C roatia is smelly
U nless you like flowers
N ot that I’m prejudiced
T hat would be presumptuous
F uck Croatia anyways
A nd all their Croatian ways
R ed Bull and Red Politics
T hat’s all those fuckers got
Category Archives: Uncategorized
A Return to Pants
My
pants
don’t
fit,
but
I
don’t
give
a
shit,
cause
I’m
unemployed.
A Name for my Band
Human
head
for
my
hunan
hand,
oh
my
god,
I
just
thought
of
a
name
for
my
bran
new
band.
SpamSieve
Mark Mayo of VMUNIX discusses his move to SpamSieve. I think he will be pleasantly surprised at how well it handle a butt-load of junk mail. Sure, sometimes with large loads of mail, it takes a minute to get processed through SpamSieve, but it does a great job at learning what is junk and what isn’t. I get on average 100-300 spam emails a day, and SpamSieve keeps on chugging. It works great in combination with SpamAssassin and other spam filtering utilities that tag spam in the headers since SpamSieve can learn about the spaminess of any portion of an email, including all headers. A++.
Upgrading Software
What gives with upgrading software? I’ve been using computers for quite a few years now, and while the abilities of software continues to expand, the amount of money we have to layout for fixes/new features is rising at an astounding rate.
My big gripe is with Adobe Photoshop. I purchased Photoshop 7 the other year. PS is not a cheap program ($650 to non educational users). There was one update to 7.0.1 in August of 2002. There have been some minor plugin updates to the program, but the meat of the program was not touched for more than a year. Then version CS came out. Thats it. To upgrade would cost me $169. This is a professional program made by a company that is apparently intent on selling a product and getting you to pay $170 every year to stay current, with no hope of minor feature additions with out paying. CS has been on the market for over a year with out any updates. I suppose that means that CS 2 will be out soon. Adobe Illustrator is the same way.
Lets take a look at Apple. They do it right and they do it wrong. Final Cut Pro seems to get it right.
Version 4 came out and had some amazing new features. There were some bugs. Versions 4.0.1 and 4.0.2 came out a couple of months later and fixed some bugs and added some performance. v4.1 came out and added some new features, followed by v4.1.1 that fixed some bugs. A year after v4 was orginally released, v4.5 HD was made available for free and gave a whole slew of new features, one of which was support for HD video. At no point during this process did the end user have to spend a dime on his software other than the original cost it took to get into version 4 of the software.
I bought Final Cut Express about a year and a half ago when I got my new computer. I got version 1. I dutifully updated to version 1.0.1 that fixed some bugs. That was it, even though FCE 1.0.1 had some serious bugs that were acknowledged by Apple. It was on the market for 11 months with no bug fixes, only to be superseded by FCE 2. In the three months following this release, v2.0.2 and v2.0.3 came out and fixed some bugs. I’ve not used v2.x at all, so I don’t know if there are any more outstanding bugs in it, but v3 was just announced, so v2.x can be considered as dead.
BareBones gets it right. Sure, some complain that the software is over priced. BBEdit is expensive for what is ultimately a text editor, and who would pay the price of Mailsmith when there are so many free email programs around? Almost every update, even a little bitty x.0.1 update has bug fixes and (minor) feature addtions. There are frequently large updates that that add/fix a whole bunch at once, not the BBEdit software is buggy to begin with; it is in fact quite the opposite. You get a lot for your money here. Never mind that you can get a special competitive updgrade price on most of their software, usually using a free program as the one you are updgrading from. This means that BareBones software is cheaper than it looks at first glance.
On to their “consumer” version of BBEdit, TextWrangler. Originally it was a cheaper feature limited version of BBEdit. Well, version 2 came out the other week. It is free, not to upgrade, but the whole dang program. Free to all, free as in beer. One might think that this is a slap in the face to existing owners. Well, BareBones gave full credit for the original price of TextWrangler to all owners of the software. I’d like to see some other software companies do that for software they’ve EOL‘d.
These programs aren’t cheap to upgrade. $100 for FCE, $300 for FCP. I think the FCP is worth the steep entry/upgrade prices, because at least you know that you will end up with a relatively bug free piece of software. I’d rather pay $300 every 2 years and get working software (with more capabilities) than $100 every 6 months, only to put up with feature crippled, buggy software.
I think if companies want to do the “feature limited” cheap version of a professional program, than that program should at least be bug free, and not end up costing more to upgrade than the pro version.
If the company is not offering a pro/consumer distinction in its software, then maybe they shouldn’t be cranking out a new version each year just to get some more cash. Maybe they should be trying to add some bug fixes and minor feature additions in between major versions to make the consumer feel like he/she is getting something for their $100 that they dutifully pay each year.
At least this is better than the yearly subscription model of Eudora, a program that used to be very dear to me. Or maybe it’s not. At least they are up front about the yearly nature of the “deal.”
I Hate First Person Shooters
We all loved it when Wolfenstein 3D came out, followed by Doom 2, finally allowing us to shoot people in 3 dimentions. Such a revolution in gaming has been followed by, well, it hasn’t been followed by anything but the same. The recent “revolutionary” releases of Doom 3, Half Life 2 and Halo 2 have shown us that not a goddam thing has changed in recent gaming except for graphics.
To illustrate my point, here’s an anecdote: Bear and I borrowed Hordak’s Xbox for a couple days just to play the original Halo. I thought to myself, “Oh, cool, with 2 players cooperating, sitting right next to each other, this could lead to really good teamplay.” This image was quickly shattered as the height of teamplay became Bear yelling “GRENADE!”, me fumbling with tunnel vision to find where on the ground he threw it and, a couple seconds later, taking the full blast from under my feet.
This is the frustrating thing about first person shooters, yet it brings up a more fundamental issue about video games and games in general. All games are designed to simulate something and make it “easier” than before. Now, the sense of “easier” here means alot of things, including less expensive, less dangerous, less tiring, quicker or just possible in the first place.
Consider sports for a second. These are physical games that simulate combat to some degree. Boxing, wrestling, rugby and football are more direct in that effect but even badminton and swimming involve physical competition with a declared loser, and losing symbolizes death. Sports as competition invoke physical aspects of parties and declares winners, usually without any necissary harm to anyone involved. This, less dangerous, is one sense of “easier” stated above.
Back to video games, they simulate taking on challenges that no one is ever up to. Shooting guns, flying planes or slaying dragons are all less expensive, easier and, in the case of the dragons, only possible in the first place through video games. Mario and Luigi can jump forward and land a few steps behind. The dude from Grand Theft Auto can steal cars with the press of a button and the player at home really doesn’t get arrested. That’s not to say that everything in a video game is easier than anything in life. It’s that the parallels should be easier. Here’s a checklist for first person shooters and how they compare to real life.
- Shooting a gun = easier, less expensive, less dangerous
- Movement = quicker, easier, less tiring
- Being on a space station, fighting aliens = only possible through games
- The ability to glance down at your feet, taking in 180 degree peripheral vision = COMPLETELY NON-EXISTANT
This is exactly what’s wrong with first person shooters. Until this is seriously addressed, there will be no more “revolutionizing” of first person shooters, unless you’re the kind that counts graphical facelifts.
The House
It is cold in the house in morning in dark.
M.U.L.E. Online
What I’ve been waiting for since soon after I got a computer is finally here: We can now play M.U.L.E. on the internet. M.U.L.E. is renown with gamers and game developers alike for its non-zero sum game strategy and simple interface. M.U.L.E. pits 4 players in a Monopoly-like experience that simulates planet colonization, dealing with economic principles such as supply and demand, price theory, economies of scale, learning curve theory of production, diminishing returns and more. Now keep in mind that M.U.L.E.’s interface only includes Atari joystick controls, 1 control stick and 1 button, meaning no keyboard to actually input numbers, but it still manages to handle a complex economic production and trade system. Also keep in mind that multiplayer games with multiple levels of interaction came decades ahead of its time with M.U.L.E. in 1983. Expect more on the game itself later.
An online friend from a M.U.L.E. forum put some time and effort in and figured out how to work an Atari emulator, Atari800Win, using Kaillera, a net connection system, to play M.U.L.E. over the nets. The end result is a zip of all the needed files that’s under a meg large and a budding online community that we are trying to expand. Notable is also that it’s possible to play with all 4 human players, which is exicting since the less AI in the game, the more unpredictable the games get.
Of course this is only for Windows machines, so we’ll have to see if we can get this working with any other OS.
Let there be authors.
If there were no authors, there would be no accountability or responsibility.
Modernity
Modernity on the British tongue sounds like Maternity, except of course there is a "d" and not a "t" in there. In America it is more of the "mod" part of modernity, which is stressed and apt just to sound more "mud" than "mod". This morning on my way to the mail I passed a house that looked to be the definition of "modernity" - or the "modern", depending on how you say it, or where you say it. That isn't to say that it was industrial and/or recalled octopus trains stretching American grain fields to a group of Molly McGuires in a factory town... ...though in a sense, or to my senses, it did collapse an expanse. A house two triangle slabs a slice of yellow between. It sat cavased backed on a large lot. But, what truly came to define it - or make me realize that somewhere in my head I'd collapsed something were the two teenagers waiting for the bus in front of the house: Smoking.