A Voice in the Dark

After a long conversation with oceandude9, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m largely to blame for how UU never went anywhere. I haven’t tried hard enough. Early on in the process, I just threw money at it and expected paid developers to care because they were paid. That didn’t work. Then I tried to do it all myself, relying on the community to guide my efforts. That didn’t work. Then I just worked behind the scenes and tossed betas over the wall whenever they were ready. That didn’t work.

So we’re going to try something new. I’ve set up a forum over at ultimate-universe.com where the project can be discussed. I’ve offered oceandude9 a leadership role there, although he hasn’t yet responded. I’m about to email Garth and make a few proposals aimed at getting him the rest of his money, and hopefully getting him onto the forums to post a little. We’ll see how this pans out.

Filed under: Business, Gaming, Intellectual Property, Software
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I was discussing some issues with American fiscal policy over at a forum, and something occurred to me. Young people frequently claim to have a problem with socialised welfare, when in reality they have a problem with capitalism and the free market.

I’ll explain.

(more…)

Filed under: Economics, Philosophy
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I love it here. If you’ve learned anything from my posts about working at Microsoft, you’ve learned that. So why am I leaving?

Well, the dynamic goes like this. I interview with a team, and the manager thinks “this is exactly the kind of smart, experienced, forward-thinking person I need in my organisation”. I look at the team and say “this is exactly the kind of long-term, high-profile, broad-impact project where I could make a real difference”. So we agree to work together.

After a while, the manager needs to delegate some authority. So someone else gets brought in to head up the team. The new manager looks at me and says “this is exactly the type of aggressive, competent, ambitious person that could take my job”. So when it comes time to fill permanent positions, a token effort is made to give me a shot, but the deck is carefully stacked to ensure I can’t actually get the job.

This is normal. It’s part of any large organisation. You can’t avoid the politics, only minimise them. And since Microsoft’s big lawsuit with contractors, they’ve instituted policies to make sure contractors never ever ever confuse themselves with regular employees. So starting April 6th, I am required by HR policy to wait 100 days before returning to Microsoft.

Coincidentally, Volt Technical Engineering requires me to wait 180 days before returning to a client they represent under a different contract agency. And Volt sucks. So I’m going to be taking six months off the Microsoft circuit while I go work for some other contract agency, and then I’ll return to Microsoft. The current front-runner is Excell Data Corporation, but Siemens Business Services and Fujitsu are also in play.

Filed under: Business, Microsoft, Politics
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Here’s my top twelve in rough order. 

- Melinda Doolittle
- Chris Sligh
- Blake Lewis
- LaKisha Jones
- Chris Richardson
- Sabrina Sloan
- Phil Stacey
- Gina Glocksen
- Jordin Sparks
- Brandon Rogers
- Stephanie Edwards
- Jared Cotter

Melinda’s my choice for winner this year, with Chris Sligh actually deserving to win but coming in second.

Blake Lewis will round out the top three. This is tentative. Blake Lewis may actually win. If so, Chris Sligh will still come in second.

LaKisha Jones will not make the final three. She’s the “we wuz robbed” competitor this year: she deserves to get farther than she will actually get.

Chris Richardson and Sabrina Sloan are solid top six competitors, but they do face some competition up at the top end of the rest.  

I thought Phil was a major force in the competition, but he hasn’t really grown in the past couple weeks, and the rest of the competitors have. I don’t think he’ll make the final month, but he should still be around next week.  

Gina Glocksen is much more interesting as a competitor now that she’s pulled out the Amy Lee stylings, but I think her song last night was just a bit too much for her. If she’s smart enough to scale it back a bit, and I think she is, she should get close to the top six and may actually displace someone if she grows a bit.

Jordin Sparks and Brandon Rogers aren’t even remotely top six material. I like them just fine, but they’re not top drawer. I’m also not sure why Simon and considers Stephanie Edwards a major force in the competition. I don’t agree. Of course, Simon’s usually right, but I’ll stick with my own gut on this one. And Jared Cotter is only making the top twelve because there are twelve of them.

Antonella Barba and Haley Scarnato are almost definitely out tonight; Sanjaya Malakar and Sundance Head from the men’s side. However, these four are just the worst half of the bottom eight, and one or more of them could stick around another week or two by displacing one of the better half. Sanjaya and Antonella, in particular, are popular enough to displace Jared or Stephanie respectively. Even Sundance has some inexplicable following of tone-deaf retards.

Filed under: Notices
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My impression of the girls stands. Antonella and Alaina should drop this week; probably Haley and Leslie next.

Guys… not liking Phil this week. Chris Sligh still doing great. Chris Richardson still doing great, Blake still on the money, Jared surprisingly good performance. Everyone else, bleh. But I’m beginning to think Nicholas Pedro is destined for the top twelve.

Filed under: Notices
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A commenter asks why I haven’t released the Ultimate Universe source, when no real progress has been made on the web site since 1999.

But progress has been made on the game. If you were on the mailing list, you saw a travel-only UU engine released in 2003, supporting thousands of dimensions and millions of sectors. But from my FTP site’s logs, I saw that virtually nobody downloaded it. From the discussion on that list, I saw that absolutely nobody provided any feedback on whether it worked and how well.

But what absolutely everybody wanted was for me to hand over the source code. Source code which I bought from Garth Bigelow and Tophersoft Engineering with my own money, before funding development to the tune of six figures and the brink of bankruptcy.

I said, what do you want to see in UU? They said, we want the source code. I said, how can UU stay fresh and competitive in the internet world? They said, it should be open source. I said, what would make UU easier for new players to learn? They said, the source code.

I don’t believe that’s about making UU better. I don’t believe it’s about giving UU to more people so they can play and enjoy it. I believe it’s about random losers wanting to strip Garth’s name off it and use search and replace to pretend they wrote a game. “No, it’s different! Look, it’s the Coalition instead of the Cabal!”

Yeah. Whatever. I don’t trust you people. I’ve tried to involve the community, and the community doesn’t share my vision. Development is now behind closed doors, but there is still development. It isn’t our main focus right now, but it is being done.

UU is brilliant, and was decades ahead of its time. I respect that, and I won’t have it degraded into a massively forked tree of eight hundred shitty variants that add nothing of any value to it. I am working on making UU into something that will make the industry sit up and take notice. Garth deserves that.

Filed under: Business, Gaming, Intellectual Property, Open Source, Programming, Software
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Well, here’s one American soldier’s opinion on the matter from Iraq:

You can tell your buddies that Ipod’s drop like flies here, I’m guessing the dust and heat have something to do with it– but my Zune works as well as the day I bought it.

I have repeatedly said that the Zune hardware is far more solid and reliable than the iPod, but people ask why and I have to shrug and say “it just is”. So here’s real world evidence - our boys are losing their iPods because the hardware is shoddy and fragile. The Zune, not so much.

Filed under: Notices
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