Blog - May, 2009 - Page 3

Which Tech CEO would you fire?

Posted on 7th May 2009 at 11:36 by Alex Watson with 30 comments

It’s time for a bit of debate here on the bit-tech blog, and I’d like your input. It’s a simple question that I am proposing: if you had the power, which CEO of a tech firm would you send packing?

In the course of reviewing the hundreds of components, peripherals, PCs and laptops that pass through our labs every year, there are always a few that are so staggeringly bad that they make you wonder quite what the company responsible is up to. Of course, in the big companies that dominate the tech world, the CEO is rarely directly involved in product design (unless we’re talking about Apple, where Steve Jobs is so involved he even gets his name on product design patents), but the CEO is, as the saying goes, the place where the buck stops.

Tags ceo, you're fired

Descartes vs AI

Posted on 6th May 2009 at 10:18 by Clive Webster with 22 comments

Mark's excellent Future of AI article went up on the site recently, and reading it over it reminds me of my days back at Uni studying Philosophy, particularly René Descartes (1596 - 1650).

I'm not sure why I got into Descartes - most of modern philosophy is pedantic and dry to the point of making the reader narcoleptic - but Descartes was an interesting fellow. He was notoriously lazy, never getting up before midday, and spent most of the waking day in a dressing gown beside the fire reading. When he took a job to teach Queen Christina of Sweden he was forced to get up early to start his lessons however, and famously died of pneumonia due to the early starts.

The really interesting thing about Descartes (and the reason why I'm writing this) is because he would probably have believed that AI is impossible and that therefore anyone researching it was wasting their time.

I played Diablo 2 and I hated it

Posted on 5th May 2009 at 10:14 by Joe Martin with 32 comments

So, I played Diablo 2, just as you asked me to. True to my word I got bit-tech developer Jamie to lend me his copy and I gave it a good ol’ go - by which I mean I played it until I didn't want to play it any more, then tried to persevere for another hour before giving up.

I was utterly underwhelmed by Diablo 2. It appealed to me even less than the very similar Titan Quest – and that’s saying something, considering how I enjoyed that game about as much as I’d enjoy passing a cupful of kidney stones all at once. I hated Diablo 2 because there seemed to be absolutely no need for me to be there. I actually felt that the game would play itself better if I just wasn’t there, as the entire role of the player is to click-click-click-click their character along a pseudo-random, utterly linear path that offers no real chance for exploration or involvement.

Playing Diablo 2 I was left with the impression that it didn’t matter what I did in the game, as fundamentally everything I did only ever had one logical outcome, so I may as well not do anything. I was stifled by the utter lack of room for player expression. You could level the same complaint against almost any FPS where players are funnelled through linear levels too, but at least those games are usually fast paced and full of explosions and a sense of interaction and puzzle solving. Diablo 2 didn’t feel that way to me.

Guess who's back in the project log forum?

Posted on 2nd May 2009 at 09:54 by Tim Smalley with 3 comments

G69T, the Italian stallion behind Dark Blade, one of my favourite projects of all time, is back with another worklog on the bit-tech forums after a two year break from modding.

In his latest project, titled DBRS Project, G69T plans to make a driving station with an integrated PC chassis. G69T describes it as "a very simple project," but we'll have to wait and see what his definition of simple is.

How I Met Tim Schafer

Posted on 1st May 2009 at 09:58 by Joe Martin with 7 comments

Meeting your heroes is always a strange thing and all too often such events end in disappointment. Thankfully though, that wasn’t the case yesterday when I met Tim Schafer – who co-wrote The Secret of Monkey Island and the creator of Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, Psychonauts and some truly hilarious blog posts of his very own.

Tim is, to put it bluntly, someone I’ve admired for a long, long time and in the run-up to the EA event I met him at I was a little worried that he might not be as funny and random as all the interviews I’d read with him over the years had led me to expect. Worse, I was worried that I might make a tit of myself in front of him or that I’d just collapse in sweaty palms and schoolgirl giggles.

Thankfully, neither situation happened and while Tim was certainly a lot quieter and more modest than I expected he definitely lived up to my rather presumptuous expectations. I chalk my lack of humiliation up to the fact that I was wearing my lucky Fallout 3 t-shirt.

bit-tech.net

Which Tech CEO would you fire?

Descartes vs AI

I played Diablo 2 and I hated it

Guess who's back in the project log forum?

How I Met Tim Schafer

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