so you want to start your own...

Working at a game company (HVS) means that colleagues are always talking about what it would be like to start one's own game development studio. (don't worry Kerry, they aren't serious)

Brian Hook is the a well-known person in the game biz who went from being the autor of the 3DFx Glide graphics API, to working at id (Quake 2, 3) and then Verant (EverQuest) before starting his own company: Pyrogon.

Brian wrote two articles which I like to point people at whenever this topic comes up. They are very sobering, and bruitally honest.

Pyrogon Postmortem and Starting a Game Company

ultimate boot CD

Ryan put me onto the excellent memtest86 utility for checking the RAM integrity on your system. When I needed to test my workstation at HVS and I asked for memtest, Mark handed me the Ultimate Boot CD v3.0 (which has memtest on it).

This is entirely OS agnostic, and an excellent thing to have around not only for when you have problems, but also when you may have doubts about your setup or intermittent flakiness in your system.

triple inflection: xbox360, apple, google

Inflection Point by Bob Cringely: an interesting article about trends and announcements from this week.

"It's an expression made popular in Silicon Valley years ago by Andy Grove of Intel: 'inflection point.' It's that abrupt elbow in a graph of growth or decline when the new technology or paradigm truly kicks in, and suddenly there is no going back. From that moment, the new stuff takes off and the old stuff goes into rapid decline, whether it is a new standard of modem, a new video game, a new microprocessor family, or just a new idea. I think we've just hit such an inflection point and -- though most of us still don't realize it -- the personal computer, video game, and electronic entertainment businesses will never be the same."

hiring is obsolete

Hiring is Obsolete by Paul Graham

"The most interesting subset may be those in their early twenties. I'm not so excited about founders who have everything investors want except intelligence, or everything except energy. The most promising group to be liberated by the new, lower threshold are those who have everything investors want except experience."

If you like that one, Paul has many others...