Wild. Besides reading my favorite Compute! magazine and typing in programs in the 80’s and 90’s, Byte magazine was the source of computer information in that era. I was pretty young, so a good bit of it went over my head, but a lot of it was fascinating.
This website provides a visual, zoomable map that shows every page of every issue of BYTE starting from the front cover of the first issue to the last page of the last issue at the bottom.
Winning the lottery doesn’t seem like it would be up there in the ‘worst things’ category, but it turns out to be one of the worst thing that ever happened to most folks that win big lotteries. Even already wealthy people who ran multi-million dollar companies find their lives completely destroyed. Murder, constant lawsuits, and bankruptcy.
What are some of those statistics?
Large jackpot winners face double digit risk increases versus the general population to be a victim of:
And triple digit increases versus the general population in:
In a surprising discovery, the worst enemy is usually yourself. Winners often suffer from drug overdoes, tax issues, dissolute and dangerous living that leads to death, or simply frittering it all away. Family, friends, and acquaintances will become an ever-present risk as well. If you win the lottery, you are 120 times more likely to be killed by a family member than before you won.
Even people that don’t know you will come out of the woodwork to sue you. In one case, a man settled multiple claims because husbands in his town had their wives leave them. Even though the lottery winner didn’t even know them. The ex-husbands sued the lottery winner simply because they claimed ‘jealousy’ of the lottery winner made their wives leave them for better prospects. Instead of fighting the frivolous cases, it was simply cheaper to just settle out of court for a few $10,000’s.
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Created for Exploring the Unknown exhibition at the CERN Science Gateway by Julius von Bismarck & Benjamin Maus, Round About Four Dimensions sculpture is a 4D tesseract rotating in 3D.
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Game development isn’t just about good leaders or even great products. You can do everything right, even making a game of the year, and still go under.
This is a hard lesson Mike Morhaime, a co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, is learning. He just had to sent a letter to staff at his new company Dreamhaven this week announcing layoffs.
One month after Dreamhaven launched Wildgate, the company had sold just 130,000 units. The company’s other game, Sunderfolk, sold just 62,000 copies since its April debut. Despite receiving positive reviews, both titles performed below expectations, Morhaime said. He’s looking for new financing for Dreamhaven, but in the meantime the company would need to retrench.
Frost Giant Studios Inc., also founded by Blizzard veterans, released Stormgate in August. Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Tim Morten said in a Linkedin post last week that the game wasn’t getting the traffic or sales he hoped for. Their SEC filing indicated Frost Giant Studios Inc. lost $11.7 million on sales of $1.4 million last year.
There are many purported causes. There’s been too many games released at once and not enough audience. Another factor may be even great games are not drawing players away from their heavily entrenchment in existing franchises. Whatever the cause, we’re clearly entering one of the worst markets for game studios in a decade.
