Mr eel
iWoz - Woz Not I
Steve Wozniak now has a biography. That’s quite nice really. Steve is an interesting guy, who has done some interesting things. I must say though, I don’t think much of the cover or title. Firstly the whole mirror finish thing is becoming a cliché. Secondly, the title really irritates me.
The reasons for calling the book iWoz are pretty transparent. After all he is most well known for having founded Apple and Apple is best known for the iMac and iPod. I think it’s a pretty shit move though.
Steve Wozniak hasn’t been involved with Apple for many years, nor did he have anything to do with the iMac or iPod, arguably the most well known and successful products they have made. So really it’s a cash in on a company and products that he can take little credit for.
The full title also drips hubris; “I Woz: How I Invented the Personal Computer and Had Fun Along the Way.”
Yeh woz, and I invented the internet.
Sony is Not Crazy (pssssshhhht! ha ha)
Gosh, I’m getting into the awful habit of posting on here in response to articles on other sites. Oh well! It’s good fun.
By and large, Next-Gen is a good source for game industry news. I don’t however think to much of their opinion pieces. I’ve posted about them in the past and my opinion hasn’t changed too much.
Cue Sony’s Far From Being Whipped by Colin Campbell. The main thrust of his article is that despite the generally negative feedback from the press regarding the pricing of the PS3, Sony is far from out of the games business. On this point I agree totally. They still have an extraordinary brand and a fair chunk of sellable games lined up for the PS3. Bottom line is; Sony can’t be ‘out of the game’ since they haven’t even launched the console yet.
That said, the reasoning in the article is pretty shit really. It’s almost a troll in fact. I would think that if the article were anywhere by Next-Gen.
“Come on people. We all knew that PS3 would be expensive; Sony has been throwing hints around like confetti these last few months.”
Which in itself doesn’t justify the price. I mean, it’s pretty fuckin’ crazy. It works out to be about $900 AUD. Oooch. A negative response is to be expected. No one is gonna say ‘yay! 900 bucks! I love spending heaps of money!’.
“Even the doom-mongers accept that when you consider the inclusion of the Blu-ray drive, it’s a bargain. And what about the multi-billion dollar Cell processor? Surely this truly amazing piece of technology is worth paying for too?”
Ha ha ha ha ha! Firstly, most people don’t know what Blu-ray is, nor do they care. Punters are not clamoring for a Blu-Ray drive, Sony put it there because they do love pushing their favourite formats even when no one wants them. Sony Memory Sticks are a good example.
Secondly they don’t care what the Cell processor is either. The Xbox 360 has a PPC chip in it and as far as anyone at E3 could tell they both performed pretty much the same.
“The fact is that, if there were a way to accurately calibrate pricing against demand, that price will still be looking like a bargain six months into the machine’s launch, and maybe even a year. EBay will doubtless prove this point.”
Oh shit, I’m quoting huge chunks of this article. I can’t help it. It’s so stupid! 
Soz, but the price is not a bargain by any measure. Compare it to the 360 if you like. There is a disparity there hey? Doesn’t look like such a bargain to me, i.e. something comparative is selling for much cheaper.
“Consumers who want to enjoy a rare experience really ought to be expected to pay. It’s not gouging; it’s capitalism. Good luck to Sony.”
Damn straight it’s capitalism! The core of which is competition and you’re a fool if you don’t think price doesn’t matter. As for the rare experience; lol! Is it really all that different to anything else? It’s not virtual reality or anything. Just prettier graphics.
“after the installed base has hit 10 or 20 million, a price cut is almost guaranteed.”
One point to remember, is that the install base of the PS2 only jumped to where it is now after a price drop. Price matters! Sony may be able to make this quoted install base, but they’ve made it hard for themselves.
“This publication has argued for some time that many of the products this business sells are way too cheap, given the value that they represent.”
Seriously, FUCK OFF. Games have been getting more expensive all the time and the trend doesn’t look like it’s gonna change. Given that, I can’t say I’m getting more value out of them. If this argument where true, I’d expect to be spending more time with a single game now than in comparison to games in the past. Which is bollocks.
The reason they cost to much is because production costs are through the roof. Why? It’s the hi-res, hi-polygon, kitchen-sink circle-jerk so many developers are stuck in. The problem is that the market is small compared to mass-media like books or cinema. So all these high costs are getting passed on to a small group. So far the punters have sucked it up with a smile, but this cannot last.
One last quote;
“But Next-Gen is not a consumer site. We would love to see consumers wearing a higher price point for top notch hardware like PS3, based on its performance as a games machine as much as its perceived value as a disk drive”
Sure, sure every company on earth would love punters to pay though the nose for everything. Doesn’t mean it’s gonna happen. A higher price point does not mean more profit though. A higher margin does. Sony’s strategy is brute force. They hope to sell the most impressive hardware with a thin margin and make up for it with a large install base and software licenses. Everyone was saying Nintendo we’re taking a gamble with the Wii, but they look downright conservative in comparison.
Ok, sorry this is the last quote:
“Getting squished in the aisles by smelly oafs, bristling with free shit, is not the way forward.”
See, now this is what he really thinks of gamers. He’s happy to see Sony et al take their money, but he hates them.
Just a general comment about Sony and Microsoft’s strategy up to this point. It’s the same as last time really. Prettier graphics, more racing and war games. That’s about it really. There are a few problems with this though. Firstly, Microsoft in particular have said that they need to expand the current gaming market in order to make a profit. With the PS3 priced the way it is, Sony may be relying on the same thing. This would be a safe gamble if everything continued the way it is now. But markets change.
There is the danger of existing gamers leaving. Gaming is turning into an expensive and time consuming hobby. People have plenty of other demands on their time. I can imagine a fair few folks just giving up because it’s too much. So far game companies have leant very heavily on a small group of people in order to keep the market alive. In that context high prices are starting to look abusive.
Also game companies continue to churn out similar games. The only difference is they look a bit different, or they become more hardcore. It’s a turn off to see the same kind of games all the time. I’m sure some people stop playing games for that reason.
The other problem is that I don’t see too many new gamers being attracted with this stuff. The subject matter is tuned to a particular audience — hey white boys! — and is pretty narrow viz. war, racing, platformers. The games are full of intricate controls, and rely on unfamiliar conventions — how many non-gamers would look in the fucking crate for ammo? I’m sure there are plenty of people that just limply hold the controller in their hands the first time they play a game. Because of the current trend to make dense and complicated. It’s like everything is a big in-game. You have to know everything before you can get into it.
Think of it this way; chess is a fun game, but anyone can play checkers.
Didn’t mean for that to turn into an essay
Wii Lose (awwwwwwww)
Ahhh, nothing gets attention like a contrary opinion. The beauty of it is you don’t have to believe it, just say something inflammatory. Firstly you get attention and secondly you get the vague credibility from going against the grain.
Cue Jennifer Tsao’s latest opinion piece. To summarise; Wii == over-rated, Sony == stupid and arrogant, Microsoft == win! Microsoft wins because they have the biggest booth man! Turns out people weren’t really excited about the Nintendo Wii. I mean, that’s all just hype right?
People lining up for hours and hours to play the Wii? They must have been excited about something. Maybe they thought it was the line to play the new Xbox 360 MMORPG racing fighting game in high definition? No wait! They all thought they were lining up to play Geometry Wars!
Personally I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to actually win E3, since it’s like an expo, not a game. That said, Nintendo fairly obviously made a very strong impression. A quick scan of press coverage shows that the Wii is getting most of the OMG, WTF AWESOME type of articles.
Wii WIN!!!!!11111eleven
Hibernate vs. Rails
It’s been awhile since I’ve written anything about Ruby on Rails, but this one article that caught my eye. Hibernate vs. Rails: The persistence showdown. It’s a comparison of mainly the object relational mapping layer of Rails (ActiveRecord) against Hibernate. It’s fairly even-handed and the critisims of Rails are generally valid.
For example Patrick rightly points out that in general Rails is more suited to green field (brand spanking new, without legacy DBs) web apps. This of course is intentional, but needs to be considered when choosing a framework. Simply, Rails might not be suited to you.
I think this article might have been written with an older version of Rails, or Patrick isn’t that familiar with the framework. That old bug-bear scaling crops up again. It’s worth pointing out that despite what the article says, you can tune your database queries and can do so without needing to write hideously long SQL queries (for most cases, see below). For example, eager cascading loads will load a set of objects, and the specified associated objects in one SQL query.
@records = Record.find(:all, :include => :tracks)
The :include bit is the important part there. Queries can also get more complicated by specifying the inclusion of more associations, and then their associated objects. This goes a long way to improving performance. I’ve begun using it extensively and it’s brilliant.
Patrick also makes a good point about lazy loading. This is where the ORM loads all of the fields for a object, regardless if you need them or not. This is the simplest solution. You never need to think about what fields your object currently has loaded, you can simply make the assumption that they’re all there for you to use.
But in some situations you may find it’s a drain on resources. Imagine a situation where you load 1000 records, but only need to access the ‘name’ field. Lazy loading has included a whole bunch of fields we don’t need.
Now we can get past this fairly easily in Rails, with one rather big caveat that I’ll get to in a bit.
@records = Record.find_by_sql(SELECT name FROM records)
Basically we write our own SQL query so that it only grabs the ‘name’ field. The big downside to this is if you wanted to use it with eager loading. There is no way to specify :include with the find_by_sql method. The only option is to have your SQL query join another table and include the fields you want.
For a single field from another table, it’s fairly simple, but once it gets more complicated, it gets much more scary!
There would be some cases where you want to tune your queries within an inch of existence. Hopefully in the future ActiveRecord will expand to allow even more optimisation. We’ll slay that scaling-beast one day!
Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ok, so Nintendo finally decided to rename the Revolution. It’s called Wii. Which is a strange choice for a game console, which says more about how insular and conservative the game industry is and less about Nintendo just being weird.
The uh, urine jokes are both obvious and puerile. It’s the kind of joke ten year olds love and adults scorn. So, the name really shouldn’t be judged on the basis of a dumb joke. Not according the interwebs of course. All those rabid fanboys have been having a good spray about it for the last week or so.
My thoughts; it’s a slightly strange name and I don’t love it. I don’t hate it either. I like the thinking behind it and like the logo itself, but the name doesn’t jazz me. Then again iPod is a daft name, but people love it.
Speaking broadly, I think this will work well for Nintendo, simply because of how unusual it is. More than anything it gives them an opportunity to change how they market the console and the games.
Soz, but fancy graphics are unlikely to make a non-game player pick up a controller. So, what the industry really needs is to discover what attracts non-gamers to games and capitalise on that in both game-design and marketing.
Nintendo is the only one trying here. I think the strangeness of the name is a slight misstep, but I don’t think it will harm them longer term. Plus, I get to say WIIIIIIIIIII!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!