It’s a well known fact common idea vague theory that science adapts itself to self-fulfilling prophecies from various sources. For example: Moore’s law was one of the bolder moves in science: from a set of very few examples, he extrapolated a theory that the number of transistors on integrated circuits would double every 18 months. This seemed to actually apply, and slowly it became a self-fulfilling prophecy; the industry adapted itself to the requirements of the law.
A more recent example seems to be Harry Potter (or rather, fairytales that might linger subconsciously in scientists’ minds): a group from Duke University have developed blueprints for an invisibility cloak. This is quite different from the retro-reflective material developed by Tokyo University a while ago; instead of projecting the background onto the material, the material itself is manipulating lightwaves. In nature, all materials have a positive refraction index which manipulates light (and other electromagnetic waves), bending it in ways we are used to. However, by creating materials with a negative refraction index, electromagnetic waves will bend at an unlikely - and unnatural - way. This is used to create metamaterials, and one such material can apparently be used to create invisibility.
Proper invisibility is pretty amazing, and I can’t help but feel that this is either:
- A very delayed April fool’s, or
- Way too much optimism over a theoretical possibility
I read up a tiny bit on the subject, and I found a nice tutorial about negative refraction indices. Unfortunately, metamaterials are only glanced over; I guess the subject is too deep to offer a cursory glance at. I did find an interesting paper that questions the validity of experiments made with microwaves onto metamaterials; it’s from 2002 though, so I assume that the scientists responsible for the invisibility plans have sorted out all the questions, or chose better materials for empirically testing the theories. I guess I oughtn’t be too sceptical about this after all.
Back to the topic of self-fulfilling prophecies: I noted an amusing reference to Star Trek technology in the first article. Interestingly, they claim that the things we see in Star Trek don’t violate any laws of physics, but I assume that they only refer to a few specific cases. After all, other people don’t seem to agree with the validity of all Star Trek physics. (But that’s of course an old link, so who knows what has happened in Physics since then.)
In the article they also mention other applications of metamaterials. Personally, I’m a pragmatic guy who thinks of common household applications: absolutely sound-proof walls that would do wonders for recording audio (and keep the neighbours happy), for example. I wonder if metamaterials could be constructed to handle different wavelengths differently - then there could be materials that let light through, but deflect electromagnetic radiation from monitors, or microwaves. Very handy stuff!
And it sounds a little like transparent aluminium. Star Trek IV anyone?
This is a very amusing summary of how inexperienced people approach developing a game. But isn’t this true for other areas as well? I’m sure that a young politician feels that he alone will be able to change the world, and rattle the walls with his fresh ideas and clever mind. And the young mathematician who looks at unproven lemmas and axioms probably decides that “hey, this is all logic and reasoning; I’m smart, so I’ll provide a mathematical proof to these things.” And I bet that young tennis players feel that they’re improving at a rapid rate, so they’ll knock Sampras out of the collective tennis consciousness in just a year or so.
Or just look at the just-started blogger who decides that his ideas are the creme de la creme that people ought to take note of. Bloody wanker.
The first and the last of these examples have one thing in common: they use the Internet as their base for expanding their egocentrism.
As a young lad, I messed around with programming 6502 assembly on the C64. I delved into copper bars and timing issues, and learned how to put 64 sprites on-screen at once, compared to the normal 8. Of course, I also started dozens of small game projects. I wanted to make an RPG; I wanted to make a fast side-scroller; I wanted to make a fighting game that would show two large fighters, each composed of 32 sprites. The projects became embryos with some art and programming, and they would probably have turned into good games. However, I definitely didn’t have the knowledge, perseverance or skills to live up to my ambitions.
How can I then chuckle at the link above when I’ve been just that kind of lad myself? Because I didn’t shove my projects down people’s throats; I didn’t bother others with them, and I didn’t expect anyone to be seriously impressed. Kids today have some sort of collective narcissistic disorder, and they seem to feel like they have to flaunt their works to the world’s approval.
And in my days we didn’t have these cell phone thingies either! And just two TV channels! And… And…
It seems that 802.11n won’t become an official standard for yet some time. Curiously enough, I’m not very anxious for this to become reality; I have the range and speed I need at home, so it won’t affect me on a personal level. Likewise, it’s not realistically feasible to use 802.11n in public hotspots or similar. 802.11n provides much higher speeds (> 150 Mbps compared to 54 Mbps for 802.11g, or “up to” 108 Mbps for proprietary D-Link or Netgear solutions), but in order to utilize that speed there needs to be high bandwidth on the WAN side as well. At home I have 10 Mbit, and public hotspots are unlikely to have more than ADSL. So, D-Link’s proprietary solution works for me, and 802.11g works for hotspots; and if range is a factor, there are MIMO solutions available.
Enterprise solutions is another thing, of course. 802.11n might be truly interesting in such cases.
Some interesting news is that the Georgia Tech Research Institute have developed a new phased-array antenna system, which utilizes mutual coupling instead of trying to compensate for it. (Here are some various papers on the topic. Too bad I’m too lazy to look for something truly relevant for Wi-Fi.) Initially I had high hopes that this technology could be used for consumer applications as well, as an alternative to beam-forming smart antennas, but it seems that the technology is way too expensive - at the moment at least. One never knows what will happen in a few years.
Low-level wireless communication is so fascinating. Once I thought that wired networking was cumbersome and weird; but it’s really nothing at all in comparison. It’s like the difference between a bunch of people all trying to talk through the same telephone at the same time, compared to a much larger set of people all standing in a small room shouting at each other.
Even though I’m tempted, I won’t mention either the game Pirates! or Pirates of the Caribbean. Instead, I’ve pondered a bit about software and media piracy. Everyone in the debate seems to focus on the price, and I simply cannot agree that this is the most important issue.
The most common view - both from consumers and publishers - seems to be that a lower price would lure more people into buying original copies instead of download pirated material. A thread on Edge’s forums even starts off with suggesting that piracy is a good thing, since it regulates prices and puts dampeners on the market. So to speak. Of course it trails off later, but one of the things they bring up is something I feel strongly about: the cost compared to the value of the purchased material.
Before I go into that, I’ll make a few layman observations:
- Adam Smith formulated the theory that (as I understand it) in a market with specific regulating factors, for example demand and price and a bunch of others, a company should always be greedy - make choices that lead to profit for itself.
- Mathematicians in the 50s proved Adam Smith’s theories to be correct, assuming that the regulating factors exist.
- In the movie A Beautiful Mind we are shown a John Nash who expresses that Adam Smith is wrong, and that companies would benefit from co-operation and compromise.
- Hollywood is full of stupid pricks who oughtn’t be let near scientific theories. John Nash formulated theories that concern cases where the market isn’t regulated in the same way, and his theories can co-exist with those of Adam Smith.
Anyway, there really is a point to this ranting: big companies seem too focused on price - on one of the common regulating factors. They ought to look at things in a wider scale. I’ll sum up some points that I believe are valid:
- Downloads are cheap
- Downloads are, in general, faster than purchasing online
- Downloads are easier than purchasing a physical product
- Downloads often provide a better product: music in a portable format, games with patches already applied, and so on
Wow, things are looking bleak. But on the other hand:
- Purchased DVDs have extra material
- Purchased games have instruction booklets, manuals, and so on
- Purchased CDs often come with a booklet containing information
- Purchased goods are often physical - you own the media and not just the data
I guess you see where this is going? I’m skipping obvious points, such that purchased goods are legal and that downloading material demands technical knowledge. The main difference, as I see it, is that the legal choices often bring an added value. That is where the main focus ought to lie: don’t lower the price, since that will lead to lower-quality products that try to compete with practically free ones. The market isn’t regulated by that variable alone anymore.
However: as I understand it, lower-quality music at a low price actually seems to be working for some companies. This could either mean that people are law-abiding and will buy their wares if they can, or that this success is a minimal one compared to the potential profit. Or, quite likely, most people disagree with me and don’t care at all for added value.
Either way: Heroes of Might and Magic V has awesome extras, and I definitely must have the collector’s edition. My theory works for me at least!
I kid you not. Right now the Swedish championship in poetry is taking place. That’s just wrong in so many ways. And I can’t help but feel that I would’ve loved to participate! I could’ve written a few sonnets aimed at talking trash about the concept of poetry itself. In a hopefully poetic manner.
In a typically pretentious way, they have a slogan along the lines of “you can’t compete in poetry; that’s why we do it.” Not only are they setting up a ridiculous competition - they’re also pretending that they’ve considered the errors of their ways. Even if I try for decades, I won’t reach their level of pretentiousness!
On a positive note, the age of the participants seem to be pretty high; I was sure that this would’ve drawn goths and teen wannabes from all over the country, rather than the slightly elderly people features on photos on the homepage. Maybe the youngsters just hang around the place, commenting on how the older people have no passion; they don’t understand love; they don’t understand pain; they don’t understand youth; they don’t understand age; they don’t understand life; they don’t understand.
I wonder if there’s a world championship in poetry.
I got a good chuckle when I read this small story of how overdressing can be just as bad as dressing too casually; at least in certain, rare cases. Reading this reminded me of a humorous incident at work that I heard of. Before I go into that, I’m going to be a right bleeding bastard and post the punchline of the story above:
“At Singletrac, we’ve never really had anything like a dress code. But if you feel so inclined to wear jeans with holes in them to work, or to flip your baseball hat around backwards while working on the game… please feel free!”
There, I ruined it for you!
Here at work people were planning a product that would operate together with products coming from a large Eastern company. (Don’t you just love how precise I am?) Once technical problems started emerging, a visit from high-ranking people from said company was planned. They were - basically - going to come here, tell us what they wanted, and make sure that we were going to do things correctly.
One developer here had the task of explaining the technical problems. An engineer and a manager from the visiting company listened gravely as our developer described why the current implementation would not work. In order to make this story more interesting I will use my literary skills to their utmost, in order to illustrate the exchange that ocurred:
“The current implementation will not work well!”
“Ah. Solve it!”
“No, seriously: this won’t do. It will be a bad solution.”
By now the visiting engineer couldn’t hold his tongue anymore.
“What are you doing? You’re just a developer. Are you disagreeing with the manager?!”
The ending to this minor conflict will be left in shadows, to keep you in suspense. The interesting thing about all of this is how titles were extremely important to the visiting people; the manager automatically had not only right, but his opinion held precedence over that of a lowly developer. This was a major culture clash, since this behaviour was unthinkable for Swedish developers. I’m pretty sure that even the cleaning lady could come up to a project manager here and say “hey, you’re making a bad decision not to include preauthentication support in this product,” and he would nod and go: “you’re right - I almost made a terrible mistake!”
Hello there. My name is Miro and I’m a Civilization addict. Well, that’s not really true. I can go six months without playing a single game, but when I do fire up Civ II or Civ III or - as is the case most recently - Civ IV, I get stuck all day. I have had dreams of Civilization. I have sat at work, yearning for when I can get home to play some more. I have skipped school to play Civilization. (Well, the last bit isn’t particularly impressive. I’ve skipped school to do laundry or to do my dishes as well. Oh, how I long for those care-free days of yore, when I was in school and could skip, skip and skip some more!)
The tragic thing in all of this is that I’m not very good at it. I really don’t like warfare in Civilization, and except for the occasional rush at the beginning of the game, I detest having to build an army at all. I want to expand my culture, and boost my science to the fullest! But on the more difficult settings there’s always a meddlesome neighbour setting spokes in my wheels. I try telling him to not rub my circles, but he comes in and chops me down nevertheless.
In the same way, I had a quite ambivalent relationship with Medieval: Total War. I loved the game to some extent, but the constant battles made me give up on it. One interesting part of the game is the underlying layer of politics that can be noticed; noticed, but not really investigated further. For example, in the game you have daughters whom you’re supposed to marry off to various people to strengthen your bonds with them. I found that part of the game intriguing but worthless; I really didn’t see that the gain was worth the micro-management it demanded.
Thinking more along those lines inevitably made me think of a different type of strategy game: a game where you only control events in an abstract manner. No micro-management at all, and you always have sub-commanders and subordinates to give orders to instead of performing things yourself. In a game like this, relationships would matter, and marrying off your daughter would have a great impact on the whole civilized world. Some day I would like to attempt making a game like that.
In the meantime, I have Civilization. And now to the revolting part of this topic: I’m sure that I can’t be the only one who chuckles when I play as the Vikings, and a city goes into anarchy…
The Vikings are revolting!
Thanks a lot, game. I’m trying to play a serious game, and you start commenting on my troops’ hygiene. I know it’s true, but can’t you be nice for once?!
Marketing is a strange beast, in my view. Like economics, it’s based on theories, assumptions and vaguely empirical evidence that often cannot be reproduced. Still, I would like to learn more about it, so I’m reading up on the things I can. After all, if sociologists pretend that they can form behavioural patterns for social groups, why shouldn’t economics and marketing people be able to form patterns with just as much credibility?
In case someone didn’t notice: I’m rather sceptical toward sciences that I find a bit…unscientific, even if I find them extremely interesting. I won’t go into the reasons why I find them interesting, but let’s just say that I probably feel a bit of the fascination that old explorers must have felt when they were mapping uncharted here-there-be-dragons-and-flesh-eating-mushrooms territory. Except of course that I am not mapping anything. I’m the one sitting in my home looking at maps and thinking how lovely it would be to go gallivanting. Aaanyway, back on topic.
In this blog entry I found a pair of nice links about marketing, aimed at independent developers. Excellent advice, but I can’t help but feeling sceptical about it all. I have no head for marketing, so it seems too much like a gamble - especially in a fluid environment like independent software development. Trends change at the blink of an eye. I still remember when Quake 2 was big news, and it doesn’t seem like all that many years have passed since those days; but they have, and the software business has changed along with them. On a smaller scale: look at the casual game market before Zuma was released. That wasn’t all that long ago.
I would love to develop games (or software) full-time, in an independent fashion. But in a haphazard and chaotic environment like that, how can anyone take the plunge without deep fears and hesitations? And that’s probably the answer to it all: one has to dive in without any fear or hesitation; no matter how carefully planned business strategies you have, independent development probably requires an extra set of giant-sized testicles.
Speaking of fears and hesitation: I find the Gamasutra article’s choice of words very amusing. Flightplan is what he calls the overall strategy, comparing it to a voyage by air. I find myself wanting to read that as flight plan instead - a backup plan for when one needs to run away; it fits in rather well with my hesitant view on independent software development.
In this month’s edition of Dr. Dobb’s Journal, there’s an article about IT project management (and I can’t be arsed to look if there’s an online version.) The age-old axiom that software development cannot be compared to for example electrical engineering is brought up and questioned. The common idea seems to be that:
- Managers think that software development can be estimated and calculated in the same way that other engineering tasks.
- Software developers claim that there can never be an analysis in the same way, since software is complex and there are no proper ways of defining discrete individual components. (For example: in electrical engineering you have to work with currents and resistances and whatnot. If you bring in a resistor, you know its parameters and what effect it will have on the circuitry. However, if you change a line of code in software, there are no formal parameters for defining the overall effect.)
Now, the article questioned this view of things; I’m not quoting, but one comment was along the lines of: “software development isn’t as fully darn special as you think.” (I love this! I have to paraphrase from memory more often; one has such freedoms when one’s not citing any sources.) This would seem to indicate that the exception-to-the-rule view is due to a combination of sloppy requirements from management and sloppy discipline from the developers.
My own view is that everything - literally everything - can be formalized and calculated, but this would be futile in software development; it’s too complex a job for a person, and not comparable with having a sheet of statistics over electrical components. However, I fully believe that better tools for code analysis will come; and will become common practice to use.
On another note, I saw a nice article about flawed IT processes today. To sum it up in a sentence: mis-management and a lack of understanding for the big picture is why so many IT projects fail, even though the best and brightest minds are used. Good point, and an interesting read.
But what is the common thread through all of this? Everyone thinks that IT management is flawed, but few offer any constructive examples in public of how to solve the specific problems.
“We’ve got to get the business process right first [and] you’ve got to think of the processes all the time,” he said.
“From that we can define the required business outcomes.”
It’s this end-to-end process visibility, and recognition of the need to keep going back to that big picture, that will help IT achieve better project outcomes.
I’m sure that Jed Simms (quoted above) has a very good plan concerning how the process can be improved. But how can one agree with his generalized comments if one doesn’t know the details? The article, in essence, says nothing more than that management and the IT processes are flawed. And, of course, now I have done nothing more constructive than comment on the flaws of the article bringing up flaws. Meta-criticism is amusing.
I really wonder how the technical discussions went around in Tokyo when the Nintendo DS was created.
“So, okay. We have this cool handheld. Let’s add some Wi-Fi to it! Imagine thousands of players playing games with each other across the world! Without wires.”
“Great idea! But Wi-Fi.. That’s like, hundreds of standards.”
“Well.. Let’s see. 812.11g - that’s this new-fangled 54 Mbit thingie. That’s more capacity than we’ll ever need. 802.11b - an 11 Mbit standard. That sounds a bit better.”
“Hey, what about 812.11a?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Granted, it uses the 5 GHz band instead of 2.4 GHz like 802.11b and g, so it doesn’t have to abide by the same FCC regulations as those, and there’s less cluttering in that range; but we want people to be able to play the DS on common Wi-Fi hotspots, and the 2.4 GHz band is what’s used most of the time, since it has farther penetration than 5 GHz radio.”
This is where the conversation starts to go all weird.
“If we want people to be able to play it everywhere, we want to maximize the compatibility. Isn’t there something even less demanding than 802.11b?”
“Oh, sure! There’s the original 802.11 2 Mbit specification - we could go for that one!”
“You’re a genius!”
“I know! Let’s celebrate with sake and karaoke!”
“First, let’s type more exalted sentences with lots of exclamation marks!”
“Yes! Let’s do that! Wai wai!”
So, basically.. What Nintendo has done is to make the DS into a bastard thing from hell; it’s supposed to be able to run anywhere due to the low requirements, but instead it barely works with any out-of-the-box products. It demands a configuration with basic rates of 1 and 2 Mbit, in comparison to 1, 2, 5.5 and 11 that’s common for 802.11b. (802.11g is decently similar to 802.11b - it just adds extended rates that are available upon request from g clients.)
In many (most?) Wi-Fi access points this isn’t really a technical problem. Most Cisco products have an excellent web GUI where you can select rates, for example. D-Link supposedly has similar configuration possibilities on most products, but I haven’t seen it myself. Access points whose firmware are based on Conexant code (the ISOS operating system) are worse off; they need a firmware update where a new profile is added.
Something that’s more annoying is the speed limitations. You know what happens when an 802.11b client is introduced into an 802.11g network, right? It slows down the entire network, since slot times must match the lowest common denominator. (Newer products might have better solutions to this.)
In other words: Nintendo has managed to create a wonderful handheld that slows down the network and creates configuration problems. Great job. It must have been a cost issue - otherwise the far better solution would have been to implement 802.11b/g.
And don’t get me started on their choice to use WEP instead of WPA or WPA2…
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