Stupid ad. Get ready. Exhibit A:

Color Families

TypePad is a hosted blog service. Fine. Not everyone can run their own box, great. But don’t have your programmers do your graphic design ok? First the logo to the left of “TypePad” is not in the color family of the blue border. You don’t have to be a design queen like me (but really I’m not) to even know this. Photoshop arranges all the color swatches in nice little sets. Pick a color close to the last color you picked. Go to home depot even. The huge tough-guy carrying the bandsaw by his sack can tell you what the difference is between earth-tone and pastels.

Unbold, Bold is not so bold

TypePad. NormalBold. OverDone. GettingTired. Yeah, I’ve certainly copied this little trick. But I’m not incorporated and I’m not billing someone for this. It needs to stop. There are better textography tricks and cliches out there.

Sets of Threes

Three. Words. Suck. TypePad.
Uninspired. Unimpressing. Pretentious. TypePad.
Little. Yellow. Different. 1980s pain killer ad campaign.
It’s. Been. Done.

Come on TypePad. I thought blogs were supposed to be all trendy, emo and complaining about the amount of soy additive in their coffee of the ‘jour. TypePad needs to listen to more Decemberists and cut themselves. Then, they’d make ruley banners.

After reading a terrible, horrible Vista review on a Windows review site, I can’t help but laugh at Vista-ish promises. And I’m not turning a blind eye. I want Vista to be good, just as Paul Thurrott said. He’s not bashing Vista. After all, winsupersite.com has to be pro-windows right? But it seems even the fanboys are not falling for it.

Why do I see a vaporware review on gamespot? What’s up with the blatant windows logo placement all throughout the article? I feel like I’m in Windows occupied Germany here! Why is this being featured right next to an Apple bootcamp article? “Oh, they’re being fair. Featuring a Windows story and a Mac story.” Yeah, fine. I’m all for fairness. But Vista isn’t out yet and Bootcamp is. Obviously, bootcamp is a pretty simple app compared to an entire OS. But again, to the ends of vaporware, I banish you gamespot. You are getting paid for this Vista feature. You are getting paid in a major way.

What do I say? What do all my friends say?

“I use XP for gaming. I only game on XP. The only reason I keep a PC around is for games. Without games, I wouldn’t have a PC. In all the things I do with my PC, there is very little that I do outside of gaming. I guess PC iz t3h game is what I’m trying to say.”

Yes. Great. So no wonder why Microsoft is sprinting to gamespot throwing money at them. It’s all so clear now. No one is buying your Xbox360 so you better start making false promises and Vista compatible banner ads. That way, people will wait a long time for Vista to deliver us from evil and dry up the revenue stream of AAPL. Except winsupersite.com didn’t bite. And neither am I.

When AAPL releases their Intel desktop, I’m buying one. It has WinFS on it. It’s called spotlight. Every time I write a file, the OS indexes it. So there’s no Windows search dog and a 5 minute wait. “Yes! Just what I wanted! I always wanted a companion when I’m searching for my .txt file with Bobby’s phone number in it!”

Hey! Where is that .zip I downloaded? Hrm, what feels natural … what should I tell the computer to do … give me an animated character! Everyone knows that cartoons search filesystems! O_o

Anyway, look at the gamespot picture up top. “If this is DirectX 9, imagine how Unreal Engine 3 games will look in DirectX 10.” This is the most stupid thing I’ll hear this month. Thanks gamespot. Now I know things can’t get any dum-ar. What a relief.

1. The graphics API has as much do to with how pretty a game looks as skin has to do with how pretty a person is. “Oh, but pretty people have skin!” Not relavent. DX10 can make games look nice, shiney with all kinds of fireworks but only if you design it that way. DX10 isn’t going to be something you type in: “enable_dx10=true! go!”, and then Quake4 starts blowing your mind.
2. This is juvenile. “The Dodge Viper has 500 horsepower. Imagine a car with a million horsepower! Wow!”
3. Like Hic said: showing off a game’s graphics is like bringing your dog’s hair to a dog show.

Group think is a bitch. Even if Vista completely sucks, everyone is still going to buy it. Because, that’s what we run at work. That’s what everyone else is using. Bill Gates is rich, he must be smart (actually he is smart .. but he’s lucky too). Everyone runs Windows so everyone runs Windows. Fine, run what you want. But wave your finger at Gamespot for stuffing their ears with Gates money.

Jesus fucking Christ, I’m choking on my own rage here.

In a discussion on digg about Apple’s Bootcamp software (which lets you run XP on an Intel Mac via dual booting), someone on digg asked:

from the site:
For your convenience, Boot Camp burns a CD with all the Mac-specific drivers for Windows:
Graphics
Networking
Audio
AirPort wireless
Bluetooth
The Eject key (on Apple keyboards)
Brightness control for built-in displays

If those video drivers are any good, what else do you need for gaming?

Here’s what I have to say about Mac, “what else we’d need for gaming” and the Intel transition:

We’d need the Intel desktops out with some nice and generic nvidia card like the ppc macs had with the dual-dvi 6800. The mac mini shares system memory with the video card (so I’ve read), really strange. The macbook has a mobile 1600 ati. A huge improvement but gamers won’t spend the cash for a laptop unless the travel all the time. Small PCs are bigger bangs for the buck. You have to sacrifice something for portability (power, money, expansion). Gamers typically want 1st or 2nd gen cards which aren’t in the Intel macs yet.

The Intel Mac tower is what I’m waiting for. Throw in an after market 7900gs for $350 and hope nvidia has some unified drivers out for OSX. Combine that with the experimental 10.5 threading stuff posted earlier and OSX might be able to make these single thread games sing on 4 or 8 cores, without an app rewrite. In this sense, Mac might have a platform that really pulls ahead for gaming in terms of performance. They’ll have equal hardware and maybe superior OS software.

The only thing worrying me as a gamer is, most of the time Apple stays behind on graphics drivers on purpose or by process. Usually their driver is based off of drivers that would be considered old in the PC world. This is my observation and the observation of some graphics programmers I’ve talked to.

Opengl 2.0 was launched on 8-10-2004. OpenGL 2.0 was pretty complicated, lots of hands in the pot. Nvidia was able to release a driver that had “OpenGL 2.0 support” starting with Forceware release 75 around Feb of 2005. IE, probably all of the 2.0 extras would work, it was completely up to spec. Apple still really can’t say that (AFAIK). They have OpenGL 1.5 with some extras on top, it’s their own creation. You can’t just go to nvidia and get your own driver with the latest bells and whistles. Now saying OpenGL2.0 is better than OpenGL1.5 isn’t fair. Apple runs Doom3, Doom3 has lots of shaders in it and overall looks the same as the PC version (ignoring frames per second). So Apple gets the same results. But they still can’t say “we support opengl 2.0″. They don’t. They don’t have all of the tasty features that OGL2.0 has.

I don’t know if this is by design or just practice. Maybe they figure gamers aren’t their market. Maybe they’d prefer to keep their drivers stable. Maybe the drivers don’t really add much. As a PC user, I usually upgrade video drivers for version number’s sake. Forceware 80 had some video en/decoding acceleration, some other versions have added a reported 5% performance gains to some games. Maybe all that isn’t worth instability to Apple. I can only guess.

Is Mac a gaming platform? No. Sure it runs games but it’s just not there yet. Considering the year-lag (and counting) on full OpenGL 2.0 support, the lack of a Intel desktop, lack of titles … it’s no wonder I still keep my XP machine around for gaming only.

Penny Arcade exposes the pink underbelly of Apple, inciting gay tendencies in a hilarious strip. But then the smoke clears from the geek holy war and we see the spoils from our crusade. The bodies from both camps pile up and we need to present a sollum press release. It will never end. Everyone has their preferences, sometimes you can prove technical superiority but most times not.

Gabe and Tyco have ordered iMac, macbooks, all the new Intel gear and I guess their embracing the platform now because of Apple’s willingness to change. Eh.. I guess a lot of people are doing the same.

I have ascertained is not that PCs as we know them lack good design, but that PCs as we know them have hardly any design to speak of. I’m not trying to be insulting. Use a Mac for a week, and we’ll talk again.

Thank you, amen. A lot of the arguements against Apple are warranted. I hear complaints of price, you don’t need to use a Mac for a week to know that you pay more upfront for a Mac. However, Windows don’t even come with an Exchange compatible email client. Exchange. The Microsoft product. Windows. The Microsoft product. Windows can’t connect to Exchange without buying office. OSX comes with Mail that connects to Exchange, without calendars, out of the box. Does it justify the price? Meh, the arguement continues. I don’t mean to solve this debate. It won’t be solved.

However some things just can’t be understood without using an Apple for a while. Putting your computer to sleep. Plugging a usb mouse in and not seeing “Windows is configurorzing your mouse!!”. Ok, please just do it. Uninstalling something by moving it to the trash. Running something out of the trash, in Windows you can’t operate on a file in the Recycle Bin without right-clicking and selecting ‘restore’.

In fact, if you have a shortcut to an app and you delete that app. The shorcut still works. Because the shortcut points to the inode and not the path. It’s a much, much smarter filesystem. I was so excited to see WinFS come out for the same features but it’s delayed a bit.

I didn’t even understand that’s what was going on until I started to write this. Like men who love the wilderness for its savage and untamed qualities, I believe many of us are drawn to this stark brutality. That frontier living, the self reliance, the adversity. The Mac, like The Alliance in World of Warcraft, was easy mode.

Ouch, now we are really getting close to home. WoW and Apple. I do play the Alliance mostly and I suppose this is a knock on how easy it is (not easy just maybe more popular) … well maybe if you play on a PvP server. Sorry, most people pick the Alliance because they look better. The Hord have undead whose jaws are falling off. Why would I want to level a toon (character) in WoW to make them an über ugly freak? Very, very relavant to this topic, perhaps.

I see his point though on PC being frontier-like and OSX being a cruise ride to the Virgin Islands. Although I guess which is better is very subjective.

Return Fire

Apple is hippy gay stuff? Apple has Trash. Windows has Recycle Bin. It goes both ways.

God damn it, OSX is Unix. Hardcore BSD/Mach, manly shit. In a dress. None of this visual studio flower-girl stuff. OSX has ruby, perl, gcc. Object Oriented interpreters bang strippers and eat their meat. OSX is a destroyer of worlds dressed up in a pink schoolgirl outfit. We raped football. We invented the steak. But we also have a new prada bag.

Stereotypes

Did you know you can’t buy radiohead on itunes? You know why? Because everyone at Apple just assumes its there. Like when you started a job, you ordered a laptop but not the moon. “Oh, you don’t need to order the moon. It’s probably outside floating right now.”

Normalization

Time to give props to MS. I’m looking forward to Vista, honestly. The latest build is far beyond what I expected. They are keeping their gadgets idea (Apple copied Konfabulator and MS is copying Apple), which is great. The interface is actually less bulky than the earlier things I saw. IE7 is meh.

The performance control panel applet is neat. You can see Windows ratings of your system and actually see your vid card, cpu and memory all in one place (under XP vid card model is only under display properties or the sysinfo program). Decent cleanup, I don’t think it’s as easy to use though. They have a lot more overwhelming menus and stuff but it’s a nice step. Hopefully WinFS rules.

Apple isn’t perfect

They are fixing my biggest problem, performance, with the Intel move. However a few things are still borked IMHO. They intentionally stay behind on graphics drivers. So you’re never on the bleeding edge, of course this also means that you don’t run into weird bugs.

It’s crazy hard to try to hack up your system. I don’t know why you’d want to run Linux on a Mac but you can, but it’s hard .. or at least harder to do than the PC.

Aliases (shortcuts) to network shares didn’t work for crap in 10.3 or 10.4 but it’s fixed now. Sometimes these weird ass bugs just show up and you have to deal with it.

OSX Mail refuses to work with courier-imap. Seriously.

I read that every icon on OSX’s desktop takes up as much memory as a finder. So if you put a million icons on your desktop, it’s like having a million Finders open.

… anyway. Funny crap.

I know I’m offending big time. No apologies, because Black Sabbath are a bunch of women with little pink purses. It’s true.

I’m rockin out to Black Sabbath (the self titled album). An awesome album, an epic band. Classic sound, low-fi production. It started it all.

And then at the end of N.I.B., they end with a Picardy Third. Now, most of you are like: “masdf878“. And I hear you. I understand your woes. However, before you pass judgement upon me and scream “masdf878″ please hear my short and humble explanation of what a Picardy Third is and what this has to do with Black Sabbath’s aftermentioned pink purses.

A Picardy Third is where you end a song happily. More specifically, you write a song in a minor key and end it in a major key. None of that technical detail matters .. all you need to know is it’s like taking a dark and sad song and ending it with a rainbow. It’s the musical equivalent of putting “and they lived happily ever after” at the end of Schindler’s List.

How else to explain. How about Black Sabbath’s “Changes“. You would keep the original chorus, “I’m going through changes” and then at the end say:
I’m NOT going through changes, THE END. Yay!

The Picardy Third is a tired musical trick. It was used by Picardy so much that they named this resolution after him. Usually it’s not used nicely. Much like if the term “Sell Out” was coined after a John Arby Sellout signed his underground punk band to MTV. The Picardy Third is the Jump The Shark episode from Happy Days, it’s a sad dirge on a rainy Sunday with a dancing bear at the end.

And so with their extremely lame ending to N.I.B., I hereby kickoff the first (and likely last) Pink Purse Award. Congratulations on your spineless ending, you horrifically splendid fucks.

It is worth noting that vocal stress is placed on the first syllable. The name is pronounced as the noun COM-bine, as in combine harvester, as opposed to the verb form com-BINE, as in “to join together or unite.”

– wikipedia

The most clear sign of the Combine’s effect on the planet is the drop of the sea level after Combine rule. Pictured here is a dry harbor in the Highway 17 chapter of Half-Life 2, evidently depicting the sea much further from port than usual, with large ships resting on what was previously seabed.

The Combine is a vast empire spanning multiple dimensions. The empire is inhabited by an unknown number of sentient, intelligent species, and appears to be governed by a race of bizarre, artificially-evolved Advisors (see below). The Combine expands its empire by invading worlds and enslaving the dominant species to be exploited as it sees fit. By manipulating these inhabitants, through methods including bioengineering and implantation, the Combine creates a race of super-soldiers uniquely adapted for the environment of that particular world. This process results in a highly mobile and adaptive military force which is able to respond to any threat and crush any opposition. The reasons behind the Combine’s imperialism remain unknown throughout the game.

This is an interesting thing I didn’t even think about for HL2. The Combine goes from planet to planet assimilating the residents into their army and soaking up the natural resources of the planet. Like a farm combine, they combine planets’ resources and people into their collection.

The pronunciation has a bit of a double meaning.

Apple made a funny. On their new iMac graphics page, they quote Trogdor, the burninator.

You have to view the source of the page to see it.


<div id="header">
<img src="http://images.apple.com/imac/images/graphicstop20060109.jpg" alt="Burninate the countryside." width="900" height="380" border="0"/></div>


Trogdor is well pleased.

Huge thread on slashdot about a Monday night CSI show. I don’t watch CBS because their shows suck and I’m not the market but I had to watch this heralded gamer bashing.

Sure enough it pissed me off to no end.

From the description: ‘Delko witnesses a bank robbery and the CSIs soon discover that the culprits are playing out the action from the videogame ‘Urban Hellraisers’ on the streets of Miami. As they score points for each crime committed, the CSIs must discover what consists of getting to the next level in the game in order to stop the culprits before they strike again.

Before the episode aired, people were already flaming away. angle_slam (623817) writes:

That is what got to me in one particular episode of CSI:Miami. While I know that they can’t always clean up video or audio as much as they do, for some reason, I’d been able to suspend my belief. But one particular episode dealt with photography, a hobby of mine. A guy using a zoom lens that couldn’t be more than 200 mm, judging by the size of the lens, was taking pictures of someone’s front yard. Turns out that he caught a murder in his camera. But the murder was at the next door neighbor’s house and was just in a small window in the corner of an 8×10 print. But they magnified it and not only were they able to see the tatoo on the killer’s hand! It didn’t matter that the camera’s exposure was set to portray an outdoor scene–they were somehow able to resolve a something in the darkened house.

“I agree!”, I replied:

I hate zoom and enhance. I hate it. It’s crap. Total crap. I hated this episode, I hated the assumptions it made. I hated the fact that Buick ads and The Who markets CSI to parents of so called ‘gamer-crimminals’. I hate how bias the show is, how bias I am as a gamer and how bias everyone is about everything. Flame on.

They had a gamer die. They found a bunch of cans all around his ‘console’ he was dead with the controller in his hand. The cans looked like AMP and Red Bull. Then whats his name… David Caruso says “HE PLAYED THE GAME TO DEATH”. I left the room. I seriously went to the bathroom. I thought I was going to puke, but didn’t. It just felt like I should. I trimmed my beard instead. *sigh*

I enjoyed reading the other threads about studies from The Guardian about how TV has affected the virgin land of ‘XYZ’. I enjoy reading all the debate back and forth, it is on a serious note, good debating. On a not so serious note, I’m going to kill CSI:Miami once it materializes into the physical world.

Indeed the episode was clearly trying to scare parents of ‘gamers’ (note they only used it to describe the gang of killers) into thinking that GTA or other violent games are going to turn every last kid into a killing lunatic. Whatever.

I can only watch in horror hoping no one is falling for the ploy. Thank god Edgar imparted some truth onto the matter:

thankfully, everyone knows it’s a fictional show, and it will have no affect on popular opinion or cultural relevance …

Probably because no one was actually watching the show. Except for all the serious gamers out there soaking up media and outputting bullets and evil. God help us all. Thank you CBS. I will turn away from my evil ways and take up a holy consumption of mass media and Buick advertisements.

Saints be praised! 2006 Lucerne I accept your divinity! CX Base MSRP $26,990* Graceful lines, sophisticated technology, and the available power of a Northstar V8 engine! Heal me! EPA estimated mpg (City/Hwy): 19/28! Be a light where there is no light!

Giveth to me cloth seats and a ride similar to riding on a thick layer of soggy cereal! Shanti, Shanti, Shanti unto all.

I ran into a banner ad and took the bait. Turned out to be a little interactive flash site. I browsed around and suddenly found myself caught in an Air Force recruiting site. Here’s a quick tour of whatamigonnadonext.com.

You first start out with a selection of “what do I want to do with my life”. It has some pretty reasonable options there, electronics, fix stuff. And then there are some real slacker choices, “whatever & make money” — for people without a solid plan.

Suddenly the viewer is on the defensive. No one, and I mean no one, knows everything. No one has their whole life planned out all nice and neat with success written all over it. That’s not how life works. You play the numbers, make small seemingly decisions, do your best day to day and eventually see some incrementing result of your hard work. It’s not some magic bullet game trying to seek out the job that’s going to make me rich, the best or famous. That’s insane.

However, I played along wondering what this site was all about. I really should have noticed the opening copyright tag…

I picked Electronics (of course) because I’m a geek. There were only 3 options and they all involved playing games, not designing or being interested in electronics. I had no option other than to pick a video game genre. So I picked online rpg since I’m playing one.

Surprised, I watched an animation of a girlfriend leaving her boyfriend (the video game player) because he wasn’t paying attention to her. There’s this guy sitting in a chair in a dirty room with flies and his back to his girl. He’s sitting in his underwear and is drawn as this closed-door loser.

Now .. I understand their job. They need people and they need people bad. They offer a great program for anyone who maybe can’t pay for college. That’s not my intention to attack on the GI Bill or to say that a military career (either 4 year or whatever) is bad. It’s a great program for anyone who wants it. However, if I joined the Air Force, I’d change from a guy who plays MMOs to a guy who used to play MMOs and is now in the Air Force. That’s it! Joining the Air Force is not some divine benediction that is going to cleanse my past of evil.

Me, I’m lucky. My parents could afford to send me to college. In fact, I’m very lucky. I’m the first one on my Dad’s side to go to college funded. I thanked my parents officially and in writing and I am very grateful of that blessing. However, there are people who are doing better than me and there are people doing worse. Is this the Air Force’s business to be judging our culture and assigning happiness and success levels to hobbies and fun? How is this not casting a first fucking stone? How about they pull out of Iraq and actually contribute to World Peace? How about we wait for the mighty nation of “Terrorism-land” to take over the world?

Electronics is my gig. It’s doing me well so far. It’s not some magic bullet and it’s not some no brained button pushing gaming session. It’s all about learning and it’s miles above TV or hanging out at a bar.

Air Force is fighting for a free country right? Then shut up and give me my freedom of privacy. I have the right to do what I want and not justify it. Freely. And other countries have these rights too, it’s not some super happy America fest. We’re not that special but we’re all so Fun Happy Super Go America™ robots. We need to come off it quick.

This is just an idea, and not a very serious one at that. I think MI6 could back the page with some logic. Why just have a webpage when you could be listening for mouse movements etc?

I need a dramatic example …

Imagine you are a spy implanted in Paris. You are being tailed. You need to get a secret code of utmost importance back to headquarters but any cell phone or other obvious means would be noticed. So you decide to stop into a coffee shop with a public web kiosk. You browse to mi6.co.uk (which might be obvious to your enemy) and you move your mouse around on the webpage creating a bunch of mouse overs over their image map. Ajax plugs into a sampling system on the backend and samples as many mouse overs as possible and suddenly you have a lightweight (and probably slow/inaccurate) drawing system.

Without clicking, you hand write “020411″, the secret code that will defuse the nuclear bomb ticking in London. You order your coffee and leave. Anyone watching might just see you looking at a web page.

Yes it’s ridiculous. But a front or fake web page isn’t completely ridiculous. Take www.ourcolony.net, a fake webite for xbox 360 marketing. They claim on their page, “not an alternate reality game” (ARG). If you haven’t heard of ARGs, it’s a game where you search media channels as if you are playing a game. For example, you might get an email to a fake site that takes you to a chat room which takes you to something else (maybe a lyric off a commercial CD). How hard would it be to take the alternate reality game content and turn it into real national security / sensitive data?