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From this week's TechWatch
Observations of the website wannabes, and advanced PC game systems
Imitation is the sincerest of flattery—Charles Caleb Colton
So what does it mean when a game developer or a movie company copies their own thing with a sequel—that they are flattering themselves?
It seems we humans to like to mimic, maybe that's how we learn. And yet some of the learning of just a few years ago seems to already be forgotten, or maybe never known. Take for example this week's story on Demo, the showcase conference held yearly in Palm Desert. We only printed a few of the stories of the show, but there was a disturbing and sad common theme that ran through a lot of the presentations—mimicry
There may be a dozen companies who were looking for funding whose business model and product was based on being the next YouTube or Facebook. Their catch was that they would do it better by offering better file organization, objects, or compression, or UI.
The other aspect of it is the things most of the companies were offering could easily be copied by Google or Microsoft and embedded in either IE or Vista. Not a great business plan if you ask me, unless their exit strategy is to hope Google or Microsoft will buy them.
Organizing content for the Web is certainly important, but I am not sure if these companies would be targets for Microsoft, based on what we learned at the conference. Microsoft looks like it's going after Adobe's AIR platform with their Silverlight product. As we all know Microsoft is really a marketing company that pushes technology. Usually the technology starts off as an inferior version to the competition and then through sheer muscle, stirring up FUD and iterations/releases they get everyone to convert to their product.
The other tragic aspect of those presentations was when speaking with the companies about their products and plans and asking, why? The most common answer was, “Because that's what the VCs are putting money into these days.”
This is sad for three reasons:
- It's cynical that the entrepreneurs would focus their energies on getting investment over developing a really great product.
- It's pathetic that the VCs are again being so herd-like and feeding the start up's hopes of sugar cane and candy.
- It's annoying that Demo doesn't have a better vetting procedure—not much service to the paying attendees.
Ok, I'll get off my soapbox and let these three feed on each other.
What about those new gamer systems?
I had a pretty miserable week last, including the weekend. We have in our little lab two of the finest state-of-the-art machines you could imagine: one is an AMD Spider mobo with 3870s and 3870x2 AIBs, and the other is a Skulltrail—the killer machine of all time, with a pair of Nvidia 8800GTXs. We've written them up in this edition's Mount Tiburon Testing Labs segment.
When I say state-of-the-art I mean it, including the latest versions of 32-bit Vista Ultimate. These are DirectX 10 machines and if you could buy them they'd be expensive and amazing. Why amazing? Well for one reason because of the level of the technology and raw power they represent. For another because they are about useless—the software, plain and simple, sucks. Nothing ran well or smoothly, crashing the system often was the only way to exit a program, and Vista with it's I want to be like a Mac silliness makes it almost impossible to fix anything.
I will readily acknowledge that some of the gamer sites have been successful in getting some Dx10 stuff to run, they are either much smarter than I am and/or have much more time than I do. They certainly don't have any better tools than I do.
Which leads me to the conclusion and reason for this rant: If a reasonably intelligent person like me, with almost 40 years experience, can't make these things work, with top tech support from the suppliers, what the hell is the average gamer supposed to do? Spend his or her life trolling the forums looking for help (and yes I did that too.)
Now I will admit that playing with the machines, trying to get them to work, is to a certain degree fun, as I've said before, it reminds of when I used to build cars. And in those days I spent a lot more time building than I did driving. Well it's like that again with the great PCs. The only difference is if I needed a wrench or piece of tubing I knew where to get it and how to use it. With Vista and the impenetrable drivers, APIs, and apps, I feel like a rocket scientist if I can successfully mod a CGF file, or trick a benchmark program with a .log file. This isn't fun. It's maddening.
However, as they say—stay tuned, because I will beat these beasts and when I do, you'll be the second ones to hear about it—I expect it to be fantastic.
