PS3 separates the wheat from the chaff, in all aspects.
*Appeared in 10th in Time's top 50 most influential in technology (
http://www.time.com/time/digital/digital50/10.html)
*Brian Hook, a former 3dfx engineer and developer at iD Software and Verant once mentioned this during an "Ask Hook" on Voodoo Extreme:
"...let me tell you, it's hard to get up the energy to think when you work with John Carmack. It's just too damn easy to walk over to him and have him solve a problem in 15 seconds that you struggle with for two days. (Yes people, he's that smart)."
From the Masters of Doom biography:
*The twenty-nine-year-old Carmack was a monkish and philanthropic programmer who built high-powered rockets in his spare time (and made Bill Gates's short list of geniuses);
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*It was February 8, 1998, and Carmack was about to put his brain to the test:
counting cards in blackjack. This had become something of a new fascination of his. “Having a reasonable grounding in statistics and probability and no belief in luck, fate, karma, or god(s), the only casino game that interests me is blackjack,” he wrote in a .plan file. “Playing blackjack properly is a test of personal discipline. It takes a small amount of skill to know the right plays and count the cards, but the hard part is making yourself consistantly [sic] behave like a robot, rather than succumbing to your ‘gut instincts.’ ” To refine his skills before the trip, Carmack applied his usual learning approach: consuming a few books on the subject and composing a computer program, in this case one that simulated the statistics of blackjack dealt cards. His research proved successful, netting him twenty thousand dollars, which he donated to the Free Software Foundation, an organization of like-minded believers in the Hacker Ethic. “Its [sic] not like I’m trying to make a living at [blackjack],” Carmack wrote online after his trip, “so the chance of getting kicked out doesn’t bother me too much.” It didn’t take long for him to find out just how he’d feel. On the next trip, Carmack was approached by three men in dark suits who said, “We’d appreciate if you’d play any other game than blackjack.”
The others at the table watched in disbelief. “Why are they doing this to you?” a woman asked.
“They think that I’m counting cards,” Carmack said.
“They think you canremember all those different cards?”
“Yeah,” Carmack replied, “something like that.”
“Well, what do you do?”
“I’m a computer programmer,” he said, as he was escorted out the door.
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*“You can’t keep up with Carmack,” said Romero’s lead programmer, “so why even try?” (when switching to the Quake engine during Daikatana's development)
Carmack. Dumb and lazy.
