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8月28日 Net Protector Phase IIThe new phase of the Microsoft LATAM Net Protector campaign is online now at http://www.netprotectoracademy.com..
I adapted some material from DevDays 2004 and wrote some new stuff. I also narrated the Portuguese contents, but that is not on the air yet.
This campaign is based on presentations and security-related quizzes. This second phase follows the very successful first phase that took place in early 2006, although I only translated and narrated that one.
If you know some Spanish-speaking developer that might need a word or two about security, point him/her to that site.
UPDATE on Aug 29th: I gave the link to the previous material; the link above is the actual one. 8月18日 BIT 2006I will be today and tomorrow at the “Baboo Congress – BIT 2006”- http://www.bit2006.com.br/SP/. Today (Aug 18th) I will be at the MVP booth ant tomorrow (Aug 19th) I will deliver a presentation on how to develop better code using Visual Studio.
UPDATED: Here is a picture of me speaking at the event. 8月14日 Create your own Xbox gameMicrosoft announced today the future availability of a toolkit that allows anyone to develop Xbox games. You can check:
Traditionally, game consoles are sold at a loss and the money is made by charging royalties on the games themselves. This business model may surprise some but it’s in fact very common. It was first popularized by the Gillette Company about a century ago when they sold sell the razors very cheap and made money on the disposable blades. To this day, “razors” and “blades” are part of the marketing lingo. For instance, printer manufactures usually sell the printers (the “razors”) very cheap – sometimes they literally give them away – so as to sell ink/toner cartridges (the “blades”). Some people even say that car and airplane industries make more money on services and spare parts, where the costumer is locked, than in the sales themselves, where competition is fierce.
So if you want today to develop a game for any major console you need to buy an expensive “developer’s kit” and sign a very detail marketing agreement with the console manufacturer, be it Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo. The consoles themselves are “locked” and sort of a possibly illegal and warranty-voiding hardware modification, you can only run games digitally signed by the manufacturer. This of course limits the possibility of someone developing a new console game in his garage, a game that might end up bringing more money to the “gaming ecosystem”. One can argue that most games are now complicated productions with complexity and costs rivaled by Hollywood movies and that a small shop wouldn’t have a chance anyway.
Of course, the situation is completely different with PCs, which are an open platform and anyone can develop software for it, sometimes with free tools. Indeed some very popular games like Tetris and Doom started life as PC games developed by individuals, so not all is lost for small developers. Although not common, there are videogame counterparts to “The Blair Witch Project”, a cheap and successful movie.
The trick here is to unleash all those developers out there without compromising the game business model. This is actually quite easy to do if you are online, with some sort of “online authentication” and maybe a “pay as you go” system, where a developer could loan or sell his game to others through the online community. No danger to the revenue stream, much the opposite: you cut a lot of middleman like DVD manufacturing, retailers and the like. Microsoft is the undisputed leader in online games, so I guess it’s quite easy for them to tap on this infrastructure so as to let anyone develop for the Xbox and at the same time not compromise its main profit stream on the game business.
This looks like a very smart move to me, and one that plays on Microsoft’s strengths: the online gaming infrastructure and its good knowledge of the developers, including its excellent development tools.
This might even unleash some – God forgives –open source game projects. 8月1日 Reinstalling WindowsIt’s a widely known that Windows “rots” over time, becoming slower and acquiring quirks. One has to reinstall it from time to time. Since I got my current notebook computer about 1 year ago, I’ve resisted the temptation to reinstall everything, despite that it was now taking about five minutes for the hourglass to vanish after I log in. One of the many quircks was a folder with very with strange files names inside that I could not get rid of (it was *not* the system restore folder). Last week I tried to remove some kernel drivers, background programs and other stuff that seemed to be slowing things down. I did decrease the time after log in to two minutes but in the process I killed the DVD drive and the display driver would no longer switch to the native 1280X800 resolution, sticking instead to 1024X768. So today I had no option but to format the drive and reinstall Windows. But I decided to try a different approach: I installed just the minimum: Windows, Office 2003 (no beta stuff) and Virtual PC. Everything else will go inside Virtual Machines. Now at least the computer boots up immediately; the virtual machines may help with the accumulation of junk as well. Let’s see how this works. Of course, one wonders whether Windows Vista will make things better; it just could. I am sure that too many programs install crap that doesn’t need to be running all the time – or at all. Since Windows XP doesn’t limit what an administrator installing a program can do, every body feels like installing more stuff than necessary. |
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