... just how much Gamasutra gets paid for these little advertisements: "This program is really, really hard, but I'm glad I convinced my parents to pay the $24k/year tuition! You should get your parents to send you too!"
Players could download Wolfenstein 3D from a number of FTP sites and BBS file areas, and play the whole thing for free. If they liked it, the game encouraged players to send id a set donation of a few dollars.
I'm pretty sure that you could only download the first episode of the game for free, and when you registered the game you were able to download the rest. The entire game was NOT offered simply for free. Seems like an important fact they could have checked. I know this isn't an oprah novel but, come on people!
Like many game programmers, I decided my career path early on in childhood (thank you nintendo). Unlike many programmers, however, bad, bad, really bad grades in high school and college discouraged me from the whole field of computer science (again; thank you nintendo).
During my last semester at school, when I knew that I would not be welcomed back for another semester, I decided to NOT go to any more of my classes and I spent every waking moment in the university computer labs working on my own video game. After entering the game at the school's computer science showcase at the end of the year, I attracted a lot of attention and got a few job interviews. A few months after "finishing" school, I had a job in the game industry.
Actually, my employers only recently found out that I don't have a degree! Lucky for me, I had already proven myself to be a dedicated programmer long before that. Drive and desire count for a LOT. (But drive and desire usually lead to a college degree of some sort!)
I personally think that the most direct path to a job in game design is a job in game programing. Programming is the only other non-design job that interacts with all other apsects of the industry, and it's a good way to learn about the requirements and concerns of all the elements and people in the games business.
Also, when you are the guy working on the code, it's actually fairly easy to have a big influence on the design of the final product (as long as you are willing to do the work twice - their way and YOUR way - without wasting too much time, and without minding them throwing away your version in the trash).
Also, programmers are usually involved in design meetings. Designers are (usually) careful not to waste programmer time by asking for something that would take too long to implement, so you often get the oportunity to throw in your two cents.
I'd much rather remain a programmer, though. I like doing the work, not telling others what work to do.
I can't help but feel somewhat offended by the fact that he chose a "black" sounding name for his silly WoW avatar.
Or maybe I just need to get a sense of humor. For the record, I was laughing just as hard as everyone else at my office (we're all big dorks) when I saw the video.
One of the points (probably the only point) I dissagree with is his obvservation that the cpus of the newer machines all use "in order" processing to ill effect. He paraphrases a developer who claims that "out of order" execution is there to make "crappy code run better.", and the lack of out of order execution turns the new machines into "dumb blondes."
The author then runs with the idea, claiming that the cell and xenon processors will be unable to deliver really complex ai because they are "tuned for graphics" and nothing else.
It is really hard to explain why this is not true. It's hard to communicate this to someone who isn't a programmer, and someone who hasn't taken courses in computer engineering and compiler design.
Frankly, I was quite suprised when I didn't see any negative reactions to this statement from other programmers. For what it's worth, I'm most excited about the raw cpu power of these new systems, and I can't wait until I get the chance to develop for them.
trade a day, instead of skipping it
on
Star Wars Sickout
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· Score: 1
I asked my supervisor if I could take the day off to see the movie (he started to frown), but then I quickly asked if it was okay if I came in the following saturday to make up for it (he started to smile).
I get what I want, and he gets what he wants... which mostly because he knows that I can get a lot more done in a day when all of the non-programmers have been evacuated from the building.
Game tester would be ok, if you actually make a living at it.
As a game programmer, I can tell you that game testing is just about the worst job you can have in the industry. The days that the artists and I are pressed into testing are the only days that I ever want to kill myself. Tracking down and logging errors (in games) is a very boring and time consuming process.
I'm always on the lookout for local teenagers that we can kidnap and force to do testing for us. It's all fun and games until you acutually sit down and do it.
(although, i think it would be significantly more fun to be a tester for a title like halo 3, but not much more fun)
Stay the hell away from the "gaming industry" as a career.
I know this was posted as an "uninformed" opinion, but can you qualify your comment somehow? Did you actually work in the industry? Or are you basing this off of what you've heard from others?
All throughout college I kept hearing (from people I now know didn't have the slightest clue what they were talking about) that the game industry was a terrible place to work. My experience, two years into it as a programmer, is that this job kicks ass!
I do work at a smaller studio, and we're not owned by any dark international conglomerate, but I've seen 0% of all the negative stuff these guys are talking about. Decent hours, decent pay, and I get a lot of creative input (even as a programmer).
Every time we go to lunch, the other guys at my job (artists in their late 20's to mid 30's) always talk about job security and what they're going to be doing in the next ten years.
In the game industry, at least, the general consensus seems to be that once you get "too old" - by which they mean "in your mid-thirties" - there is no longer any place for you. Game studios claim to want "experienced" artists and programmers, but we all really know that they just want the cheapest talent they can get. They want a 22 year old savant who will work 70+ hour weeks for minimal pay.
But, like a previous poster already said; everywhere I've seen there is a need for experienced people with good leadership qualities. You can't get anything (worthwhile) done without an experienced captain at the helm. It would take a bit of searching, but I guarantee you that there's a place for someone like you.
If all else fails; use your years of experience and industry contacts to start your own company!
Within about 45 seconds of seeing this slashdot story I was already typing in my credit card info for 2 VIP tickets. I'm glad to see they're starting out in my home town (Chicago).
Normally, I balk at the high prices at the local blockbuster, so I hope my girlfriend understands why I had to pay damn near $300 for VIP tickets. I'm always trying to share my passion for videogames with her, so I guess a nice dinner and a night at the opera will do the trick.
Better to aim for the stars and hit the moon, instead of aiming for the moon and hitting the ground... or whatever the saying is.
From my short experience, cool features tend to get eliminated from a project as the delivery deadline grows near - not added.
Half of the awesome blue-sky ideas that we have for a game end up never working out. That's just the nature of the business. That doesn't mean that we're going to stop trying, though.
At my job, most of the code I write gets changed around dozens of times before the product is out the door. That's just the nature of the business.
First they want a space ninja, then they want a caveman lawyer. The game you start programming the first month of the project is almost guaranteed to be an entirely different game from the one that you finish.
Frustrated with all of the changes, I asked my boss once for the design document, and he pulled out a barely legible scrap of paper.
That goes for the low-level hardware stuff too. Even the hardware might change mid-project! My sprite code stopped working one day after we got new boards from the hardware people. I called them up, and sure enough, they changed around the hardware! (Thanks for telling me beforehand!)
Long story short; assembly programming is a skill that every serious game programmer should know, but you never know where you're code is going to end up, so it only makes sense to write well-documented C/C++ instead of the complicated ASM equilavent. (yes, I know you want to prove how clever you are with your 100% ASM programs, but in a professional environment you need to make sure that your code is understandable and modifiable by everyone on the project.)
Even on the low-level system I described in my previous post, we still use C.
The design of the xgamestation is almost *exactly* like the arcade hardware that we're using at work.
This little bit of hardware might seem to be underpowered, but I can tell you from experience that this is the kind of stuff that a lot of professional game developers are using today.
With the arcade business being what it is today, the challenge is to fit the most amount of game into the smallest (meaning cheapest) hardware. The game I'm working on right now runs on hardware (similar to the xgamestation) that only costs about $40 for each unit. It's basically a 66mhz Z80 cpu, 4mb of texture memory, and an fpga that is really good at moving around memory, and it's a childrens redemption piece (ticket spitter) that's going to sell like hotcakes.
When I applied for my current job, I was one of the only guys who had any non-pc game development experience (through the sony net yaroze). This little box should open the door for a lot of aspiring game programmers.
Between Torque and the XGameStation, young programmers have no excuse for not having a kick-ass game for their demo reels.
Have you actually played Doom 3? Yes, there are separate keys for each of the (different?) weapons, and the flashlight, but from what I've played, Doom 3 has a much simpler control system than games like Unreal and Battlefield. They certainly succeded in making a simple, old-school shooter.
For Doom 3 the only buttons I use (other than the arrow keys and mouse) are (F)lashlight and (R)eload.
I'm not sure this was mentioned elsewhere, but every psychology student learns about the patient H.M., who underwent a complete hippocampal lombotomy to treat his severe epilepsy (thankfully, they no longer do this drastic surgery today).
Long story short; by completely removing his hippocampus, researchers discovered that they eliminated H.M.'s ability to form new memories, and that existing memories for a certain time prior to the operation were erased. H.M. can hold a conversation with you, but within a few minutes he will have forgotten what he was just talking about, and who he was talking to.
I'm not sure what the current research is, but it is widely believed that newly formed memories take some time to become permanent. Of course, the length of time and the specific brain regions involved are still under debate, but any good electrial disturbance to your brain (a siezure, for instance, or getting knocked really hard on your head), will distrupt this system and will wipe out any memories that you have recently acquired.
And, the larger the disruption, the longer the period of time that gets erased, some believe.
This phenomenon of retrograde amnesia has been the center of the debate about the human memory system for a number of decades now. (This was the subject of my last presentation as an undergrad at UIUC, by the way.)
Re:Don't know my own password
on
Real Security?
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· Score: 1
Honest, I don't know any of my passwords. If someone were to ask me for my password, I'd have to first find a QWERTY keyboard, sit down, place both hands in the right position on the keys and start typing into a text editor. The pattern I type is sort of a rhythm and can be typed very quickly.
I do the same thing.
Just a quick story... at my university I was interviewed by campus police about a student who was messing around with the network (sending threatening emails and the like - not me, though, I swear!), and because I was a campus employee at the time, they asked me for my password so they could log on to my work account to "check things out."
And that's what I told them: I don't know my password! I just sit at the keyboard a certain way and tap away... consistently and in the exact same way every time, and that is my password! (this is true)
Needless to say, the campus cops didn't like this, and they grilled me for half an hour until I went up to a terminal and demonstrated that I wasn't lying. They were very much unamused. They thought I was just fooling around with them.
(not that I was at all scared of campus police. little more than undergrad security guards with pepper spray and rape whistles.)
Wow. This post is so off-base I don't know where to begin. Call me a conspiracy theorist geek, but I'd bet that you're some kind of microsoft employee.
#1 is stupid: why should I automatically let somebody commercialize code that I've been working on for free with the intent that my code shall be freely distributed? Corporations should not be able to feed off the open source community for commercial purposes.
#2 is even dumber: if there is a commercial product out there, anybody should be able to work on an open-source replacement. If the commercial product were perfect, then nobody would waste their time trying to replace it. The last time I checked, no existing piece of commercial software has attained this status. Competition, open-source or otherwise, is the primary incentive for software developers to improve the quality of their wares.
#3 is the worst, and I'll quote this one directly, as I anticipate your post being moderated -1 flamebait: "3) My software will not be targeted at the average consumer (read: no easy to use UI, no easy installation process).
Who the hell is paying you to post this? Are you suggesting that open-source developers should make their software as difficult to use as possible? Are you saying that the job of making software that benifits the general population should only be given to large corporations? I suppose that only microsoft is qualified to create software for the "unwashed masses."
Everybody should have the option to choose whatever piece of software they want to use. They shouldn't be force-fed one kind of software or another. If existing software companies have to have all of their open-source competitors outlawed for them to turn a profit, it only goes to show how terrible their software really is.
The Google Code Jam winner was certainly famous for his skills a long time before this... even ordinary kids in my suburban high school new about Jimmy Mardell 8 years ago.
Jimmy Mardell was one of the pioneers of assembly programming for the TI calculators way back when. Without his ZTetris program (with two player link capability, no less!), high school math class would have been really boring for me.
I credit Jimmy Mardell's work for sparking my interest in game programming. It's good to see he's still on top of things.
The way I see it, owning (at least in part) a satellite is a lot like owning a radio station.
My uncle owns a few stations, and the scheme works like this; he buys a radio station for around $10 million (with hefty financing from a bank, of course), and arranges it so that the monthly payments on the loan are less than the monthly revenues from the radio station.
Maybe there is a similar opportunity for small business owners to have access to a satellite like this? Lord knows, I can't think of anything. How could a satellite bring in $10 million? I mean, aside from Real Genius Death Lasers and government spycams?
I bugged my parents for one of these back in high school, and I spent just about all my time on it. It was a great way to learn about 3D programming back then, with a standardized graphics library that was actually used to make lots of games.
For my senior calc class, my final project was a demonstration of spherical mapping. I brought the Yaroze, my laptop, and borrowed a TV from the AV room. I was actually kind of a "jock" in high school (captain of the track team), so this bizzare demonstration really confused everyone. I remember the girl I had a crush on was walking through the hall and saw me as I was explaining surface normals. She didn't seem too interested in me after that.
True story:
For some reason SGI donated an O2 to our student group, and we were supposed to have a demonstration program running (apparently we convinced them it was good PR) at this big conference in LA. I was never able to get anything running on the O2 - this was before I knew how to use GLUT/OpenGL - so a couple of weeks before the conference I did the whole thing on the Yaroze.
The funny part was, SGI was displaying all of these REALLY NICE posters advertising the event that was supposed to showcase SGI technology (I hung one up in my dorm, I remember), but the whole thing was running off the Yaroze. I had it hidden under the table. Fun times. To test the display before the event I popped in a few PlayStation imports. People thought that Tobal 2 and Einhander were running on SGI hardware!
It was really fun to learn, but once college started getting tough, I used it less and less. The last game that I was working on was a 3D puzzle/racing game, but I since moved development to the PC, as it was becoming easier and easier to do 3D things on your average PC.
I've got all my Yaroze cables and software. And I still have the original laptop that I did the development on. It'll probably be fun to go back in a few years and load up those programs, but for now, it's too recent to be retro, and too retro to be useful.
Each induvidual ISP is going to have to come up with some scheme for paying the bandwidth bills.
Thankfully, it isn't some abstract concept like bandwidth "utility" that is difficult to quantify and price; every month an ISP has to pay X amount of dollars for their infrastructure. However they see fit to pay that money is really up to them. There are numerous ways, of course.
The best possible situation would be every ISP trying a diverse set of payment structures. Through the magic of capitalism, consumers will eventually migrate to those ISPs who've created the most fair and efficient pricing scheme. Although, history (or maybe, Microsoft) has shown that being the most fair and efficient isn't a prerequisite for financial success.
One of the strongest truths in anything that isn't necessarily legal, or could be interpretted as not legal, is that you don't leave any evidence that others can control. If you're really smart, you leave no evidence at all, period, but if you do leave something, make sure that it is in your control, and your control alone.
That is a good point; clearly, most of these "criminals" are just young kids out there looking to make a "name" for themselves by hosting the most mp3s and warez. They don't take the extra precautions because they don't think they are commiting any real crime.
The real criminals (IMHO) are the scum that try to sell pirated CD-Rs and DVD-Rs in the backalleys of New York, and I'm 100% in support of corporate and government efforts to crack down on these guys.
I don't, however, agree with the RIAA's apparent goal of making a multi-million dollar example out of some 16 year old kid. Just direct complaints to the ISP and have them shut down the account after it's been proven to host pirated files. No need to bust down doors and put people behind bars...
Slashdot Mirror
... just how much Gamasutra gets paid for these little advertisements: "This program is really, really hard, but I'm glad I convinced my parents to pay the $24k/year tuition! You should get your parents to send you too!"
Like many game programmers, I decided my career path early on in childhood (thank you nintendo). Unlike many programmers, however, bad, bad, really bad grades in high school and college discouraged me from the whole field of computer science (again; thank you nintendo).
During my last semester at school, when I knew that I would not be welcomed back for another semester, I decided to NOT go to any more of my classes and I spent every waking moment in the university computer labs working on my own video game. After entering the game at the school's computer science showcase at the end of the year, I attracted a lot of attention and got a few job interviews. A few months after "finishing" school, I had a job in the game industry.
Actually, my employers only recently found out that I don't have a degree! Lucky for me, I had already proven myself to be a dedicated programmer long before that. Drive and desire count for a LOT. (But drive and desire usually lead to a college degree of some sort!)
I personally think that the most direct path to a job in game design is a job in game programing. Programming is the only other non-design job that interacts with all other apsects of the industry, and it's a good way to learn about the requirements and concerns of all the elements and people in the games business.
Also, when you are the guy working on the code, it's actually fairly easy to have a big influence on the design of the final product (as long as you are willing to do the work twice - their way and YOUR way - without wasting too much time, and without minding them throwing away your version in the trash).
Also, programmers are usually involved in design meetings. Designers are (usually) careful not to waste programmer time by asking for something that would take too long to implement, so you often get the oportunity to throw in your two cents.
I'd much rather remain a programmer, though. I like doing the work, not telling others what work to do.
I can't help but feel somewhat offended by the fact that he chose a "black" sounding name for his silly WoW avatar.
Or maybe I just need to get a sense of humor. For the record, I was laughing just as hard as everyone else at my office (we're all big dorks) when I saw the video.
One of the points (probably the only point) I dissagree with is his obvservation that the cpus of the newer machines all use "in order" processing to ill effect. He paraphrases a developer who claims that "out of order" execution is there to make "crappy code run better.", and the lack of out of order execution turns the new machines into "dumb blondes."
The author then runs with the idea, claiming that the cell and xenon processors will be unable to deliver really complex ai because they are "tuned for graphics" and nothing else.
It is really hard to explain why this is not true. It's hard to communicate this to someone who isn't a programmer, and someone who hasn't taken courses in computer engineering and compiler design.
Frankly, I was quite suprised when I didn't see any negative reactions to this statement from other programmers. For what it's worth, I'm most excited about the raw cpu power of these new systems, and I can't wait until I get the chance to develop for them.
I asked my supervisor if I could take the day off to see the movie (he started to frown), but then I quickly asked if it was okay if I came in the following saturday to make up for it (he started to smile).
I get what I want, and he gets what he wants... which mostly because he knows that I can get a lot more done in a day when all of the non-programmers have been evacuated from the building.
Game tester would be ok, if you actually make a living at it.
As a game programmer, I can tell you that game testing is just about the worst job you can have in the industry. The days that the artists and I are pressed into testing are the only days that I ever want to kill myself. Tracking down and logging errors (in games) is a very boring and time consuming process.
I'm always on the lookout for local teenagers that we can kidnap and force to do testing for us. It's all fun and games until you acutually sit down and do it.
(although, i think it would be significantly more fun to be a tester for a title like halo 3, but not much more fun)
Stay the hell away from the "gaming industry" as a career.
I know this was posted as an "uninformed" opinion, but can you qualify your comment somehow? Did you actually work in the industry? Or are you basing this off of what you've heard from others?
All throughout college I kept hearing (from people I now know didn't have the slightest clue what they were talking about) that the game industry was a terrible place to work. My experience, two years into it as a programmer, is that this job kicks ass!
I do work at a smaller studio, and we're not owned by any dark international conglomerate, but I've seen 0% of all the negative stuff these guys are talking about. Decent hours, decent pay, and I get a lot of creative input (even as a programmer).
Every time we go to lunch, the other guys at my job (artists in their late 20's to mid 30's) always talk about job security and what they're going to be doing in the next ten years.
In the game industry, at least, the general consensus seems to be that once you get "too old" - by which they mean "in your mid-thirties" - there is no longer any place for you. Game studios claim to want "experienced" artists and programmers, but we all really know that they just want the cheapest talent they can get. They want a 22 year old savant who will work 70+ hour weeks for minimal pay.
But, like a previous poster already said; everywhere I've seen there is a need for experienced people with good leadership qualities. You can't get anything (worthwhile) done without an experienced captain at the helm. It would take a bit of searching, but I guarantee you that there's a place for someone like you.
If all else fails; use your years of experience and industry contacts to start your own company!
Within about 45 seconds of seeing this slashdot story I was already typing in my credit card info for 2 VIP tickets. I'm glad to see they're starting out in my home town (Chicago).
Normally, I balk at the high prices at the local blockbuster, so I hope my girlfriend understands why I had to pay damn near $300 for VIP tickets. I'm always trying to share my passion for videogames with her, so I guess a nice dinner and a night at the opera will do the trick.
Good use of a christmas bonus.
Better to aim for the stars and hit the moon, instead of aiming for the moon and hitting the ground... or whatever the saying is.
From my short experience, cool features tend to get eliminated from a project as the delivery deadline grows near - not added.
Half of the awesome blue-sky ideas that we have for a game end up never working out. That's just the nature of the business. That doesn't mean that we're going to stop trying, though.
Opps. I did mean a 68000. Dragonball SZ to be exact.
At my job, most of the code I write gets changed around dozens of times before the product is out the door. That's just the nature of the business.
First they want a space ninja, then they want a caveman lawyer. The game you start programming the first month of the project is almost guaranteed to be an entirely different game from the one that you finish.
Frustrated with all of the changes, I asked my boss once for the design document, and he pulled out a barely legible scrap of paper.
That goes for the low-level hardware stuff too. Even the hardware might change mid-project! My sprite code stopped working one day after we got new boards from the hardware people. I called them up, and sure enough, they changed around the hardware! (Thanks for telling me beforehand!)
Long story short; assembly programming is a skill that every serious game programmer should know, but you never know where you're code is going to end up, so it only makes sense to write well-documented C/C++ instead of the complicated ASM equilavent. (yes, I know you want to prove how clever you are with your 100% ASM programs, but in a professional environment you need to make sure that your code is understandable and modifiable by everyone on the project.)
Even on the low-level system I described in my previous post, we still use C.
The design of the xgamestation is almost *exactly* like the arcade hardware that we're using at work.
This little bit of hardware might seem to be underpowered, but I can tell you from experience that this is the kind of stuff that a lot of professional game developers are using today.
With the arcade business being what it is today, the challenge is to fit the most amount of game into the smallest (meaning cheapest) hardware. The game I'm working on right now runs on hardware (similar to the xgamestation) that only costs about $40 for each unit. It's basically a 66mhz Z80 cpu, 4mb of texture memory, and an fpga that is really good at moving around memory, and it's a childrens redemption piece (ticket spitter) that's going to sell like hotcakes.
When I applied for my current job, I was one of the only guys who had any non-pc game development experience (through the sony net yaroze). This little box should open the door for a lot of aspiring game programmers.
Between Torque and the XGameStation, young programmers have no excuse for not having a kick-ass game for their demo reels.
Have you actually played Doom 3? Yes, there are separate keys for each of the (different?) weapons, and the flashlight, but from what I've played, Doom 3 has a much simpler control system than games like Unreal and Battlefield. They certainly succeded in making a simple, old-school shooter.
For Doom 3 the only buttons I use (other than the arrow keys and mouse) are (F)lashlight and (R)eload.
I'm not sure this was mentioned elsewhere, but every psychology student learns about the patient H.M., who underwent a complete hippocampal lombotomy to treat his severe epilepsy (thankfully, they no longer do this drastic surgery today).
Long story short; by completely removing his hippocampus, researchers discovered that they eliminated H.M.'s ability to form new memories, and that existing memories for a certain time prior to the operation were erased. H.M. can hold a conversation with you, but within a few minutes he will have forgotten what he was just talking about, and who he was talking to.
I'm not sure what the current research is, but it is widely believed that newly formed memories take some time to become permanent. Of course, the length of time and the specific brain regions involved are still under debate, but any good electrial disturbance to your brain (a siezure, for instance, or getting knocked really hard on your head), will distrupt this system and will wipe out any memories that you have recently acquired.
And, the larger the disruption, the longer the period of time that gets erased, some believe.
This phenomenon of retrograde amnesia has been the center of the debate about the human memory system for a number of decades now. (This was the subject of my last presentation as an undergrad at UIUC, by the way.)
Just a quick story... at my university I was interviewed by campus police about a student who was messing around with the network (sending threatening emails and the like - not me, though, I swear!), and because I was a campus employee at the time, they asked me for my password so they could log on to my work account to "check things out."
And that's what I told them: I don't know my password! I just sit at the keyboard a certain way and tap away... consistently and in the exact same way every time, and that is my password! (this is true)
Needless to say, the campus cops didn't like this, and they grilled me for half an hour until I went up to a terminal and demonstrated that I wasn't lying. They were very much unamused. They thought I was just fooling around with them.
(not that I was at all scared of campus police. little more than undergrad security guards with pepper spray and rape whistles.)
Wow. This post is so off-base I don't know where to begin. Call me a conspiracy theorist geek, but I'd bet that you're some kind of microsoft employee.
#1 is stupid: why should I automatically let somebody commercialize code that I've been working on for free with the intent that my code shall be freely distributed? Corporations should not be able to feed off the open source community for commercial purposes.
#2 is even dumber: if there is a commercial product out there, anybody should be able to work on an open-source replacement. If the commercial product were perfect, then nobody would waste their time trying to replace it. The last time I checked, no existing piece of commercial software has attained this status. Competition, open-source or otherwise, is the primary incentive for software developers to improve the quality of their wares.
#3 is the worst, and I'll quote this one directly, as I anticipate your post being moderated -1 flamebait: "3) My software will not be targeted at the average consumer (read: no easy to use UI, no easy installation process).
Who the hell is paying you to post this? Are you suggesting that open-source developers should make their software as difficult to use as possible? Are you saying that the job of making software that benifits the general population should only be given to large corporations? I suppose that only microsoft is qualified to create software for the "unwashed masses."
Everybody should have the option to choose whatever piece of software they want to use. They shouldn't be force-fed one kind of software or another. If existing software companies have to have all of their open-source competitors outlawed for them to turn a profit, it only goes to show how terrible their software really is.
The Google Code Jam winner was certainly famous for his skills a long time before this... even ordinary kids in my suburban high school new about Jimmy Mardell 8 years ago.
Jimmy Mardell was one of the pioneers of assembly programming for the TI calculators way back when. Without his ZTetris program (with two player link capability, no less!), high school math class would have been really boring for me.
I credit Jimmy Mardell's work for sparking my interest in game programming. It's good to see he's still on top of things.
The way I see it, owning (at least in part) a satellite is a lot like owning a radio station.
My uncle owns a few stations, and the scheme works like this; he buys a radio station for around $10 million (with hefty financing from a bank, of course), and arranges it so that the monthly payments on the loan are less than the monthly revenues from the radio station.
Maybe there is a similar opportunity for small business owners to have access to a satellite like this? Lord knows, I can't think of anything. How could a satellite bring in $10 million? I mean, aside from Real Genius Death Lasers and government spycams?
For Alien, this is the scheme: the first two rule, the last two blow.
Alternatively, for Star Wars: the last three rule, and it's the first three that suck.
I bugged my parents for one of these back in high school, and I spent just about all my time on it. It was a great way to learn about 3D programming back then, with a standardized graphics library that was actually used to make lots of games.
For my senior calc class, my final project was a demonstration of spherical mapping. I brought the Yaroze, my laptop, and borrowed a TV from the AV room. I was actually kind of a "jock" in high school (captain of the track team), so this bizzare demonstration really confused everyone. I remember the girl I had a crush on was walking through the hall and saw me as I was explaining surface normals. She didn't seem too interested in me after that.
True story:
For some reason SGI donated an O2 to our student group, and we were supposed to have a demonstration program running (apparently we convinced them it was good PR) at this big conference in LA. I was never able to get anything running on the O2 - this was before I knew how to use GLUT/OpenGL - so a couple of weeks before the conference I did the whole thing on the Yaroze.
The funny part was, SGI was displaying all of these REALLY NICE posters advertising the event that was supposed to showcase SGI technology (I hung one up in my dorm, I remember), but the whole thing was running off the Yaroze. I had it hidden under the table. Fun times. To test the display before the event I popped in a few PlayStation imports. People thought that Tobal 2 and Einhander were running on SGI hardware!
It was really fun to learn, but once college started getting tough, I used it less and less. The last game that I was working on was a 3D puzzle/racing game, but I since moved development to the PC, as it was becoming easier and easier to do 3D things on your average PC.
I've got all my Yaroze cables and software. And I still have the original laptop that I did the development on. It'll probably be fun to go back in a few years and load up those programs, but for now, it's too recent to be retro, and too retro to be useful.
Each induvidual ISP is going to have to come up with some scheme for paying the bandwidth bills.
Thankfully, it isn't some abstract concept like bandwidth "utility" that is difficult to quantify and price; every month an ISP has to pay X amount of dollars for their infrastructure. However they see fit to pay that money is really up to them. There are numerous ways, of course.
The best possible situation would be every ISP trying a diverse set of payment structures. Through the magic of capitalism, consumers will eventually migrate to those ISPs who've created the most fair and efficient pricing scheme. Although, history (or maybe, Microsoft) has shown that being the most fair and efficient isn't a prerequisite for financial success.
The real criminals (IMHO) are the scum that try to sell pirated CD-Rs and DVD-Rs in the backalleys of New York, and I'm 100% in support of corporate and government efforts to crack down on these guys.
I don't, however, agree with the RIAA's apparent goal of making a multi-million dollar example out of some 16 year old kid. Just direct complaints to the ISP and have them shut down the account after it's been proven to host pirated files. No need to bust down doors and put people behind bars...