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Programming

Game Development In a Post-Agile World 149

Posted by Soulskill from the slowly-but-surly dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Many games developers have been pursuing agile development, and we are now beginning to witness the debris and chaos it has caused. While there have been some successes, there have also been many casualties. As the industry at large is moving away from the phantasmagoria of Agile, Gwaredd Mountain, Technical Director at Climax Studios, looks at Post-Agile and what this might mean for the games industry."
Businesses

Former Exec Says Electronic Arts "Is In the Wrong Business" 180

Posted by Soulskill from the inspiring-internet-outrage-is-a-bad-business-model dept.
Mitch Lasky was the executive vice president of Mobile and Online at Electronic Arts until leaving the publisher to work at an investment firm. He now has some harsh things to say about how EA has been run over the past several years, in particular criticizing the decisions of CEO John Riccitiello. Quoting: "EA is in the wrong business, with the wrong cost structure and the wrong team, but somehow they seem to think that it is going to be a smooth, two-year transition from packaged goods to digital. Think again. ... by far the greatest failure of Riccitiello's strategy has been the EA Games division. JR bet his tenure on EA's ability to 'grow their way through the transition' to digital/online with hit packaged goods titles. They honestly believed that they had a decade to make this transition (I think it's more like 2-3 years). Since the recurring-revenue sports titles were already 'booked' (i.e., fully accounted for in the Wall Street estimates) it fell to EA Games to make hits that could move the needle. It's been a very ugly scene, indeed. From Spore, to Dead Space, to Mirror's Edge, to Need for Speed: Undercover, it's been one expensive commercial disappointment for EA Games after another. Not to mention the shut-down of Pandemic, half of the justification for EA's $850MM acquisition of Bioware-Pandemic. And don't think that Dante's Inferno, or Knights of the Old Republic, is going to make it all better. It's a bankrupt strategy."
PlayStation (Games)

US Air Force Buying Another 2,200 PS3s 144

Posted by Soulskill from the quick-who-knows-a-good-ps3-flight-sim dept.
bleedingpegasus sends word that the US Air Force will be grabbing up 2,200 new PlayStation 3 consoles for research into supercomputing. They already have a cluster made from 336 of the old-style (non-Slim) consoles, which they've used for a variety of purposes, including "processing multiple radar images into higher resolution composite images (known as synthetic aperture radar image formation), high-def video processing, and 'neuromorphic computing.'" According to the Justification Review Document (DOC), "Once the hardware configuration is implemented, software code will be developed in-house for cluster implementation utilizing a Linux-based operating software."
Businesses

Submission + - Some Claim Android App Store Worse Than iPhone's (reuters.com)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: If you think the iPhone app store is the only mobile game store suffering an exodus, some game publishers claim Android's app store isn't much better at generating revenue. In fact, French game developer Gameloft (that owes 13% of its profits to iPhone game sales) said, 'We have significantly cut our investment in Android platform, just like ... many others. It is not as neatly done as on the iPhone. Google has not been very good to entice customers to actually buy products. On Android nobody is making significant revenue. We are selling 400 times more games on iPhone than on Android." So the trade seems to be more sales but an annoying approval process versus a lack of sales promotions and no annoying approval process. It seems those in it for money will opt for iPhone and those in it for distribution will opt for Android or maybe someone will get it right one of these days?
Google

Submission + - Google announces open-source Chrome OS

Submitted by
geog33k
geog33k writes: "Google has announced a new open-source OS that will first target netbooks. Quoting Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management and Linus Upson, "Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.""
Portables

Submission + - Atari 1200XL vs Dell Inspiron: My 1st vs my latest

Submitted by
Bill Kendrick
Bill Kendrick writes: "My first computer was the short-lived 1200XL model of the Atari 8-bit computer line. I finally got ahold of one again, after having to settle with a lesser Atari system. My immediate reaction was: "damn, it's as big as my Dell Inspiron laptop!", and I couldn't resist doing one of those side-by-side comparisons, complete with photos of one system sitting atop the other. (I also put the 1983 storage and speeds in 2009 terms, for the benefit of the youngin's out there.)

While, in many ways, the Atari pales in comparison to the latest technology they cram into laptops, I do get to benefit from SD storage media. It also still boots way faster than Ubuntu on the Dell, has a far more ergonomic keyboard, and is much more toddler-proof."
Portables

Submission + - Linux free phone project Openmoko in troubles?

Submitted by
bain_online
bain_online writes: "The lead developer at Openmoko project Herald Welte has this blog entry to show the status of the project.
From the entry "If you want a status update on OpenMoko: I'm at a point where I won't go to the office again because I know the agression inside myself will tusufrn into physically hurting someone there."
His previous post was little more optimistic though. The project is apparently suffering from a lot of managerial problems.Progress on technical fronts, especially the software aspect of OpenMoko is slow.
OpenMoko is a first free software mobile stack being developed under sponsership from FIC. The first device it is suppose to support, is Neo1973, which some people compare to iPhone."

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