering or honest innovation, just more doodads.
Very unfortunately, the "we must beat the evil empire" attitude has hurt Linux development in a number of ways. Isn't Linus always saying "there is no war"? Doesn't anyone listen?
I'd hesitate to use a Photoshop-wannabe as the poster child of an experimental technology group. It's kinda like those groups of high school kids who start faux game companies "dedicated to innovative ideas" who write fancy versions of Tetris and Breakout.
Slashdot Mirror
He knows a winner when he see's one ... Xbox is going to tranform the console market.
John Carmack is the deity of high-end PC geek gaming. He doesn't know anything about the mass market.
One of the great hidden secrets of the video game industry is that 50% of all products lose money, 40% break even, and 10% make a profit. Of those 10%, only a handful make what could be considered a spectacular profit.
I think the author is off base about what would cause another video game crash (something that comes up every couple of years, going back to at least 1990). This time around the issue that development is hugely expensive, takes two to three years, and games have to do exceptionally well just to make up development costs. The next time you read a poor or mediocre review of a game, consider that a team of 20 was slaving away on that game, day in and day out, since 1998. This is in a different class than a band spending two months to write and record a weak album. Daikatana is a high profile example of a failed game, but the sad truth is that most games follow the same path; it's just that they don't have a well-known figure managing the team.
Maybe "video game rock stars" would have been a more appropriate phrase. You're right Kojima didn't do the actual programming, but he did bring the whole thing together. Can anybody name who actually operated the cameras on Hitchcock's films? Actually, I'm sure someone can. But you get the point.
You don't understand video game development. There's much more in common with pumping out commodity items, like toys and WB sitcoms, than there is with creating art. Mr. Kojima is a _manager_. Most days he probably works on budgets, looks at sales projections, runs meetings, makes sure the project is sticking to milestones, etc. This is business, not idealistically created art.
And with them, the programmers will become what I call "programming rock stars".
Where have you been? This concept is at least 18 years old, right down to the phrase "rock stars." This is what Electronic Arts was created to do. See how long it lasted?
Interestingly, of all the people you mentioned, only two are programmers (Sweeney and Carmack). Mr. Kojima is not a programmer. He is part designer, part manager (more the latter than the former). Games are created by large teams of 10 to 200 people, with a rough average of 25. Maybe 30% of those people are programmers. Can you name *anyone* doing programming for Metal Gear Solid 2? Or should the manager take all the credit?
The trouble isn't language advocacy so much as with people who don't understand that not using one language for everything is okay. I like Perl a bunch for certain types of text processing. For other types of text processing, I find languages with more of a Lispy feel to be more suitable. I also recommend Python to people who want to learn programming, because I think it is less fiddly than Perl. This doesn't mean I want to have Guido's baby.
Periodically I've mentioned a shortcoming of a language, and I've been railed by people who are personally insulted. Why is it so hard to say language X is good here and language Y is good there?
This is similar to the OS "wars." If I say something good about Windows, I'm branded as a clueless Microsoftie. If I say something bad about Linux, I get flamed. Why I can't I use both?
I think the root of the problem is narrowness of experience. People advocate what they know and put down what they don't. That's stupid. Linux advocacy is being hurt by people who don't know anything about operating systems other than Linux and Windows. I would hardly listen to someone with such shallow knowledge. Similarly, people who get bent out of shape over programming language choice are not worth talking to.
I always try to be fair to Mr. Katz, but this article is superficial. It reads like an attempt to vindicate gamers from all the bad press games have been receiving. It doesn't reach below the surface or attempt to look for the truth.
At the moment, there is a schism in gaming. The traditional hardcore players are becoming more and more inbred and negative, while being almost entirely separated from the surge in video game popularity. On the web you see ravings from people who seem obsessed with aliasing and polygon throughput and so on, as if this is somehow related to fun. At the same time, hardcore gamers are hugely conservative. If you develop an RPG or FPS that at all deviates from the norm, then you take heavy flak for it. Heck, you can't even get away from gothic, sci fi, or midieval settings, because no one will stand for it. Or try to do a first person shooter that doesn't include a rocket launcher, and you get grilled.
So I'd consider most people who consider themselves gamers to be behind the curve in a big way, in that they're handicapped with a narrow view. There's no reason to call them any kind of cultural force, any more than people who think that Lethal Weapon 4 is, like, the most awesome movie ever.
Games Programmers, that's who. Just like we now talk of Bradd Pitt and Alfred Hitchcock in Hushed tones, soon we shall be talking of hotshot young games programmers in the same reverential way.
This has already been tried in the past, and it hasn't worked. Thing is, there can be 20 to 200 people working on one project. And the people who you usually hear about, like John Romero and Dave Perry, don't actually do programming. They're more managers than anything. John Carmack is one of the few exceptions to this rule.
And if you can't name some examples, then you really can't back up your statement, so it's a moot point. ;-)
A few examples: NASM, Free Pascal, Open Scheme, most window managers (note: WMs are different than desktop environments). gcc is actually pretty horrible inside, but it does have a regression test suite (one of the few).
Lanier's paper, One Half of a Manifesto, is actually several months old. The article referenced at Slashdot is a fluffy interview with the author which includes out-of-context fragments of the original paper. Please read the full paper rather than posting about how shallow the article is.
Did you read the original paper at edge.org or did you just read the fluffy overview that this story references? The original paper is several months old and is much more detailed. It's somewhat surprising that the Slashdot guys missed the original paper completely.
Now, now, now, don't take that as a flame. But what's the average age of a Slashdot reader? 20? What's the average age of a gung-ho Open Source development team? 21? Realistically, you don't have much software engineering experience at that age. Heck, how many Open Source projects have regression test suites? Two?
I'm not talking about old standbys like Perl and Apache and so on, but most of the other projects that get started by young coders and garner press simply for being "open source" without code quality ever being an issue. I don't want to name names, but examples are plentiful. Having a relatively simple project with 5 megabytes of *compressed* source code should scare anyone off.
I see a lot of posts which view Plex86 as a triumph for Linux, something that will make it so that Linux users can use Windows applications.
This is missing the mark.
Plex86 is in effect its own operating system. It provides a "meta-os" that lets other operating systems run at the same time. So, yes, it will let Linux and Windows co-exist in a way that's cleaner than constant rebooting. But more than anything, Plex86 is opening the door to other choices beside the old tech of Windows and Linux. New OSes won't be as out in the cold, because they can be sampled alongside current software. Even better, developing new OS software will now be much easier. Possibly this means that it will detract from both Linux and Windows in the long run, but that's not the issue. The issue is that it is a stepping stone for future advances, rather than forcing everyone to cling to current technology because there are no alternatives.
Here. Sigh.
Argh. Moderate the original posting down! This is a huge FAQ at the Plex86 website. Don't waste interview questions with FAQs. 5 indeed!
No offense to anyone intended, but a good many of the replies here, including many moderated up to 4 and 5, could have been pulled from piracy discussions in 1982. It's amazing how little things change!
Personally, I bought a DC over the PS2. Why? 'Cos the games are better. Listen... 1. Soul Calibur 2. Crazy Taxi 3. Quake III: Arena 4. Unreal Tournament 5. Half-Life 6. Phantasy Star Online And ya got all the modem-related greatness. All for half the price of a PS2.I won't be getting a PS2, because of the difficulty of programming thw machine. By the time the programmers have got up to speed on the PS2, the X-Box will be out and stompin' all over it. Hooray for X-Box.
Thank you for a picture perfect example of mindless and annoying advocacy.
Am I the only person who gets really annoyed by all the over-zealous Dreamcast advocates who apparently run to the web-connected machines in the library during lunch period so they can defend Sega's honor? Shudder. I mean, yeah, the DC is a nice machine with nice games. So are all the other consoles I've ever played. But the raving and mindlessness really turns me off on the DC. I want a game system. I don't want to buy into a phony counter-culture.
IMHO, stick to computer hardware. Observe the jaggies in the Top-Left corner of this picture
Hmmm...it never occurred to me to poke around the web looking for jaggies in screenshots. I usually just enjoy playing the games.
This is THE game I`ve seen quickies on that really raised my appetite for getting one of those ps2`s (but I didn`t). Silent Hill 2 being the close second. Where are THOSE reviews?
MGS2 is vaporware. A release date hasn't even been announced yet. And the number one rule of gaming, BTW, is never, never, NEVER advocate a game that you have not actually played. Even after being repeatedly burned by over-hyped games that turned out to be disappointing, some people just never learn.
Low power consumption has not been a goal in recent years, especially in regard to the computer industry. A few years ago, a power supply for a top of the line machine was 200W. Now we're seeing 450W. The Voodoo 5 from 3dfx even comes with an external power supply, because it draws too much power for an AGP slot.
Yes, the article is talking about industrial power usage, but it sure would be nice for low power consumption to filter down thoughout the PC world. The big speed increases we've been seeing lately aren't coming for free. We just jack up the transistor count and die size and get performance in return. That's on par with putting a 16 cylinder engine in a car. Of *course* it will be faster, but there's more to cars than raw horsepower, you know?
Personally, I think low power and reliability should be the two goals for the computing industry. Does a secretary really need an 800MHz Athlon? Do students? Heck, I've done commercial game development with much, much less than that.
No start bar. No task bar. No stupid menu bar stuck across the top of my screen. No silly pull out control bar. No shortcut bar. BUT a configurable start-type menu that appears anywhere on the background that I left-click. How much more innovative should Linux be before it is released from this myth that the Linux GUI is nothing more than a copy of windows & macintosh.
What you are describing is the standard X interface from 1987. The trouble is that raw X--or raw X prettied up with alpha-blended windows--is not close to the usability level of the Windows or Mac, primarily because there are no interface standards. Desktop environments, like KDE and Gnome, are attempts to make Linux more luxurious and pleasant. But that movement, from raw X to desktop environment, is pretty much a "Microsoft is doing it so we will too!" game. That's what this thread is about.
And having Linux in cash registers benefits Linux because...?
Simple answer: It doesn't have any benefit for desktop users. Do you normally think about the various embedded OSs that are used in cars and industrial facilities?
What a pud. More innovation has come out of development on Linux than from M$ and crApple combined.
What are you talking about? Completely objectively (I am a user of Windows, Linux, and the Macintosh), the GUIs for Linux are more attempts to outdo Windows than anything else. You won't find much in terms of amazing human engineering or honest innovation, just more doodads.
Very unfortunately, the "we must beat the evil empire" attitude has hurt Linux development in a number of ways. Isn't Linus always saying "there is no war"? Doesn't anyone listen?
In a past interview, he specifically mentioned Standard ML as a beautiful and practical language that he was surprised didn't catch on.
I'd hesitate to use a Photoshop-wannabe as the poster child of an experimental technology group. It's kinda like those groups of high school kids who start faux game companies "dedicated to innovative ideas" who write fancy versions of Tetris and Breakout.