Caused a minor outrage on Qt3 a couple years ago by being uncomfortable with individual leaders having their own logo. I stupidly pointed out that personalized logos have commonly been used by totalitarian movements in the past (Godwin alert!)
But you know, it’s still creepy.
And you know what else is creepy?
To politicians: STOP IT.
Multiplicity 2 was released today.
You can get it here:
https://www.stardock.com/products/multiplicity/
Here’s a video of it in action:
What makes Multiplicity special isn’t that it’s the first program ever that can enable users to use multiple computers at once. You can get a digital switch to do that and heck, there’s freeware out there that will let you use a keyboard and mouse to move back and forth between computers.
Instead, what makes Multiplicity unique is in the execution. It’s designed to make your local machines function as a single unit. So, for instance, you can drag and drop files smoothly from one machine to another. You can copy and paste images and formatted text between machines.
It’s also about how easy it is to set up. You just pretty a few keys one each machine to get it going and you’re ready to go. The configuration process is seamless.
If you’re a laptop user with a main work or home machine, you’ve probably had your share of emailing a document from one machine to another. Here at work, we often have one machine for “content creation” and they’ll want to have their laptop next to it that they use for chatting, web browsing, email, etc. And often they’ll want to be able to quickly move back and forth between them, copying and pasting between them, etc.
If you have two PCs that are near each other, give it a shot:
Jury is out on the new maps. The satellite images are newer than what is on Bing or Google though.
Siri is noticeably better than it was previously. I was able to ask “Where’s a good Pizza place around here?” and it got me a list. I asked it “Are there any new Bruce Willis movies out?” to which it found the Expendables and The Cold Light of Day and where they’re showing.
I haven’t noticed anything else. I saw Passbook (the new app) but can’t tell you if it does anything useful other than in theory.
The full change log can be found here.
Anyone who has an SSD already know this. But there are still people out there who aren’t sure on this. The performance difference of putting in an SSD is greater than any single upgrade I’ve ever seen since the days back in the early 90s of going from 4M to 8M in memory on Windows NT or OS/2.
October is going to be insanely good.
I have a ThinkPad X1 Carbon on order for my wife.
A new Kindle white on order for me.
And of course the iPhone 5 will be generally available.
It does appear technological progress and innovation is accelerating.
Over at MacRumors they have an article reporting on benchmarking results from PrimateLabs.
The iPhone 5 comes in with a total score of 1601. The iPad 3, by contract, is 766.
Mine’s on order.
Some of you may recall that I was going on an extended sabbatical after War of Magic shipped.
I still remain active online but as I detailed on Freakonomics, the long hours over many years had taken their toll and I was going to diversify what I spent my days doing. What started out as a sabbatical after War of Magic evolved for the reasons I outlined on the podcast into a semi-retirement.
My libertarian friends have called it "Going Galt". But that's really not an accurate way to put it. I'm not striking or taking my ball and going home.
What I did was take the approach with Stardock that had been taken with Neowin.net (we are a co-owner of that site). Which was to be hands-off. I'd stay involved in smaller ways (write computer AI, help with web design, transfer skills).
On the games side, Derek Paxton took over Stardock Entertainment. His experience making Fall from Heaven (the Civ IV mod that is) and his business experience at Novell has really helped transform the games side into producing much better quality games than we previously were capable of doing.
On the software side, Jamie McGuffie, former VP of Compuware joined us and has really improved the way software gets made here. We make a lot fewer things but we make them a lot better.
It took over a year to make that transition but for the past year, it's been a different world for my family, myself, and the companies I participate in.
But stepping back isn't "going Galt". I'm still the CEO of Stardock, for example. It's just that my primary sources of income no longer come from these entities.
Instead, the new team has the vested interest in the company's performance. My role is to play it forward. Transfer skills and help people achieve what their individual goals might be.
By contrast, Going Galt is a reference to the book Atlas Shrugged where the "movers and shakers" went on strike in response to a society that increasingly believed the individual should be sacrificed for the collective.
I don't buy into that philosophy. I just find that such beliefs are too simplistic for this age. At some point, people's priorities change. What matters to them changes. I wonder how Rand's writings would have been if she had had children, for instance.
The problem with wealth is diminishing returns. At some point, it stops making much of a difference in your day to day life. And my point in saying that is that in John Galt's world, there were no diminishing returns. Industrial accomplishment and wealth were infinite drivers. But they're not.
I wrote many, if not most of the quests in the Elemental games. And I did it with notepad. The system, is pretty arcane. I've asked for quest editors to be made internally but the problem boils down to - I'm free and I make quests so they can't justify budgeting a quest editor for me.
But being painfully familiar with the XML structure of quests, my suggestion would be to ignore the way the XML is made and instead focus on what types of quests you want.
So I'd set it up as a wizard of some kind.
Once you have this working, which handles the typical quest, you can expand on it.
But this is the way I'd recommend handling it. I wouldn't try to make it a sophisticated tool because you'll never satisfy those who are really into making hard core quests. But if you make something relatively simple where people just choose pictures and loot and monsters to fight then you can end up with a lot of users and an incentive to keep making it better and better.
