The Guardian’s series on great buildings
Scott Matthewman writes:
In the UK, the Guardian newspaper has been bundling a free poster each day highlighting one of the world’s great modern buildings. They started with some of the most obvious, the Empire State, Sydney Opera House, etc. and today have included the 1930s-built Arnos Grove station on the London Underground.
As well as including original design blueprints, the posters contain a wealth of information putting the design of each building into historical context, most of which is also online (there’s a Flash-based interactive presentation of some of the buildings in the series available from that address, too).
I particularly thought you might enjoy the five design principles that WS Graff-Baker stuck to when designing new train carriages for the Underground:
1. Will it work? 2. Is it as simple as possible? 3. Could it easily be maintained in service? 4. Can it be manufactured? 5. Does it look well?
Something tells me you guys would have got on well with him.
Saying more by saying less
Neal Shaffer writes:
Thought you might take an interest in this post I just put up, as it deals generally with some of the same issues you tackle now and then on SVN:
Saying more by saying less: “Since you usually can’t simply dispatch with the fool, either online or in person, what do you do? You let him have his say, and leave it at that.”
Bad support info
Jose Espinal writes:
I would definitely like you to check this (Amusing But Sad Video Shows Verizon Reps Misquoting Rates 93 Percent of the Time) out.
I used to work for a communications company in a call center and the same happened with my colleagues, what happens is just some people don’t take their time to get to know the system they’re working nor they don’t know how to use it to look-up this type of information.
Getting Real and video games
Miguel Javier writes:
I’m a few minutes into this video interview with Valve and they talked about using a shorter release cycle for their games using ‘episodes’.
I think a lot of what they said sounds Getting Real, and it’s a good contrast to Bungie that just broke off from Microsoft because they were already exhausted from working on one game all these years (Halo 1, 2 and 3).
F-book
Hugh Bien writes:
For people who drop the f-bomb a lot, I thought you’d enjoy this book (NSFW).
Have an interesting link, story, or screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Contact svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.
Jemaleddin
on 08 Jan 08They ship blueprints for buildings? Don’t they understand that terrorists could get those posters? Won’t somebody think of the children?
Wait, I think terrorists read the Daily Mail, right? ;-)
Noah Everett
on 08 Jan 08I think bungie will always be known(and maybe only) as the game shop who created Halo. It also created really high expectations for their future releases, which could be a bad thing for them.
Neil
on 08 Jan 08But Bungie included Xbox Live map packs as pretty important part of their Halo 2 & 3 campaign. In the UK, they charged £40 for the main game, and £6 for the map packs – that’s a whopping 15% in potential additional revenue on top of every disc sold.
Micro-purchases/episodic releases/in-game items etc are the way forward for developers, but they aren’t so appealing for the gamers – they just want a one-off, all inclusive cost for playing a game.
For game developers, this isn’t so much about ‘Getting Real’, it’s more about ‘Getting Revenue’, because they’re ‘Getting Screwed-Over’ by the spiraling development costs of producing titles for next-gen consoles.
George
on 09 Jan 08The real “Getting Real” philosophy in video games comes from the modding scene for Quake and the original Half-Life, which Valve readily admit to being their inspiration. The best mods were the ones that got real and released small achievable things often.
The philosophy is so incredibly relevant – you can see it every day in new teams starting out who announce that they are going to do the equivalent of topping Google/Microsoft in size and scope. They never release anything.
This discussion is closed.