Flit

NICE PIECE FROM THE DEFENCE

NICE PIECE FROM THE DEFENCE MINISTER

In the Globe today. As I said previously, I believe from my one meeting with him that this one is a stand-up guy... the only problem is he's likely too talented for the portfolio. (link)

BRITS WEIGH IN ON IRAQ

BRITS WEIGH IN ON IRAQ WAR

From the Guardian:

American bombers, supported by RAF aircraft, on Sunday attacked a communications site in southern Iraq, the US central command revealed yesterday. It was the sixth such strike this month in response to what the US said were hostile actions by Iraq.

Love to hear more details on this, btw. A communications site? Heretofore the air strikes in Iraq have been confined to anti-aircraft missile batteries and radars that could threaten the NATO overflights.

Of course the Brits are a little cagey. The last time they invaded Iraq an army of 8,000 was ushered into a cruel captivity at the Siege of Kut. Those things tend to focus the mind wonderfully.

CARMACK AND ID: MORE OPEN

CARMACK AND ID: MORE OPEN SOURCE THAN YOU THINK

While I certainly respect Den Beste's extremely long reflections on open source, I really don't think he gives John Carmack and Id Software ENOUGH credit, if that is possible. Indeed the element of his thesis related to the high-end computer gaming market is flawed... it's an environment that is ever-increasingly, and ever-successfully reliant on the post-release user modification (or "mod"), alterations to how the game works and plays by volunteer enthusiasts and released for free, to extend the shelf-life of those high-end games, and bring new talent into the industry.

Carmack's brilliance has been not just to master the product cycle by anticipating Moore's Law well, as Den Beste lauds him for, but also for using a savvy combination of licensing and encouraging the modders to increase sales and keep his Quake game engine the top of the line choice for first-person view rendering in detailed virtual spaces for the last six years now. The classic example, of course is Quake 2 (1997), a massive best-seller, which Carmack then licensed to Valve Software for their game Half-Life (1998), the massive best-seller for that year, which was then modded for free by a kid from Vancouver named Minh "Gooseman" Le into Counter-Strike, the most popular online game OF ALL in 1999, 2000, and 2001... one still requiring a copy of Half-Life to play, and Id making money no doubt off of every purchase, and assuring their market dominance all the while over the competing Unreal and Lithtech game engines.

Now some of this was windfall... Carmack couldn't have counted that a Gooseman would show up. But when I talked to Gooseman, he credited Carmack's release of the Quake SDK in 1996 for starting his modding obsession... one that eventually paid off in significant returns for Valve and Id. (Le, it should be noted, was hired by the industry, and has a great future ahead of him.) So, even though that decision to encourage the modders (who could just as easily be called "open source" game designers), as Den Beste says, may not have been well thought-out by Carmack at the time, looking back it's easy to see open-source had a role to play in that market, too... not in producing great initial software releases, which I agree it's hard to imagine open source ever doing, but in stretching out the product life of games for those companies that embrace it, sometimes for years longer than their anti-modder competition.