pooping out games

Wonderman looks like she's trying to drop a mean duce. but it's not as bad as how EA pretty much decided to destroy a fairly popular title by announcing this:

DICE currently working on 5 Battlefield games
June 24 2008

EA Has Five Battlefields In the Oven
June 24 2008

no matter what kind of resources you have to pull this off, the thought of -- "omg, there's going to be 5 games of this?" just makes me want to say: f#ck it. i only want one good game. not 5 mediocre ones.

and if you're gonna $#!t out games year after year - don't be surprised when the public respond with - "didn't that come out last year?"

a title needs to have time between sequels. a lot of gamers are getting to know what studios are producing the fun time-suck games versus the"alternate year" studios. which in my opinion tarnishes the "franchise". [ infinity ward vs. treyarch ]

now, i can't tell you a single person i know who bought consecutive years of the madden games. and if there's someone out there who did, you're a tool. so what about these announcements:

EA craves sequels for Dead Space, Army of Two, and Battlefield: Bad Company
EA: Dead Space, Army of Two, Bad Company sequels in the works
EA Considering Sequels to Dead Space, Army of Two
oct 23 2008 - three games - three links

as long as it's every other year - then i don't mind. but if you're going to shovel it down our face every year - people are gonna start ignoring the marketing blitz. while paying more attention to these kinds of headlines:

EA Laying Off 600 As Revenue, Losses Rise, Citing Weakening Retail
Oct 31 2008

EA promises its games won't be 'crappy' anymore
Aug 5 2008

EA: Investors don't give a sh*t about quality
July 22 2008

Lawsuit flags EA for illegal procedure on football monopoly
June 12 2008

so you poop out "crappy" games because you are only interested in increasing shareholder value? not caring about the ramifications for the long term? (and it really isn't that long: only 18-24 months cycles - for a title.) and trying to squeeze something out in every 12 month (again, of the same project) -- just to see customer loyalty destroyed at the end of the fiscal year? good going f#ck bags.

oh, you want new buyers? thanks for caring. we're the ones who recommends games to your new potential buyers.

if you have nothing new, nothing exciting and not worth paying full price for -- then why do you wonder people are not buying your games. you'd be lucky if someone waits until it hits the bargain bin.

stick to new/multiple titles. don't grind on the same title until it literally turns in to dust. over exposure is a sure way to turn people off. sequels aren't a bad thing (can't wait for diablo3 & starcraft2). but i guess that's not stopping articles (like this one) from flying off the shelf (even though we are all pretty much talking about the same thing):

Insomniac loves sequels, so it should MARRY them
oct 23 2008

Why Are Gamers Cynical Of Sequels?
oct 24 2008

ps. yes, i know the DC characters here have nothing to do with this article, but they were too easy to pass up to make d!ck and f@rt jokes with...

evil telcos - double charge

this post is a side bar to the main P2P article.

network caps. please note that there is a difference between bandwidth size limits and bandwidth rate limits. how are these different? i watch A LOT of internet videos (video length contributes to the file size downloaded) and i don't like waiting through the "buffering..." messages (how fast can the video stream be downloaded).

the speed at which the file can be downloaded is dependent on how fast your ISP will plow the files to your home. in fact, when looking into or recommending an ISP to others - i look for the fewest "buffering" message moments. some ISPs do not seem to get this. (yes, speed is also dependent on how fast the source server is - but we are talking about the ISP services to your home. major internet video broadcast networks makes use of CDNs - content distributed networks. and some even distribute their shows on torrent networks. but it all comes down to how tight the pipes gets closed when the ISP's rips you off.)

now i understand that they should be charging more for people with a faster network pipe (which they already do). they have T-1, T-3, OC-3, OC-12, OC-48 and OC-192 dedicated lines. and they come with (most of the time) unlimited transfer sizes. remember, it's a dedicated line. (and i say most of the time because, for example, it seems to be regional for academic institutions. who knows why - maybe some crazy legislation is why. see my previous article.)

in a nuttshell, the evil-telcos want to double charge you for the same product and services. here's what i mean. a T-1, for example, is a 1.544 megabits per second pipe. a T-3 is 43.232 Mbps, which has 28 times the capacity of the T-1. or in other words, it would take 28 times longer to push the same amount of data on a T-1 than on the T-3. (by the way, a T-3 is just 28 T-1's bundled together. and yeah yeah yeah, packet data [payload] versus packet header [overhead] bliz blaz.) but, keep this simple math in mind as we continue.

Comcast's New Network Management Will Slow Down Heavy Users for Up to 20 Minutes
Aug 20 2008

Comcast to slow down heaviest 'Net users to DSL speeds
Aug 21 2008

we see they no longer wish to honor the services they said they will provide when they have no problem charging you money every month for it. here's where the double charges come in:

It's official: Comcast starts 250GB bandwidth caps October 1
Aug 28 2008

"there was also buzz that Comcast might try to charge customers $15 for every 10GB they went over the limit."

HA! nickle and dime, i tells ya! although this is just a rumor, i'll bet the air you're breathing that this will happen.

ok, back to the double charge and the basic math i mentioned earlier. most DSL and cable modem provider charge you a certain amount of dollars for a certain bandwidth rate.

AT&T DSL price quote as of Oct 19 2008
price	up stream	down stream
$14.99	384 Kbps	768 Kbps
$25.00	384 Kbps	1.5 Mbps
$30.00	512 Kbps	3.0 Mbps
$35.00	768 Kbps	6.0 Mbps

note: i could have posted some cable modem, fiber and DSL prices here from the P2P unfriendly bastards that are all over the newsfeeds. but, this is just an example of the price scam i want to bring up. and you can do your own math with the ISP you're using to see for yourself. oh wait, where's the $10 package AT&T said they are offering? i would put the link here but it doesn't seem to be up anymore. evil and greedy f#ck bags. note: AT&T was required by the FCC to offer the low cost service as an agreement for the bellsouth merger. and what do you know, "at" bellsouth, you can find the information on how to get the cheap offereing.

let's say that you want to download a few files that totals to 250 GB - maybe it's every Linux Distro ISO and all of the source codes that were used to make it. let's see how long it would take to download it.

time to download 250GB
rate	days	hours	mins	secs
768 Kbps	32	8	43	22.67
1.5 Mbps	16	13	40	55.77
3.0 Mbps	8	6	50	27.88
6.0 Mbps	4	4	25	13.94

note: 1GB = 2^30 bytes which is then multiplied by 250 and again by 8 to get the number of bits we are looking to download. yeah yeah yeah packet headers, retransmission & delay windows. just consider them all part of the total 250 GB downloaded.

so, on the slowest tier, it would take the whole month for you to download all of that. good for you! you physically can't download it fast enough to even hit the limit. but if you went and upgraded to the faster rate, not only will pay more for it, but will download it faster and faster and hit the "limit" quicker than the month would end. so you would be charged extra in order to keep using the internet feed you already paid for - or spend the rest of the month unable to access the internet. told you the telco's want to DP you in the @$$.

p2p - 2slow4u - up&down

last time, i wrote about the evil telcos and want to wrap this up here.

but this time, it's not about the money. i mean, i understand that a company needs to find ways to keep their business up and running. and if they can milk all the dollars they can from their customers, then good for them. however, their tactics that could lead to the demise of the innovative transport medium technology and products as well as the collateral damage of new and interesting media providers and broadcasters.

these new media may be snuff out by the evil telcos, and this is what i fear the most.

first, it's P2P traffic. and even though, technically, one computer linked to just one other is a P2P network, let's assume for this section it's one computer linked to many others (just like what the carriers are all complaining about).

Verizon: we need freedom to delay P2P traffic when necessary
Aug 21 2008

Comcast sues FCC, wants P2P throttling order overturned
Sept 4 2008

it seems that some companies haven't figured this one out yet. the P2P control freaks are completely out of line here -- and need to know that they MUST NOT F@#K with the P2P traffic. these ISPs doesn't seem to not know about the people who: chat (voice or typing) and play games.

these kind of network traffic are your most common and basic multi-point/distributed P2P network. and if the network provider is the cause of that laggy connection (or worse a dropped connection) - YOU WILL LOSE THAT CUSTOMER. yes, most chats goes to a central server, but it is possible to join a pile of IRC channels from a pile of servers with [insert your favorite multi-protocol social chat client]. yes, while it's most likely that you are not joining 100's of endpoints, it is possible to join at least "a" 100 from one user. and if you have more than one users (i.e. roommates) then it is possible to see 100's of connections coming from one IP address. but if your network caused me to drop my game, you're F@#King with my QoS. don't expect me to keep you as my provider.

next, network caps. please note that there is a difference between bandwidth rate limits and bandwidth size limits. [ i when off tangent here - it went back to being about money (those greedy bastards) and said that this article wouldn't be about it. so i decided to put it in to a separate side bar article. ]

bandwidth rate limits are more in tune with what i wrote above about laggy connections (especially sensitive to quick-action games) - but, what the providers are really asking for is bandwidth size limits. and this is HUGE problem for other reasons.


upload and download limits. as HD videos become more and more prevalent in the video podcast world, these transmission sizes may easily reach the 250GB limit. so, can i see myself hitting that cap? well, let's do some quick paper napkin calculations.

if each HD video podcast is 1GB (which the totally rad show @1280x720 ~1hr @24fps - has sometimes hit), then that means i can watch 250 shows a month. which is about 8 one hour shows per day. that's a lot of video watching. i think most people only watch 2-3 hours of TV. a couch potato may watch up to 4-5 hours. and the video gamer may play games with the video podcast running in the background 4-8 hours. yes, there are days where i would play for 4 hours and other where i would play for up to 12 or even 16 hours. but on average, i have hit a stride of 4 to 6 hours. i also download a lot of financial stock data and listen to a lot of internet radio.

what's my current usage? a little less than 100GB/month according to ifconfig. HA! you say? now re-run the calculations when shows become 1920x1080. the data size for a single 1080 frame would be more than twice that of a 720 frame. now how about at 30fps or 60fps. of course, compression technology will try to keep the file sizes small. however, the best way to keep file sizes small is lower resolution running at lower frame rates. but we are looking into the future.

so why all of the sudden the reason to enforce the P2P restrictions?

• have the carriers met the usage saturation point (i don't think so)
  
• is this a pre-emptive move to contain users from high network usage (on a system that's pretty much a shared network) (maybe, but really, i don't think so)
• do they want to start charging subscribers more money and this is one way to ease it in (plausable)
• do they want to help the RIAA or MPAA stop piracy (i don't think so)
• do they want to help the major broadcast networks stop loosing viewership to the new media networks (i would say more so than stopping piracy but way less than wanting to charge more $$)
  

if you ask me, i think it's some RIAA or MPAA douche bag that has somehow convinced the carriers to fight the P2P wars on their dime. or else they would face lawsuits for allowing P2P traffic on their networks. the anti-P2P systems started to roll out, but the carrier's ultimate reason for doing so is that they can upsell additional services that comes with the higher network speed package (do you really need the triple package now a days?) or charge you extra for a service you already are paying for (remember net neutrality?). there really is no reason to throttle P2P traffic when there are many good uses for it. and many good reasons to show your network is multi-user friendly that will shine well with people who wants to have a fat and fast pipe while not feeling like they are being ripped off.

couldn't resist

free wifi, eh? evil telcos to the rescue!

about a month ago i wrote how telcos want to nickel and dime (and by nickel and dime, i mean $5 and $15) their subscribers for every little feature. i want to expand on that with how they also want to/will kill anything that would threaten their stranglehold on your wireless communication needs their cash cow.

a long time ago, a city wanted to roll out a free or subsidized low-cost wireless network:

Philadelphia Plans $10M City Cloud
aug 31 2004

and in three months, some evil telco convinced the governor to make it illegal for a city to provide such services. how is it possible to make this "illegal" is beyond me.

Philly Negotiates a Cloud
nov 30 2004

Every cloud has a Verizon lining
nov 26, 2004

image courtesy of: prickwear.com

here's a nice article that wraps all of this up from an interesting source. how and why does the UK have any interest in this is amazing.

Wi-fi venture tests Philadelphia
dec 4, 2005

fast forward a few years:

FCC boss mulls free* wireless for all
may 27, 2008

and now, free wifi is under attack as a health scare?

City sneezes at WiFi allergy claims, goes ahead with hotspots
jun 17 2008

although there's no wireless provider officially involved with that uprising, i bet dollars to donuts one of them are. anyways, let's not forget the land based telcos.

the attempted assassination of the internet by twisting the net neutrality principle would have been a major coup for the few ginormous ISPs. the FCC are trying their best to keep the network free and open - but that's not stopping the telcos from going in to their bag of dirty tricks to choke out your options.

Telco to fiber-deploying town: we sue because we care
Sep 11 2008

Comcast Sues FCC to Get P2P Slowdown Ban Reversed
Sep 5 2008

image courtesy of: njvadala.blogspot.com

hell, they'll even resort to bribing, kickback, payout or what ever you want to call it:

Comcast pays $150K to put end to Florida bandwidth cap probe
Sep 8 2008

FCC Order scolds Comcast for changing story on P2P blocking
aug 20 2008

ha! lying - now i see how they get these lawsuits, legislation and health scare "facts" through the system. how naive of me.

or is it because they do not want any competition by making up excuses lobbying for laws that is in the telcos best interest. smash your options if it's going to save you money. and if they can take your money by force law, they will.

German court bans VoiP on iPhone
sept 12 2008

image courtesy of: freemagenta.nl

this rant will be concluded on my next P2P article.

OLPC - a lesson in product development

a couple of months ago i wrote why microsoft needed to kill the OLPC. this time, i felt like writing why the OLPC project nearly failed from a product development view point.

they had a near feature-complete product that was ready to be manufactured and then shipped. the product should have been in design lock down after the first prototype was spec'd out. the sales agreements should have been put down in writing. and then followed through (i.e. make, boxed and then shipped).

so what happened. a big pile of $$ was dangled in front of their noses - allowed intel to smeared Negroponte with the "you can't sell the classmate" PR disaster. and then they let microsoft in to the party. again, loosing sight of the road map. this should have been version 2.0 for a brand spankin new OS implementation, feature locked and signed off on the hardware platform.


there is something to be said about being ahead of your time.
OLPC Founder Negroponte Wanted to Make Multitouch XO-2 Laptop 20 Years Ago [Olpc]
june 2 2008

but you should not compromise your release cycle by being distracted with the bells and whistles of what could be. i mean, there was all of these dual touchscreen articles popping up all over the place like this one:
V12 Design Delivering Dual Touchscreen Laptop Within Two Years [Laptops]
july 9 2008

again, they lost focus on releasing their first product out the door. with all of these add ons, did they honestly thought they were going to keep the costs down by adding two full touch screens?


when all of this was happening, a whole heap of cheap "netbooks" started to pop up from all kinds of manufacturers. the ASUS eeePC is an excellent example of them. they've manage to release different versions upon different versions all aiming at the same market the OLPC was in. the eeePC 700 was the linux book, 701 had XP, 900A a faster processor, 1000 a larger screen. there is a giant table of all the different models they did that it's mind boggling trying to keep track of it. and since there are so many of these eeePC out there, people have started to mod them with things like touchscreen capabilities.



finally, an interesting read on how the OLPC journey was taken:

How the OLPC Changed Laptops Forever: The Untold Story [Origins]
aug 14, 2008

and what's also curious is that this article link used to be found through gizmodo's pages:

• gizmodo.com/5037044/
• gizmodo.com.au

even their twitter feed has it:

• twitter.com/Gizmodo

don't they normally mark the article as inaccurate or strike the lines in the article to "update" their findings? i have never seen them pull down a post like this. and now it's:

• stay tuned

maybe it wasn't popular enough for people to take interest in this, it seems to only have 18 diggs so -- no one will miss it...

update: it seems that a new article has been posted on gizmodo:
Secret Origin of the OLPC: Genius, Hubris and the Birth of the Netbook
aug 26, 2008

update: here's another fancy article that bears a similar headline to my original article:
Why Microsoft and Intel tried to kill the XO $100 laptop
aug 10, 2008

real time ray tracing, huh...

there's been a lot of graphics technology goodies piling up. too good for me to pass up on some more of my thoughts.

Intel takes another jab at Nvidia during its research day
june 12, 2008

"[ray tracing] doesn't waste time drawing things that are hidden and, according to Intel, it is best done on the CPU."

i think the über managers doesn't realize the complexity of raytracing. there is no such thing as "things that are hidden" object in ray tracing. in fact, it's quite the opposite. you need all of the objects in the scene to calculate for reflection and refraction, scattering, and chromatic aberration (wiki). to make a high quality rendered scene depends on the number of times the ray is bounced (reflection) or passed through (refraction) an object. hidden (off screen) or not, the object needs to be in the scene no matter what.

16-core, four-chip monster CPU, running last fall’s game, “Quake Wars: Enemy Territory.” It ran at 16 frames per second, not the usual 60 frames per second that is possible on a good graphics chip.

wow, that's a lot of hardware for 16 frames. granted this is ray tracing but still. i would throw my computer out the window if i can't get my frag on smooth silky frame rates.
Nvidia video: No quad-core chip needed for extreme PC
june 20, 2008

from intel, again:

"...programmers will like ray tracing better because they can do many complex tasks with simple one-line programs."

huh? did i just read that right? what hell are function and macros again?

this guy has a much better thought on these issues.
Ray tracing for PCs-- a bad idea whose time has come
june 12, 2008
and now, back to more graphic goodies. to achieve some pretty good results, there's been a lot of work going into the multi-core chip solutions.

AMD, Nvidia graphics chip designs diverge
june 16, 2008

Intel aims x86 at GPU market
aug 04, 2008

and, it seems to be kicking ass so far:
AMD ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 Preview
july 14, 2008


finally, john dvorak said this on his podcast:
Save Your Phone Books
06/18/2008 06:35 PM @3:55 mins:secs

"... it would be difficult for a CPU company to make a GPU as it is for a GPU company to make a CPU... mindset and marketing style are different..."

i think that's only true for CPU to GPU. going the other way should be much easier for the GPU maker. a CPU works much more simplier in a linear fashion with a lot of instruction sets that are more in tuned with logic processing. the GPU on the other hand has a lot of pipelining effiency designs that needs to be taken into consideration with data that are normally processed/passed over multiple times.

plus, it's funny how all the major CPU makers are into the low power processor:
AMD may be planning its own CPU to compete with [VIA] Nano [and Intel] Atom
june 19, 2008

and the lone GPU maker:
NVIDIA pays Transmeta $25 million for LongRun technology
aug 8 2008


but i hope there's more work like this being done from all graphics makers:
AMD Cinema 2.0 tech demo: real-time photo-realistic human models
aug 12 2008

there's nothing more outstanding than showing what you are working on and what your graphics chip can do. nvidia used to always showcase their cards by constantly displaying all of these cool demos, samples and apps. it seems that they are kind of slipping as of late.

iphone vs gphone

so a buddy if mine forwards me this artcle and proceeds to mention that he "had hopes for Android but [is reading] many disappointing things about it so far":

Google Android flaws pushing software firms towards iPhone

and i reply with this:

this "flaw" is just a publicity slam (scam) to keep the market's perception of iphone is better than google android -- just like how apple did the whole mac vs. vista ad/smear campaign.

the article is total BS.

the article jumps directly into the open source "problem".

[cherry-picking the teams ] with "advanced releases of Android's Software Developer Kit"

almost every mega-software house on the planet does this. external developers who shows skills ahead of the curve will almost always be tapped as "guinea pigs" for testing prototype code and asking for their remarks before releasing the features out into the wild.

"open source software ... allow early adopters access ... buggier pieces of code... can help fix them or let people ... wait for a solid release ..."

again, i'm sure that there are piles of "test" code within the OSS community that will never see the light of the day when ideas are getting bounced around between the project leaders -- just as well as coders external to the project who tries submitting patches that also never become part of the official tree. every one has a process. non-disclosure agreements may not be one of them, but when it comes to dealing with evil telco's... more about on that later.

"carriers and hardware manufacturers are believed to be encountering technical problems regardless of their access to code."

this isn't a google flaw. this is an evil telco problem...

the poorly supported article continues with a link to a "language translation problems" -- a stupid remark about a mobile phone company having problems to re-write the code base into another language. if you don't know how to convert (written/read) text from one language to another, you should be out of business. localization is one of the most basic programming task a junor coder should be able to do in his/her spare time.

if google android is to fail - it's because of the evil telcos.

google has a bigger problem. most of the major cellular proviers will not want to sell (or allow on their networks) android phones because subscribers will be able to put their own applications and files on their own phones. they can't charge you $ if you can put stuff on the phone for free. they want to nickel and dime (and by nickel and dime, i mean $5 and $15) for every little feature they want to up-sell you (every month). not to mention "time-limited" ring tones, games, apps, or what-ever.

the telcos (wireless, land and even internet providers) are a bunch of greedy bastards. i am actually very surprised that android phones will make it out into the market by the end of this year. with such open access to the device - i thought it would have taken at least 4 or 5 years to make it a reality. but, i wouldn't be surprised if either of the following are/will be happening:

• the telcos will sabotage android phones ability to work on their networks
• the telcos are kicking begging and screaming to "lock down" the phones so apps/files/add-ons can only be installed via the provider's "store"

i can go on and on about this -- but i think i'll save that for another post.

dear buffy fans, i'm sorry for making fun of you

ok, there was only really one person i actually did that to. and that was in 1998 - way back when i was working at motorola. we will just call him thomas - he was in his late-40's watching the buffy vampire slayer series with his wifey. and he was my senior engineer so it was a playful "making fun of". he went on saying that the series was whitty, clever, yes - tongue in cheek about the whole vampire things, but "quite good". but i just never got in to it. every time i must have popped on the teli when buffy was on- it must have been during those cheeks stuffed with cheese moments.


anyways, fast forward all the way to 2005 or 6, there's a guy i work with at midway games who always made it a point to watch buffy when ever it was on - we will just call him brian. it was also when i noticed he started having bleached blonde hair. but this was not unusual - he would every once in a while have a mohawk ever since i started working on the mortal kombat projects. i never knew about the whole spike thingie. and finally figured out why he always dated really thin drusilla-look-a-likes.

so, a good buddy of mine was dating a girl, amanda, who was all about buffy. since then, the box set for buffy was out, she got it as a gift from demon snowman (and he got a xbox360). they are now married. you can't just make that up. it's poetic.


anyways, i have since borrowed her box set - and finally plowed through to season 5. to sum it up to now in one word - awesome! the only thing i didn't like -- it was the extras that was slipped into season 5 disk 3 (of 6) that basically has some major spoilers for the rest of the season.

now, the question is, season 5 left off on a high note. i mean, the story and plot development culminated in the end on top. it had everything, main character against a much more powerful opponent. every protagonist was struggling in their most darkest hour. a whole heap of emotions running wild - from the usual fear, sad and happy to the pain, confusion and love (of a different kind). and good ol fashion um... s5d3extras...

so should i continue on with season 6 + 7? the series has reached a point that is of shakespearean epic proportion. do i ride out the rest of the story and see what lies ahead? risk some cheesy plots and come back stories that has been done over and over before in the many comic books and video game story lines i have seen. (i don't read "books" unless it has purr-ty pictures in them - or it's full of lines of code.)

eh, who am i kidding. i'm gonna watch it.

=)