If he's a jerk, you don't want to work for him anyway. Best to find that out sooner rather than later.
Being sloppy with licensing is a good way to expose your company to legal risk, so you need to be straightforward with the facts to your management and get this cleared up. Talking to the lead in question is a good first step. Perhaps permission had been properly obtained, in which case it should be documented as such (e.g. in comments), otherwise the original author needs to be contacted. The lead needs to take responsibility here - that's why he's a lead.
Documenting where the code came from (assuming it's legit) is more than just good legal practice. It's also good engineering practice. If there are bugs in that area, a future maintainer can go back to that forum to report them, or look for solutions, for example.
A good lead should also know better than to play lawyer, but everyone has a bad day, and most people are basically decent and act in good faith. Start the conversation assuming that nobody had bad intentions and it should go fine.
Sony's launch prices for their two versions were $499 and $599.
Now, after the "price drop" the prices for their two versions are...$499 and $599.
Sure, the harddrives are bigger between then and now, but other than that not much is different (oh, except it's SW instead of HW backward compatibility, which is a downgrade whichever way you slice it).
Sure, but back in the real world, it's a bit unfair to hold Microsoft to standards we don't hold anyone else to. For example, I don't notice Sony or Nintendo publishing their hardware failure rates. Heck, I can't think of a single consumer electronics company which publishes such a thing. In that environment, MS would have to be crazy to publish their numbers (no matter what they are).
Actually, they don't oppose current axioms. The results were pretty much as expected by the QM community. What's interesting is that they seem to have eliminated non-locality as a possible explanation.
It really does seem to be the case that it is meaningless to ask about the value of a particular observable until you actually perform a measurement. Yes, this is extremely weird, because intuitively we think about a measurement as simply being a passive reporting of information which already exists (the cat is either dead or it's not), but this experiment is telling us that you can't think about it that way and expect to get the right answers.
This is a profound result philosophically, and one that I think should make one uncomfortable, but that's not the same thing as it being wrong.
That is definitely true. But the idea that observables only exist when observed is, while appealing to very small children still undergoing psychological development, plain rubbish. How can you be so sure?
It's intuitively wrong, but our intuition is a poor guide to the actual behavior of the universe outside of our normal realm of experience. For example, it's intuitively obvious to us that velocities sum linearly, but relativity tells us that just isn't so (and experiments can be done to confirm this). It's intuitively obvious because we have evolved in a world where everything we observe moves very slowly compared to the speed of light - our brain didn't need to evolve the intuition to deal with relativistic velocities.
Similarly it's intuitively obvious to us that an object must have a definite state, because every object we directly observe unaided appears to have a definite state. Our brains have therefore evolved to make that an intuitive assumption. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's the way the world actually works - and experiments in quantum mechanics (such as this one) suggest that it isn't.
"I didn't even consider an XBox, because I refuse to put any money towards Microsoft's efforts to expand their monopolistic bullshit beyond the PC. Honestly, I'm surprised a slashdotter can admit buying an XBox without holding their head in shame."
And yet somehow stuffing the coffers of the same company responsible for the rootkit debacle makes you a model slashdotter (whatever the fuck that means)?
And as someone who still works in the games publishing business, for a platform holder, I can tell you that the terminology we use is "first party" to refer to all titles published by us, regardless of who developed them. Note that "published by us" is not the same as "released on our platform". If, say, Electronic Arts releases a title for our platform, then that would indeed be called "third party".
Perhaps there are some distinctions from company to company about how exactly the terminology is used, leading to the confusion. In any event, I think it's pretty obvious what the interviewee in the article meant.
Even taking a definition of "first party" to mean "internally developed", Microsoft does have quite a bit of first party software. In particular, note that Bungie, Lionhead, Ensemble, and Rare are all owned by Microsoft, and thus count as "first party" (even by your definition). Forza is also a first party title. I'm sure there are some other pieces I have forgotten.
By your definition, Sony has very little first party strength at all, and relies very heavily on third party publishers. Nintendo obviously has great first party strength. I would argue that Microsoft is somewhere in the middle.
I've been watching this whole exchange with some amusement, and I have to congratulate you, sir. You really are a first class troll. Let's review:
- You don't like ad hominem attacks when they're directed at you, but you're perfectly prepared to sling them liberally in the direction of Mr. Minter. This appears to be a common theme in your line of reasoning.
- You accuse Jeff Minter of being a "nobody", and yet I'll wager that far more people in the industry have respect for him than have even heard of you.
- You claim that Jeff Minter is "despised" in the games industry. That's news to me, and I've been in the industry for over 11 years. Given how long he has been around I'm sure he has bumped heads with a few people along the way, so it wouldn't surprise me if there were some people floating around who feel that way. But you could say the same about almost anyone, and it's a far cry from the universal disdain you are suggesting.
- You claim that all of Jeff's games are clones or sequels. Given a broad enough interpretation, that's a fair statement. However, it's also a fair statement about the vast majority of games ever made. There just aren't that many genuinely new ideas. Unless you happen to be Sid Meier, Will Wright, or small handful of others, your life in the games industry consists of putting slightly new twists on essentially the same basic gameplay.
This last point I want to make particularly clearly. It's a perfectly honorable thing to take an existing game and remake it better - there is no copyright on an "idea" and nor should there be. Some of the best, i.e. most fun and/or best selling, games out there are clones and sequels. Every FPS ever made owes a debt to Wolfenstein and Doom. Every RTS should give a nod to Dune 2. Does that mean that Halo and Starcraft are worthless, terrible games? Of course not! Similarly, should we lambast Jeff Minter for making Tempest 2000, or should we applaud him for making the best version of that game ever built? I vote for the latter. If your Sudoku game turns out to be the best Sudoku game ever, I'll applaud you too.
Sure, but the EULA is irrelevant when it comes to determining the value of the gold. The market at large has decided that the gold has value, and that I can be paid for performing the service of transferring gold to you in-game. There is a risk premium being paid, in that at any time the MMO operator might decide to just not allow either of us access to the game, but that just gets factored into the price.
Fair market value means "what people will pay for it". And it is most assuredly the case that people will pay for in-game gold. They might be paying for a virtual thing which a EULA says they don't even have any right to, but they're prepared to pay for it nonetheless.
Lastly, if you ask any tax attorney (I am not one, but I have friends who are), they'll tell you that you can't really take anything in tax law for granted until it has been litigated, and that there is certainly a case to answer here even if it's not completely clear-cut either way.
Uh, no. You have to sell the asset to convert it to money, but you do not have to sell the asset in order for it to be taxable.
If you and I do a barter transaction, say you perform some service for me and I pay you in (real world) diamonds, then that moment is the taxable event, not the later time when you actually sell the diamonds. It should be fairly obvious that if you couldn't be taxed on anything until you turned it into actual dollars, there would be a gaping loophole in the tax code. (Example: I arrange to get paid entirely in stock / gold bullion / classic baseball cards, and further arrange with my landlord that he will accept stock / gold bullion / classic baseball cards instead of dollars for my rent.)
And while your statement that you cannot assign FMV to items which have no FMV is true, it's also a meaningless tautology. Something does not have to be legally saleable for it to have fair market value. Fair market value is just a fancy term for "what people are prepared to pay for it". In the case of gold earned in an MMO, that value is non-zero.
Now, you might argue that the EULA prevents sale of gold. But it actually does no such thing, as evidenced by the fact that gold is sold every day. The EULA merely sets up a contractual situation where you are breaching your agreement with the MMO operator by selling the gold, and that presumably there might be sanctions against you if you are caught doing it. As a buyer of gold, I need to be aware of the possibility that my account might be terminated or the gold might be confiscated, but the market just factors those risks into the price.
So, you're saying that without assistance the market will lead us to a "solution" where global warming isn't addressed, and instead we'll just drive down the cost of beachfront property. And you think this is a good long-term solution because....?
Point is that there is no economic incentive to avoid future global warming. There might be an economic incentive to avoid investments which might be adversely affected by future global warming, but that's not the same thing. That's what makes it a textbook example of an externality: from the perspective of the energy market, the costs associated with potential future global warming are not borne by the players in that market, they're instead borne by future people in coastal regions who might not even own an automobile.
The bottom line is that carbon emissions have a high probability of imposing a large future cost on all of us, and yet that cost is not reflected in the cost of carbon fuels. Therefore, the market in energy is not able to use that information. The fact that the beachfront property market might use that information is neither here nor there, and is certainly not useful in solving the problem.
The problem with environmental issues is that, contrary to your assertion, the free market doesn't work unaided. It's an example of what economists would call an "externality", because it's a cost which doesn't fall on the players in the market, and hence cannot supply information to that market.
The notion that if we don't reduce our carbon emissions now then the world we be an ugly place in 50-100 years time simply can't be accounted for without giving the free market a helping hand, because unaided there's no mechanism by which that potential future event has a dollar cost for the companies and consumers involved in energy transactions today.
This is specifically the situation that governments are for - they are able to apply to a cost to something and hence influence the market in a way that accounts for this externality. For example, raising the tax on gasoline is a very direct way of applying some of that external cost into the appropriate market. The free market still does it's work, we've just made the cost of gasoline what it "should" be to take account of future global warming. The market can then decide what to do about it, whether it's building more efficient cars, taking fewer journeys, or investing in alternative fuel sources.
No need for fancy tax credits or pork barrel schemes. Just make the price of gasoline (and other carbon-emitting fuels) reflect the future global warming risk, and let the usual action of the market do it's work.
I'm sure Skype does have lawyers, who probably wouldn't have seen anything amiss, since Skype isn't the one with the dominant market position. Of course, that still doesn't make it a smart move, but lawyers aren't there to stop you doing stupid things, only to stop you doing legally risky things.
A more relevant question is whether Intel's bloodsuckers were asleep at the switch.
I am a BAFTA member, and as such I vote in these awards. And yes, I still haven't seen Munich due in part to this debacle. The distributor does offer screenings in a cinema for members, but if you can't get to them when they are scheduled (as I couldn't) then you can only judge from the DVD. If you can't play the DVD, then you're out of luck.
However, it's not correct to say that Munich is ineligable. It is eligable for the awards, but members are (obviously) instructed not to vote for films they haven't seen. So, if most members don't get to see a review DVD or make it to a screening, then they're not going to (or at least certainly shouldn't) vote for the film or performances from it - consequently, many of them haven't. That may of course lead to a film/performance being eliminated from contention in an early round of voting (which is perhaps what you're getting at).
Atheists are capable of being moral people. It's offensive to suggest that somehow religion is required for morality. Worse than that, it suggests that the reason to be moral is some kind of supernatural reward or punishment for "bad" or "good" behaviour, as opposed to an intrinsic sense of right and wrong.
Teaching kids morals is responsible parenting, but it's completely orthogonal to teaching kids religion.
If you need religion to tell you what is right and wrong, then you're a pretty sorry excuse for a human being.
Business travellers especially like to have their email stored locally, so they can work on a plane, for example. Although some airlines are starting to offer wireless connectivity on their flights, it's going to be a while before it's ubiquitous.
Sure, eventually we'll all have a high-bandwidth connection all of the time. But until that happens, a useful offline mode is a critical feature for many users.
Card counting isn't illegal in Nevada, but that's not really relevant, because nor is it illegal for a Nevada casino to ban you for card counting (or indeed pretty much any other reason they feel like).
From the point of view of the casino, they don't really care whether you go to jail or just get asked to leave, so long as you're not card-counting (successfully) in their casino anymore. The tech they're talking about here still achieves that goal.
The Algebraist was a good read, and although you rightly say that it's not a Culture novel, it really did seem to me that the Dwellers were pretty much The Culture by another name, at least in many respects.
Besides, designing is only necessary when there is something new or different.
Utter bullshit. You obviously have no experience of games development.
The fact of the matter is that ideas are, for the most part, completely worthless. And it's not ideas that game designers, in general, are paid for.
What game designers do get paid for is the ability to make the thousand little decisions along the way that separate the truly great game from the merely average. Why is Halo great, but Killzone merely so-so? They're both basically just shooters. The ability to analyze what's working in your game, what's not, and what you can do to push your game in the right direction is not an easy thing. And that's what most game designers are paid to do.
Now, it's true that there are some designers out there who every now and then come up with a genuinely different idea. A Will Wright or a Sid Meier, say. But those are the exceptions. The vast majority of designers are not going to be those guys. The vast majority of designers, even when they are working on original IP, are still working within the framework of an established genre or blend of genres.
My guess is that one of the SPEs is disabled for production yield reasons. If only 7 out of 8 SPEs have to work, then your production yield goes up by quite a bit.
For example, suppose that on any given chip you manufacture, the probability of any given SPE working correctly is 75%. If you require all 8 to work, then your yield is about 10%. If you only require at least 7 out of the 8 to work, then your yield is about 36%, or over three times as much.
Yes, I know you're a troll, but there's a point to be made here: expanding the base of developer expertise on a console is a good thing. Isn't it better if it's about who has the best game ideas, rather than about who is the biggest assembly-language geek?
Slashdot Mirror
If he's a jerk, you don't want to work for him anyway. Best to find that out sooner rather than later.
Being sloppy with licensing is a good way to expose your company to legal risk, so you need to be straightforward with the facts to your management and get this cleared up. Talking to the lead in question is a good first step. Perhaps permission had been properly obtained, in which case it should be documented as such (e.g. in comments), otherwise the original author needs to be contacted. The lead needs to take responsibility here - that's why he's a lead.
Documenting where the code came from (assuming it's legit) is more than just good legal practice. It's also good engineering practice. If there are bugs in that area, a future maintainer can go back to that forum to report them, or look for solutions, for example.
A good lead should also know better than to play lawyer, but everyone has a bad day, and most people are basically decent and act in good faith. Start the conversation assuming that nobody had bad intentions and it should go fine.
Sony's launch prices for their two versions were $499 and $599.
Now, after the "price drop" the prices for their two versions are...$499 and $599.
Sure, the harddrives are bigger between then and now, but other than that not much is different (oh, except it's SW instead of HW backward compatibility, which is a downgrade whichever way you slice it).
Sure, but back in the real world, it's a bit unfair to hold Microsoft to standards we don't hold anyone else to. For example, I don't notice Sony or Nintendo publishing their hardware failure rates. Heck, I can't think of a single consumer electronics company which publishes such a thing. In that environment, MS would have to be crazy to publish their numbers (no matter what they are).
Actually, they don't oppose current axioms. The results were pretty much as expected by the QM community. What's interesting is that they seem to have eliminated non-locality as a possible explanation.
It really does seem to be the case that it is meaningless to ask about the value of a particular observable until you actually perform a measurement. Yes, this is extremely weird, because intuitively we think about a measurement as simply being a passive reporting of information which already exists (the cat is either dead or it's not), but this experiment is telling us that you can't think about it that way and expect to get the right answers.
This is a profound result philosophically, and one that I think should make one uncomfortable, but that's not the same thing as it being wrong.
It's intuitively wrong, but our intuition is a poor guide to the actual behavior of the universe outside of our normal realm of experience. For example, it's intuitively obvious to us that velocities sum linearly, but relativity tells us that just isn't so (and experiments can be done to confirm this). It's intuitively obvious because we have evolved in a world where everything we observe moves very slowly compared to the speed of light - our brain didn't need to evolve the intuition to deal with relativistic velocities.
Similarly it's intuitively obvious to us that an object must have a definite state, because every object we directly observe unaided appears to have a definite state. Our brains have therefore evolved to make that an intuitive assumption. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's the way the world actually works - and experiments in quantum mechanics (such as this one) suggest that it isn't.
"I didn't even consider an XBox, because I refuse to put any money towards Microsoft's efforts to expand their monopolistic bullshit beyond the PC. Honestly, I'm surprised a slashdotter can admit buying an XBox without holding their head in shame."
And yet somehow stuffing the coffers of the same company responsible for the rootkit debacle makes you a model slashdotter (whatever the fuck that means)?
In my experience it's rock-paper-scissors:
Zerg beats Terran. Zergling rush FTW!
Terran beats Protoss. Firebats mangle zealots, sci-vessels take down shields
Protoss beats Zerg. Templars chew up zerglings, archons+scouts chew up everything else
However it's still close enough that the r-p-s aspect only really matters when skill is quite finely balanced.
Bush admitted ordered illegal wiretapping of US Citizens. Clinton lied about getting a blowjob from his intern.
Are you really arguing that the latter is impeachable but not the former?
And as someone who still works in the games publishing business, for a platform holder, I can tell you that the terminology we use is "first party" to refer to all titles published by us, regardless of who developed them. Note that "published by us" is not the same as "released on our platform". If, say, Electronic Arts releases a title for our platform, then that would indeed be called "third party".
Perhaps there are some distinctions from company to company about how exactly the terminology is used, leading to the confusion. In any event, I think it's pretty obvious what the interviewee in the article meant.
Even taking a definition of "first party" to mean "internally developed", Microsoft does have quite a bit of first party software. In particular, note that Bungie, Lionhead, Ensemble, and Rare are all owned by Microsoft, and thus count as "first party" (even by your definition). Forza is also a first party title. I'm sure there are some other pieces I have forgotten.
By your definition, Sony has very little first party strength at all, and relies very heavily on third party publishers. Nintendo obviously has great first party strength. I would argue that Microsoft is somewhere in the middle.
And if you RTFA, you'd realize that the Slashdot article has a typo, and the quote should refer to Dead or Alive not Dead Rising.
Also, in the games business, "first-party" refers to games published by the platform holder, not necessarily developed by it.
I've been watching this whole exchange with some amusement, and I have to congratulate you, sir. You really are a first class troll. Let's review:
- You don't like ad hominem attacks when they're directed at you, but you're perfectly prepared to sling them liberally in the direction of Mr. Minter. This appears to be a common theme in your line of reasoning.
- You accuse Jeff Minter of being a "nobody", and yet I'll wager that far more people in the industry have respect for him than have even heard of you.
- You claim that Jeff Minter is "despised" in the games industry. That's news to me, and I've been in the industry for over 11 years. Given how long he has been around I'm sure he has bumped heads with a few people along the way, so it wouldn't surprise me if there were some people floating around who feel that way. But you could say the same about almost anyone, and it's a far cry from the universal disdain you are suggesting.
- You claim that all of Jeff's games are clones or sequels. Given a broad enough interpretation, that's a fair statement. However, it's also a fair statement about the vast majority of games ever made. There just aren't that many genuinely new ideas. Unless you happen to be Sid Meier, Will Wright, or small handful of others, your life in the games industry consists of putting slightly new twists on essentially the same basic gameplay.
This last point I want to make particularly clearly. It's a perfectly honorable thing to take an existing game and remake it better - there is no copyright on an "idea" and nor should there be. Some of the best, i.e. most fun and/or best selling, games out there are clones and sequels. Every FPS ever made owes a debt to Wolfenstein and Doom. Every RTS should give a nod to Dune 2. Does that mean that Halo and Starcraft are worthless, terrible games? Of course not! Similarly, should we lambast Jeff Minter for making Tempest 2000, or should we applaud him for making the best version of that game ever built? I vote for the latter. If your Sudoku game turns out to be the best Sudoku game ever, I'll applaud you too.
Sure, but the EULA is irrelevant when it comes to determining the value of the gold. The market at large has decided that the gold has value, and that I can be paid for performing the service of transferring gold to you in-game. There is a risk premium being paid, in that at any time the MMO operator might decide to just not allow either of us access to the game, but that just gets factored into the price.
Fair market value means "what people will pay for it". And it is most assuredly the case that people will pay for in-game gold. They might be paying for a virtual thing which a EULA says they don't even have any right to, but they're prepared to pay for it nonetheless.
Lastly, if you ask any tax attorney (I am not one, but I have friends who are), they'll tell you that you can't really take anything in tax law for granted until it has been litigated, and that there is certainly a case to answer here even if it's not completely clear-cut either way.
Uh, no. You have to sell the asset to convert it to money, but you do not have to sell the asset in order for it to be taxable.
If you and I do a barter transaction, say you perform some service for me and I pay you in (real world) diamonds, then that moment is the taxable event, not the later time when you actually sell the diamonds. It should be fairly obvious that if you couldn't be taxed on anything until you turned it into actual dollars, there would be a gaping loophole in the tax code. (Example: I arrange to get paid entirely in stock / gold bullion / classic baseball cards, and further arrange with my landlord that he will accept stock / gold bullion / classic baseball cards instead of dollars for my rent.)
And while your statement that you cannot assign FMV to items which have no FMV is true, it's also a meaningless tautology. Something does not have to be legally saleable for it to have fair market value. Fair market value is just a fancy term for "what people are prepared to pay for it". In the case of gold earned in an MMO, that value is non-zero.
Now, you might argue that the EULA prevents sale of gold. But it actually does no such thing, as evidenced by the fact that gold is sold every day. The EULA merely sets up a contractual situation where you are breaching your agreement with the MMO operator by selling the gold, and that presumably there might be sanctions against you if you are caught doing it. As a buyer of gold, I need to be aware of the possibility that my account might be terminated or the gold might be confiscated, but the market just factors those risks into the price.
So, you're saying that without assistance the market will lead us to a "solution" where global warming isn't addressed, and instead we'll just drive down the cost of beachfront property. And you think this is a good long-term solution because....?
Point is that there is no economic incentive to avoid future global warming. There might be an economic incentive to avoid investments which might be adversely affected by future global warming, but that's not the same thing. That's what makes it a textbook example of an externality: from the perspective of the energy market, the costs associated with potential future global warming are not borne by the players in that market, they're instead borne by future people in coastal regions who might not even own an automobile.
The bottom line is that carbon emissions have a high probability of imposing a large future cost on all of us, and yet that cost is not reflected in the cost of carbon fuels. Therefore, the market in energy is not able to use that information. The fact that the beachfront property market might use that information is neither here nor there, and is certainly not useful in solving the problem.
The problem with environmental issues is that, contrary to your assertion, the free market doesn't work unaided. It's an example of what economists would call an "externality", because it's a cost which doesn't fall on the players in the market, and hence cannot supply information to that market.
The notion that if we don't reduce our carbon emissions now then the world we be an ugly place in 50-100 years time simply can't be accounted for without giving the free market a helping hand, because unaided there's no mechanism by which that potential future event has a dollar cost for the companies and consumers involved in energy transactions today.
This is specifically the situation that governments are for - they are able to apply to a cost to something and hence influence the market in a way that accounts for this externality. For example, raising the tax on gasoline is a very direct way of applying some of that external cost into the appropriate market. The free market still does it's work, we've just made the cost of gasoline what it "should" be to take account of future global warming. The market can then decide what to do about it, whether it's building more efficient cars, taking fewer journeys, or investing in alternative fuel sources.
No need for fancy tax credits or pork barrel schemes. Just make the price of gasoline (and other carbon-emitting fuels) reflect the future global warming risk, and let the usual action of the market do it's work.
I'm sure Skype does have lawyers, who probably wouldn't have seen anything amiss, since Skype isn't the one with the dominant market position. Of course, that still doesn't make it a smart move, but lawyers aren't there to stop you doing stupid things, only to stop you doing legally risky things.
A more relevant question is whether Intel's bloodsuckers were asleep at the switch.
I am a BAFTA member, and as such I vote in these awards. And yes, I still haven't seen Munich due in part to this debacle. The distributor does offer screenings in a cinema for members, but if you can't get to them when they are scheduled (as I couldn't) then you can only judge from the DVD. If you can't play the DVD, then you're out of luck.
However, it's not correct to say that Munich is ineligable. It is eligable for the awards, but members are (obviously) instructed not to vote for films they haven't seen. So, if most members don't get to see a review DVD or make it to a screening, then they're not going to (or at least certainly shouldn't) vote for the film or performances from it - consequently, many of them haven't. That may of course lead to a film/performance being eliminated from contention in an early round of voting (which is perhaps what you're getting at).
Atheists are capable of being moral people. It's offensive to suggest that somehow religion is required for morality. Worse than that, it suggests that the reason to be moral is some kind of supernatural reward or punishment for "bad" or "good" behaviour, as opposed to an intrinsic sense of right and wrong.
Teaching kids morals is responsible parenting, but it's completely orthogonal to teaching kids religion.
If you need religion to tell you what is right and wrong, then you're a pretty sorry excuse for a human being.
Business travellers especially like to have their email stored locally, so they can work on a plane, for example. Although some airlines are starting to offer wireless connectivity on their flights, it's going to be a while before it's ubiquitous.
Sure, eventually we'll all have a high-bandwidth connection all of the time. But until that happens, a useful offline mode is a critical feature for many users.
It's not a dupe, it's just another instance...
Card counting isn't illegal in Nevada, but that's not really relevant, because nor is it illegal for a Nevada casino to ban you for card counting (or indeed pretty much any other reason they feel like).
From the point of view of the casino, they don't really care whether you go to jail or just get asked to leave, so long as you're not card-counting (successfully) in their casino anymore. The tech they're talking about here still achieves that goal.
The Algebraist was a good read, and although you rightly say that it's not a Culture novel, it really did seem to me that the Dwellers were pretty much The Culture by another name, at least in many respects.
Besides, designing is only necessary when there is something new or different.
Utter bullshit. You obviously have no experience of games development.
The fact of the matter is that ideas are, for the most part, completely worthless. And it's not ideas that game designers, in general, are paid for.
What game designers do get paid for is the ability to make the thousand little decisions along the way that separate the truly great game from the merely average. Why is Halo great, but Killzone merely so-so? They're both basically just shooters. The ability to analyze what's working in your game, what's not, and what you can do to push your game in the right direction is not an easy thing. And that's what most game designers are paid to do.
Now, it's true that there are some designers out there who every now and then come up with a genuinely different idea. A Will Wright or a Sid Meier, say. But those are the exceptions. The vast majority of designers are not going to be those guys. The vast majority of designers, even when they are working on original IP, are still working within the framework of an established genre or blend of genres.
My guess is that one of the SPEs is disabled for production yield reasons. If only 7 out of 8 SPEs have to work, then your production yield goes up by quite a bit.
For example, suppose that on any given chip you manufacture, the probability of any given SPE working correctly is 75%. If you require all 8 to work, then your yield is about 10%. If you only require at least 7 out of the 8 to work, then your yield is about 36%, or over three times as much.
Yes, I know you're a troll, but there's a point to be made here: expanding the base of developer expertise on a console is a good thing. Isn't it better if it's about who has the best game ideas, rather than about who is the biggest assembly-language geek?