One of my colleagues, Joe Stagner, got this when he was registering for Oracle Dev Days today:

Of course, I'm sure there's lots of ones that bash on our “perfect software” as well

Here's one that I never thought I'd get... I would up getting this message a couple of weeks ago while reconfiguring a machine...

Life goes on...

Well, I got the last production chapters of my “Beginning Net Game Programming in VB” book reviewed and posted last night.  That means it should be on bookshelves in about 6 weeks or so.

The book was supposed to be a simple conversion, but work and DirectX SDK changes slowed down my progress significantly (well, mostly work -- I knew about the upcoming SDK changes well in advance, so I can't really blame that).  My biggest fear, however, is that there's still some C# code or C#-oriented text lurking in the book somewhere, in spite of my best efforts to make it have a very distinct VB “look and feel.”  I'm sure I'll find out when people buy the book and read it :-(

If you were a fan of the first Star Wars movies like I was, you were really excited about the upcoming "Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace."  The trailers looked impressive.  You loved the whole light saber thing and the cool "Force" stuff.  You couldn't wait.

Then you saw the movie.

Taxation of trade routes?  Annoying alien characters with ridiculous accents?

You probably walked away simultaneously impressed with the new special effects and saddened by the lack of anything that resembled a good plot.

That's Doom3 for you.

The game is good at conveying a "Things That Go Bump In The Night" effect...dark, cramped corridors... eerie music and lighting to set the mood.  My first hour playing it with all the lights off and the sound cranked up was quite hair raising.

Then by the third or fourth hour I noticed something else: Everything looked the same as the first hour.  Dark, narrow areas with interesting lighting, but it was like a 3D shampoo bottle, "Enter room, shoot bad guys, exit into new room.  Repeat".  And the backstory?  Dull.  Dull.  Dull. 

Reminds me of the manuscript Jack Torrance (the character famously played by Jack Nicholson in "The Shining") wrote: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."  Over and over again.

Ok, so maybe the single person gameplay experience could be made up by the multiplayer experience.

Nope.

This is where Carmack and Co. score a big, fat, "F".

A few things to note about the "out of the box" multiplayer experience:

You are limited to 4 players (although I've heard there are some hacks that get past this, I haven't played in such a game)

The "sort by ping" feature uses the new high speed "Random Sort", whereby it doesn't give a damn what you ask it to do. 

The "Don't show passworded servers" feature also used a variant of the "Random Sort", whereby it also doesn't give a damn what you ask it

Connecting to games, when you can, yields an experience that cannot be forgotten, mostly because the experience is so bad.

So there you have it.  Doom3 ain't worth spit.  Certainly not the $55 retail (in the US) that iD is demanding (I paid $43 at Fry's and I still feel robbed).  It's pretty to look at, and fun for a short while, but I could say the same thing about the Pet Rock.

P.S. -- I've been a playtester for both Halo2 and Half-Life2.  Both of them stomp all over Doom3's butt any day of the week.  My advice is to save your money for those.

Thanks to Scoble for pointing this out.  Go to http://microsoft.com/protect and turn on on Automatic Updates and let everything happen automagically (Automatic Updates only push critical updates to your desktop). The sheer number of improvements and security fixes in this service pack are worth the download (and by using automatic updates, it will download while your computer isn't busy, so it won't affect your Doom3 gameplay )

Now Playing:

• Girls Got Rhythm
• AC/DC
• Highway To Hell, Track 2

Most people would claim that Doom3 is the latest anti-productivity software, to which I'm partially inclined to agree.  The game definitely conveys "presence".  I'm going to reserve my thoughts about this for now, other than to say that the "out of the box" multiplayer experience leaves much to be desired.

But the true anti-productivity software I'm talking about is called Novodex Rocket.  It's not a game.  Rather, it's a software product that demonstrates all the features you can get from using the Novodex Physics SDK.  I found myself toying endlessly with trebuchets, Jenga block stacks, horses careening through brick walls (no horses were injured during the simulation), and rag-doll like monsters and stick-men.

One of the other cool features is that this is the first publicly-available product I've seen that uses the new "Custom UI" feature found in the DirectX SDK. 

Go check Rocket out, but don't blame me if your productivity takes a dive.  I've given you fair warning :)

You gotta love Sun (well, I don't, but I thought it was a good opening line).  In June, they publish a benchmark that shows their web services performance is 300% better than Microsoft's.  Not 3%, not 30%, but 300 whopping percent.  Wow.  Time for me to write my resignation letter, cuz Microsoft is doomed.  We clearly don't have a clue how to write good software.

But wait.  Maybe we just don't know how to do benchmarks.  A little bit of inspection shows the Secret of Sun's Success:  Don't show the benchmark code.  Just write a bunch of gobbledygook about configurations and what your code supposedly did and everybody will believe you.

Wrong.

Microsoft, once again, took the high road.  We submitted a rebuttal to The Middleware Company, which was subsequently published on TheServerSide.Net.  We were very very thorough.  We followed Sun's publication as closely as we could, and implemented both sides openly and fairly, without taking special “shortcuts” on our side to make us look better.  What happened?  By golly, we did better.  Not 300% better, but definitely better overall.  More importantly, as we scaled up the web service messages to “real world payload” size, our performance became much more pronounced.  Then we did something really brave...

We published all the source for everybody to see.

Yesterday, Dennis MacNeil of Sun write up a thorough rebuttal to the work Microsoft did.

But they neglected to back it up with source.  Again.

And then to add fuel to the fire, Dennis challenged Microsoft to participate in the SPEC group's new web service benchmark standard.   Which we had been fully participating in until IBM and Sun demanded that the benchmark leave out price/performance ratios.  Talk about insane.  That's almost like somebody saying that the way to fix a deficit is to give away money (*cough*).  That's not how benchmarks work, just look at the TPC benchmarks.  They're respected, reliable, and give business decision maker's a foundation on which to make a decision when it comes to price as well as performance.  I mean, I don't know about you, but I've NEVER done any consulting for a CxO who says “Who gives a damn about money, just give me something big and powerful!” (which probably explains why I'm not a filthy rich consultant .

Fortunately, sanity has prevailed, and Greg Leake (who manages a lot of benchmark work at Microsoft) politely responded to the rebuttal.  I'll summarize for you here:  “Dude, you are so full of it.”

Dennis: We await your reply.  But even more, we would ALL love to see the source code that proves Sun's point.  We've stepped up to the plate.  Now it's your turn.

I often see Microsoft-centric sites run by Cold Fusion or PHP.  That's not really news.  But when Linux conference sites are run by Microsoft servers...Well, maybe that's not news either, but I'm trying to make it newsworthy in my blog