Wednesday, February 22, 2006
The lost film of Don Hertzfeldt of Billy's Balloon fame
All I can say is drugs must have been involved.
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Monday, February 20, 2006
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Shit.
I just realized that Tom Lantos is _my_ congressman. Fuck.
He might be getting a letter from me. On the other hand, I'm very lazy, so probably not.
He might be getting a letter from me. On the other hand, I'm very lazy, so probably not.
Friday, February 17, 2006
Lantos and the China tech debacle
Lantos is being a dick. Did he just bring Google, Microsoft, and Cisco in front of the Senate to publicly shame them? What an asshole. Particularly given, as per my previous post, these companies have exactly zero leverage with the Chinese government. If they had refused to comply with Chinese authorities, China would have said, "Fine. Fuck you, round-eye." and gone off and done it anyway. Is every consumer who buys Chinese-made goods supposed to be ashamed too? They are just as culpable if not more so for supporting the Chinese regime.
Anyway, he's a dick. That's all I'm saying.
Anyway, he's a dick. That's all I'm saying.
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Apple is not switching to Windows
Apple is not switching to Windows. Ever. This may be the single dumbest article in a major magazine I have ever read.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
A new and exciting way Republicans are dumb
I meant to comment on the move to block US companies from having servers in China when it first came out...
Two Republican lawmakers want to make a law preventing US companies from, essentially, having operations in countries where governments have "repressive regimes." This is stupid. It might possibly make sense for countries that do not have the technological capability to create equivalent technologies on their own, but this is not the case in China. These lawmakers are assuming that little, helpless China would actually be hurt in any way by not having access to big-strong-economic-powerhouse-US firms for internet development, and that's bull honkey. If Google (or Microsoft) aren't allowed to do business in China, China will simply home-grow the equivalent technology. They honestly would not give much of a shit. The only people hurt here would be the US tech companies and the US government to the degree they would get a share of revenues from China (who, let's remember, we have a gigantic trade deficit with). Moreover, don't you think getting China to build their infrastructure using US technologies gives you more leverage in the long run than making an idiotic and short-sighted moral stand now?
Idiots. I understand it's all a political stunt, but still...idiots.
Two Republican lawmakers want to make a law preventing US companies from, essentially, having operations in countries where governments have "repressive regimes." This is stupid. It might possibly make sense for countries that do not have the technological capability to create equivalent technologies on their own, but this is not the case in China. These lawmakers are assuming that little, helpless China would actually be hurt in any way by not having access to big-strong-economic-powerhouse-US firms for internet development, and that's bull honkey. If Google (or Microsoft) aren't allowed to do business in China, China will simply home-grow the equivalent technology. They honestly would not give much of a shit. The only people hurt here would be the US tech companies and the US government to the degree they would get a share of revenues from China (who, let's remember, we have a gigantic trade deficit with). Moreover, don't you think getting China to build their infrastructure using US technologies gives you more leverage in the long run than making an idiotic and short-sighted moral stand now?
Idiots. I understand it's all a political stunt, but still...idiots.
Monday, February 13, 2006
Intel is evil
I'm really beginning to think that Intel is, in fact, more evil than Microsoft (and since when is Skype evil?!). AMD is pretty much strictly better than them, and yet they somehow manage to bully people (*cough* Dell *cough*) into signing exclusive deals with them.
Friday, February 10, 2006
Not only is it not a challenge to Darwinism, it isn't new
It's called Punctuated Equilibrium, and it's been around for quite a while.
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Stupid Jim Gray
I wish I would quit discovering people much smarter than I am had already had my half-baked ideas years ago.
(It's very technical, and I don't expect you to suffer through it unless you're a CS person...but the gist is that Jim Gray used an nVidia GPU to sort an astronomical database really bloody fast by transforming the sort operations into what would normally be graphical texture mapping operations that 3D games like to do)
(It's very technical, and I don't expect you to suffer through it unless you're a CS person...but the gist is that Jim Gray used an nVidia GPU to sort an astronomical database really bloody fast by transforming the sort operations into what would normally be graphical texture mapping operations that 3D games like to do)
Google as Big Brother
So, ask yourself: if Microsoft were replicating the files on your home computer on their servers instead of Google, how would you feel about it?
I don't know how I feel about the issue yet...there are advantages to having a company that is full-time responsible for enabling ubiquitous access to my data. They can worry about backup, network availability, provisioning for storage, etc. But I also think it's worth worrying about having a single company storing your data in one place along with everyone elses as it makes it way too easy for them or any NSA schmuck to go poking around in it.
It's conceivable that your data could be indexed in such a way that _only you_ could search it, but that takes away all incentive for Google to be involved because then they can't target you for advertising. :)
I don't know how I feel about the issue yet...there are advantages to having a company that is full-time responsible for enabling ubiquitous access to my data. They can worry about backup, network availability, provisioning for storage, etc. But I also think it's worth worrying about having a single company storing your data in one place along with everyone elses as it makes it way too easy for them or any NSA schmuck to go poking around in it.
It's conceivable that your data could be indexed in such a way that _only you_ could search it, but that takes away all incentive for Google to be involved because then they can't target you for advertising. :)
Nooooooo!!
Terrible, terrible idea! Did I mention terrible? For the love of god, don't fucking do it!
So much for principles
Jesus Christ...this really is the Japanese internment camps of the modern era. They might even be worse.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Quick note on the budget (or lack thereof)
Bush's budget is idiotic. I mean, I knew it would be idiotic, but it's idiotic. Even ignoring the omnipresent ridiculousness of trying to deal with Katrina cleanup (aside: here's an idea: don't rebuilt New Orleans! It's a fucking terrible place for a city! Hmmph.), wage a "war," and yet somehow incur massive tax cuts simultaneously, my more immediate objection is the continued use of "supplementary budget requests" to finance Iraq. Just fucking stop it, okay? It was cute the first time (and by cute, I mean it was a disingenuous political sleight of hand that would make even the most morally constipated used car salesman shiver with unease), but it's getting old. If I make a "budget" for myself that doesn't include car payments and rent, that isn't really so much of a "budget" as it is a "laughably incomplete list of shit I need to spend money on that gives me no idea the actual state of my finances." PUT THE FUCKING WAR ON THE BOOKS, DAMNIT. Own up to the fact you guys have fucked the budget worse than even Reagan could have dreamed of in his most vivid Cold War/Star Wars wet dream.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Monday, February 06, 2006
As if I didn't have enough reasons to be pissed at the Bush White House
I was listening to the domestic spying hearings on NPR this morning, and (of course) listening to Gonzales pissed me off, as did listening to the sympathetic Republicans on the panel. I think all the Republican senators, particularly the ones from the states in the middle of the country that tend to be large and rectangular (Brownback, Coburn, etc.) should be fitted with collars that give them an electric shock every time they mention 9/11. Once again, boys and girls, "Hey! Remember 9/11?" is not a response to, "Umm, why exactly did you think that conducting surveillance against US citizens without a warrant was legal, and if you thought you needed to do it, why didn't you get the law changed so you could?" Republicans don't seem to get this. Mentioning 9/11 seems to be an almost reflexive response to any criticism. Hence, I think they need some form of psychological conditioning to train them out of it, and my preference would be something involving painful electrocution.
As for Gonzales, he at least was actually responding to the legal issues, albeit with contradictory and nonsensical responses. The Administration's position is that, well, yes, so technically FISA says we have to get a warrant (details, details), but it provides a back door for "legislation that dictates otherwise," and you should have known we'd want to conduct warrantless spying when you passed the PATRIOT act despite the fact that neither PATRIOT nor any other war authorization legislation ever said jack shit about anything even remotely related to warrantless spying.
Gonzales/Bush's argument strikes me as roughly equivalent to saying, "Well, mom, you said I could go play at Billy's, and you must have known that there's a strip club in the same town that Billy lives in, so in effect you told me I could go to the strip club."
Gonzales is such a douchebag. I at least enjoyed hearing Durban take him to task on issuing contradictory statements.
Gonzales: "We didn't violate FISA."
Durban: "But the Justice Department just last week issued a memorandum saying that FISA was too restrictive and the executive was forced to supercede it!"
Gonzales: "These are not the droids you are looking for."
I hate the neocons. I really do.
As for Gonzales, he at least was actually responding to the legal issues, albeit with contradictory and nonsensical responses. The Administration's position is that, well, yes, so technically FISA says we have to get a warrant (details, details), but it provides a back door for "legislation that dictates otherwise," and you should have known we'd want to conduct warrantless spying when you passed the PATRIOT act despite the fact that neither PATRIOT nor any other war authorization legislation ever said jack shit about anything even remotely related to warrantless spying.
Gonzales/Bush's argument strikes me as roughly equivalent to saying, "Well, mom, you said I could go play at Billy's, and you must have known that there's a strip club in the same town that Billy lives in, so in effect you told me I could go to the strip club."
Gonzales is such a douchebag. I at least enjoyed hearing Durban take him to task on issuing contradictory statements.
Gonzales: "We didn't violate FISA."
Durban: "But the Justice Department just last week issued a memorandum saying that FISA was too restrictive and the executive was forced to supercede it!"
Gonzales: "These are not the droids you are looking for."
I hate the neocons. I really do.
On the shitful state of video games
Since it's 3 am and I'm having my usual bout of insomnia, I thought this might be an appropriate time to comment on the shitful state of video games.
My generation was the first generation to really grow up with video games. Nintendo and I came of age together, and as my voice was awkwardly breaking and loved ones were not-so-subtly suggesting that it might be time to start using deodorant, so too was Mario taking his first mushroom-squishing hops and was Link taking his first sips of healing potions in his eternel quest to save Zelda. It was the Eden of video games, and everything was pure and new, and we lived in blissful ignorance of how crapitudinous the industry would eventually become.
The graphics on those games sucked. They unavoidably sucked. So you had no choice but to actually focus on the design of the game. Gameplay was actually important. True, the standard was lower because people had never seen anything like those games, short of Space Invaders and Pac Man, but still...you couldn't blow hundreds or thousands of man-hours on getting the shadows of your gun just right even if you wanted to. So you actually had to design the fucking game.
Fast-forward to the modern day. Everything nowadays is either a ridiculous and increasingly pointless arms race in 3D graphics or a junkie-like reliance on franchises (NFL, NBA, Grand Theft Auto, etc.), and it pisses me off. Moreover, I think it pisses a lot of people off. The gamer community is getting fed up with the same shit. It's a community that by its very nature consists of thrill seekers, and the problem with thrill seekers is that their reaction to things attenuates quickly, and they need something new. So of course feeding them yet another goddamn First Person Shooter is eventually going to bore them to tears. There are thousands of them now, and they're all the fucking same. It's all just Doom or Unreal all over again with cosmetic modifications. If it's not Doom, it's Final Fantasy dressed in fancier clothing. Or, if you're lucky, it's Warcraft. That's it. Those three lineages cover most of the games out there, and it covered them five years ago.
Every so often, a new game does indeed come along, and when it does, it tends to sell amazingly well. The first instance of this was Myst. Myst was such a success because it threw away fancy interfaces in favor of creating a totally immersive, meticulously detailed virtual world and a gripping, dramatic storyline. It was new, and it had nearly universal appeal. Sure, it bored some people, but it was so simple that anyone could play it straight out of the box, and it was addictive. And it was the best-selling game of all time for a while.
...Until the next breakthrough came along: The Sims. Here again was, finally, a fundamentally new idea in gaming. It wasn't combat-based, but it also wasn't the quintessentially isolated world that Myst and other RPGs created. It was the first genuinely social game, and it was one of the first games that ever hooked women. The objective, the rules, and the gameplay were fundamentally different from anything else anyone had ever done. It had a vague similarity to SimCity, but it included that oh-so-important social aspect that drew girls into its addictive little world. And to my knowledge, nothing has yet surpassed its sales numbers.
What's my point? Basically, that I'm waiting for the next breakthrough game, and looking at the shape of the gaming industry, I'm beginning to despair at it. In some ways World of Warcraft is the next Big Thing(tm). The first-person RPG has been done before, but Blizzard made the game a masterpiece by meticulously planning their online experience, and it has its players entranced. And they're making a shitload of money. It is, after all, a publisher's wet dream: a game that continues to draw income for as long as a player plays, and moreover the publisher continues to have control over the game even after it's released, so he has a way to easily tweak the world to keep the players coming back, credit cards in hand.
So yes, there is an online dimension to gaming that is in its infancy, and maybe that's where we'll see the really cool stuff in the next few years. I have high hopes for Xbox Live...it has the possibility to set the standard for online game play. But still...in a time when graphics hardware manufacturers are in the same kind of arms race that processor manufacturers were engaged in a few years ago, the game publishers are being seduced by the excited ramblings of their marketers who are telling them that they can sell a zillion copies of anything if they can produce a shinier demo reel than their competitors. "Oooh! Look at the shiny explosions! Look how that guy fell off that ledge! The kids will love it!"
But they won't, and they don't. Ignore the graphics for a moment. Game play on these games hasn't evolved one iota in at least eight years. This is stupid. There's no reason other than a lack of trying and an unwillingness to try something new. One of the many half-baked ideas I have in the back of my head is to look at using the immense power of modern gaming hardware to enhance the game play of games rather than the visuals. At core, all graphics hardware does is accelerate certain mathematical transformations that happen to be useful for painting pictures. I'll bet you could use the same hardware to do some really cool shit with either the AI or with non-linear storylines. I dunno...maybe not. But either way, the field is ripe to create a genuinely new game instead of the billionth iteration of rehashed games from the mid 90s. And whoever does it will be rolling in money while the other idiots are left whining about lagging game sales of a game that was supposed to be a hit because, "...it was the sequel to a well-received game, it had the violent aesthetic of the popular Grand Theft Auto series, and it featured licensed songs from name acts like DMX and Public Enemy."
Ugh. How fucking retarded are these guys? Just reading that sentence makes me want to punch the CEO of Activision in the face in service to the remote hope that I might be able to knock even the tiniest morsel of stupid out of him.
My generation was the first generation to really grow up with video games. Nintendo and I came of age together, and as my voice was awkwardly breaking and loved ones were not-so-subtly suggesting that it might be time to start using deodorant, so too was Mario taking his first mushroom-squishing hops and was Link taking his first sips of healing potions in his eternel quest to save Zelda. It was the Eden of video games, and everything was pure and new, and we lived in blissful ignorance of how crapitudinous the industry would eventually become.
The graphics on those games sucked. They unavoidably sucked. So you had no choice but to actually focus on the design of the game. Gameplay was actually important. True, the standard was lower because people had never seen anything like those games, short of Space Invaders and Pac Man, but still...you couldn't blow hundreds or thousands of man-hours on getting the shadows of your gun just right even if you wanted to. So you actually had to design the fucking game.
Fast-forward to the modern day. Everything nowadays is either a ridiculous and increasingly pointless arms race in 3D graphics or a junkie-like reliance on franchises (NFL, NBA, Grand Theft Auto, etc.), and it pisses me off. Moreover, I think it pisses a lot of people off. The gamer community is getting fed up with the same shit. It's a community that by its very nature consists of thrill seekers, and the problem with thrill seekers is that their reaction to things attenuates quickly, and they need something new. So of course feeding them yet another goddamn First Person Shooter is eventually going to bore them to tears. There are thousands of them now, and they're all the fucking same. It's all just Doom or Unreal all over again with cosmetic modifications. If it's not Doom, it's Final Fantasy dressed in fancier clothing. Or, if you're lucky, it's Warcraft. That's it. Those three lineages cover most of the games out there, and it covered them five years ago.
Every so often, a new game does indeed come along, and when it does, it tends to sell amazingly well. The first instance of this was Myst. Myst was such a success because it threw away fancy interfaces in favor of creating a totally immersive, meticulously detailed virtual world and a gripping, dramatic storyline. It was new, and it had nearly universal appeal. Sure, it bored some people, but it was so simple that anyone could play it straight out of the box, and it was addictive. And it was the best-selling game of all time for a while.
...Until the next breakthrough came along: The Sims. Here again was, finally, a fundamentally new idea in gaming. It wasn't combat-based, but it also wasn't the quintessentially isolated world that Myst and other RPGs created. It was the first genuinely social game, and it was one of the first games that ever hooked women. The objective, the rules, and the gameplay were fundamentally different from anything else anyone had ever done. It had a vague similarity to SimCity, but it included that oh-so-important social aspect that drew girls into its addictive little world. And to my knowledge, nothing has yet surpassed its sales numbers.
What's my point? Basically, that I'm waiting for the next breakthrough game, and looking at the shape of the gaming industry, I'm beginning to despair at it. In some ways World of Warcraft is the next Big Thing(tm). The first-person RPG has been done before, but Blizzard made the game a masterpiece by meticulously planning their online experience, and it has its players entranced. And they're making a shitload of money. It is, after all, a publisher's wet dream: a game that continues to draw income for as long as a player plays, and moreover the publisher continues to have control over the game even after it's released, so he has a way to easily tweak the world to keep the players coming back, credit cards in hand.
So yes, there is an online dimension to gaming that is in its infancy, and maybe that's where we'll see the really cool stuff in the next few years. I have high hopes for Xbox Live...it has the possibility to set the standard for online game play. But still...in a time when graphics hardware manufacturers are in the same kind of arms race that processor manufacturers were engaged in a few years ago, the game publishers are being seduced by the excited ramblings of their marketers who are telling them that they can sell a zillion copies of anything if they can produce a shinier demo reel than their competitors. "Oooh! Look at the shiny explosions! Look how that guy fell off that ledge! The kids will love it!"
But they won't, and they don't. Ignore the graphics for a moment. Game play on these games hasn't evolved one iota in at least eight years. This is stupid. There's no reason other than a lack of trying and an unwillingness to try something new. One of the many half-baked ideas I have in the back of my head is to look at using the immense power of modern gaming hardware to enhance the game play of games rather than the visuals. At core, all graphics hardware does is accelerate certain mathematical transformations that happen to be useful for painting pictures. I'll bet you could use the same hardware to do some really cool shit with either the AI or with non-linear storylines. I dunno...maybe not. But either way, the field is ripe to create a genuinely new game instead of the billionth iteration of rehashed games from the mid 90s. And whoever does it will be rolling in money while the other idiots are left whining about lagging game sales of a game that was supposed to be a hit because, "...it was the sequel to a well-received game, it had the violent aesthetic of the popular Grand Theft Auto series, and it featured licensed songs from name acts like DMX and Public Enemy."
Ugh. How fucking retarded are these guys? Just reading that sentence makes me want to punch the CEO of Activision in the face in service to the remote hope that I might be able to knock even the tiniest morsel of stupid out of him.
Sunday, February 05, 2006
Probably the least effective reassurance ever
Turns out the warrantless eavesdropping the Bush administration has been conducting "only targets Al-Qaeda." Well my fears are certainly allayed, aren't yours? Glad we cleared that up.
[Idiots.]
[Idiots.]
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Thursday, February 02, 2006
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
He might be on to something
Indeed, what's wrong with having an entirely online existence?
(Disclaimer: As a general rule, never, ever believe or buy into anything Mr. Satchel Rage says. Ever. His siren song leads only to self-destruction and despair, or at best a protracted stay in the Land of the Lotus Eaters. And in this case the loti are, by and large, microwavable burritos. And yes, I think I'm done with the cliched mythology references. He does play a mean game of Buck Hunter though...)
(Disclaimer: As a general rule, never, ever believe or buy into anything Mr. Satchel Rage says. Ever. His siren song leads only to self-destruction and despair, or at best a protracted stay in the Land of the Lotus Eaters. And in this case the loti are, by and large, microwavable burritos. And yes, I think I'm done with the cliched mythology references. He does play a mean game of Buck Hunter though...)
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