RedBeard’s Curious Life

Before I had WordPress all set up, I was still ranting away. Please take a moment to reflect on those old rantings. Back then my primitive php skills, combined with massive spambot attacks, meant you could not comment on them, but this fancy blog system suffers less from those problems and you should post any commentary here. Some of those rants have lost their lustre, but the essence of some still survives. I’ll give a brief rundown of how I view each of them now after a couple years have passed:

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Games I played this past fall: Hitman Blood Money, Max Payne 2, Dark Messiah, Dead Rising, Gears of War, Viva Pinata, and the Burger King games.
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We’ve had devices called PDAs for a while now, purporting to be “personal digital assistants”, but in reality they’re more like digital address books. A real assistant doesn’t just file your notes and remind you of appointments and force you to do most of the work involved in such tasks; a real assistant does useful work, such as taking notes, fleshing out dictations, compiling information into reports, and arranging appointments around the schedules of all involved. Some argue that with modern organizational software (think MS Office, Outlook/Exchange in particular), the effort of performing assistive tasks is diminished to the level that someone can do the work themselves just as quickly and effectively as telling a human assistant to do it.

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So, let’s see what’s going on in the world lately…
Litigation, extortion, and gaming ahoy!

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I bought some new games recently, and instead of just sticking them all on a shelf, I actually played some of them! Elder Scrolls Oblivion, Tomb Raider Legend, SiN Episodes Emergence, and Beyond Good & Evil. I bought some more but haven’t played them yet.

*draft outline*

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United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: “[The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”

Towards this goal, our Congress has implemented a number of laws and offices with the intention of protecting the production of intellectual property. The primary areas of interest are summarized as follows:

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Attention people who make software, particularly games:
DO NOT RUN AS ADMIN.

If I have a security policy in effect on my machine that prevents your installer from futzing around with system-wide settings, there’s probably a good reason for it. Windows might not have the most robust and user-friendly security system in the world, but the concept of a game failing to install because it can’t write to the system registry or the “program files” folder is pretty pathetic. Granted, by default all Windows users are administrators, but that’s no excuse to make a few simple changes that will vastly increase the usability and decrease the annoyance factor of your product for those who have smarter sysadmins. If you simply have to run as admin, at least run your installer and game through AppVerifier with limited-user testing enabled, and you’ll get a big fat load of warnings and errors about silly little things that will break your program unless you take a few minutes to correct them. But seriously, you can and should write and run all your code as a limited user.

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Another post where I jotted an outline and then didn’t feel like fleshing it out:

*number of computing devices used by a person burgeoning (home, work, e-cafe, phone, library, car, tv, fridge, …)
*management of information becomes exponentially complex across geography and hardware/software boundaries
*hardware failure/loss often results in irreparable damages, and backups are rarely complete and up-to-date

*virtualized data solves these problems…
*information lives on numerous devices with on-demand access for more devices
*universal system failure much less likely

problems…
*memory availability across devices (1TB PC vs 1MB phone)
*network transfer sometimes unreliable or lethargic (cable upstream icky)
*privacy, authentication, information poisoning
*network disconnection

concessions:
*not all data needs to be universally accessible, only “unique” data: personal settings & documents – configurations, bookmarks, photos, spreadsheets, savegames, logs
*needs at least 2*workingset total system storage to mirror everything
*avoids transfer of huge amounts of data, and large documents can be previewed before committing to full transfer
*compression and versioning can trade CPU work for network bandwidth
*device peering can avoid complete network disconnection (cellphone<->notebook while on plane)

Now that 2005 is over, I feel like documenting my year in gaming. As previously stated, I have a collection of unplayed games. Some are old, some new. For kicks, I put these in chronological order.

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I tend to upgrade my computer piece-by-piece as I find constrictions in my computing experience. However, there are instances in hardware progression when single components cannot be individually swapped out. The CPU and motherboard are usually linked in such manner, but it seems that the torch has now been passed from AGP to PCI-E, and DDR2 looms, anxious to lay claim to a torch of its own. Adding to this state of affairs is the generally high expense of increasing my megahertz or cores numbers, which leads me to conclude that the value in such increases is somewhat lacking.

I’m looking at roughly a grand to grab a dual-core CPU with a higher clock frequency than my single-core, a motherboard to support it, and a dual-DVI PCI-E videocard to fit into the slot on said motherboard. Dropping a grand on hardware that will result in roughly two or three times performance boost just doesn’t strike me as good value. Not to mention I’ll be clamoring for a DDR2 motherboard+CPU once those become available, with the added expense of replacement RAM.

So my conclusion for the time being is that I’ll sit this round out, perhaps grabbing a decent dual-DVI AGP card if I can find one for roughly a Benjamin.