Amr Awadallah Blog

I am half way through the campaign (co-op with my son). I also played about a dozen online multiplayer matches.

I love it, it’s Halo 2, just better, much better, and that is exactly what I wanted. They did not mess with the fundamentals of the game, they just improved the graphics, finished the story, and added a lot of new cool toys for multiplayer (equipment/vehicles/weapons/accessories).

The graphic textures are crisp clear on 1920x1080p and way better than Halo 2, they are not ultra realistic like Gears of War or BioShock, but they are good graphics, eye candy in every sense.

My only qualm is why is it rated M? I want my 12-year old son to play it with me, and my wife is making me feel guilty about it due to the M rating. The game actually does not have any gruesome violence (ala Gears of War chain-saw action), just artistic blood splatter ala the movie 300, but without any limbs being cut off. Anyway, I think it is ok for pre-teens to play it, and trust me, they will.

My son enjoyed “The Forge” a lot, it is like his virtual playground where he can make explosive physics experiments or drop tanks on top of his friends, a very welcome addition.

The mobile bases on the Sandtrap map are hilarious and really change the game dynamics..

The game is also revolutionary in being Web 2.0 like, that is you can easily share screenshots and video clips with your friends. The replay theater is super cool, lets you replay the action from any angle and pause/slowmo to learn tricks from other folks you were playing with.

That’s all I can say for now, need to wrap up some work so that I can run back home to finish the fight 🙂

— amr

Web 1.0: Companies publish content that people consume (e.g. CNN)

Web 2.0: People publish content that other people can consume, companies build platforms that let people publish content for other people (e.g. Flickr, YouTube, Adsense, Wikipedia, Blogger, MySpace, RSS, Digg)

Web 3.0: People build applications that other people can interact with, companies build platforms that let people publish services by leveraging the associations between people or special content (e.g. FaceBook, Google Maps, My Yahoo!)

— amr

I lead a team at yahoo called PIE (short for Product Intelligence Engineering), our job is to deliver the systems and the insights that make yahoo products better for our users. It is a very exciting group to be working for since you will be constantly challenged with hard problems and you will always be working on new things. We are also tasked with building one of the largest BI datamarts in the world (if not the largest).

The team is growing and we currently have about 20 open positions, we need two types of folks:

1. Deep Analytics: Problem Solving, Analytical Thinking, basic Statistics, SQL, HTTP/HTML basics, Programming experience, Regular Expressions, and a good product/business sense (Microstrategy knowledge is a plus).
2. Data Systems: Strong SQL and RDBMS skills (Oracle preferred), data warehousing experience, dimensional data modeling experience (star/snowflake schema design), database system design experience, and DB optimization experience (Microstrategy modeling and report development is a strong plus).

Of course it goes without saying that strong oral, written, communication, and presentation skills are a must!

If you fit the mold, then please send email to:

Cheers,

— amr