I don't know if this has been widely reported yet but...

http://www.impulsedriven.com/publisher/valve

There’s been a lot of talk about the New York Times article on why Iphones are made in china.

If you haven’t read it, you can find the article here.

I was reading comments on Slashdot and it was apparent that most of them didn’t read the article. They assumed it was all because of “cheap labor”.

According to the article, it has more to do with the type of expertise that is readily available there – lots of people with mid level technical knowledge (i.e. people with say 2 year degree equivalents) that tend to get poo-pooed here in the US.

One thing that I found interesting was the number of people who place the blame on Apple for making these choices even as Americans outsource every day when they purchase products that say clearly “Made in China”.

Mashable Business has a good article today on starting a business. They list 6 things which are very useful.

It’s missing a few items that I think should be added or emphasized more. Here are 7 through 10 that I would have added:

7. Get used to failing often.

The article talks about not being afraid to fail. But I think most people will take that as meaning that your business might fail.  In my 20 years of running a business, 90% of the things I’ve worked on have failed (from a profit point of view).  You have to get used to pouring your heart in soul into things that will be deemed worthless and be ready to keep trying new things that also will likely fail.

8. If you succeed, be ready to have your success trivialized

It takes a thin skin to listen to some public school teacher rant, during here lengthy summer vacation, on how unfair it is that you have so much more than he does. For every successful business person there’s 9 who lost everything they put in. And like #7 mentions, even the 1 out of 10 that do succeed have 9 out of 10 of their efforts fail too. People will discount the rare combination of skills necessary to be successful. When we sold Impulse, lots of people asked why I didn’t “just hire” someone to run it rather than sell it to Gamestop. My god, if I could “just hire” people to do what I do I’d do it in an instant.  People who can do what I can do are already busy – running successful businesses.

9. You are always responsible

Your level of involvement on a product or service is irrelevant. If it fails, it’s your responsibility. Don’t start a business if you are not prepared to take full responsibility for everything that goes wrong. This is easier said than done. Last year we made a game that was a disaster. I had spent a total of maybe 4 months on it out of the 3 years it was in development. But my job, as the business owner was to get out in front and accept responsibility because, as the business owner, it IS your responsibility. It’s not about “fault” or “blame” it’s about responsibility.

10. If you fail, you will get pity, if you succeed, you will get estrangement

People have no limit on how much sympathy they will give to someone who fails. But they have a very limited amount of good will to share with those that are successful. If you do fail at your business, your friends and family will be there to support you (probably). If you succeed, beyond a certain point, there will be resentment. You can either hide your success and reduce that resentment (which means not enjoying the fruits of your sacrifices) or you can enjoy your success but deal with some level of angst from friends and family.

Victor Davis Hanson has a very lengthy and interesting article today on the various Republican candidates.

I can’t say I’m terribly excited about any of them.

You’ve got Newt who is all over the place on issues and frankly, makes me think it’s more about him and his love of power than any thought of public service.

You’ve got Romney who I can’t even understand why he’s running in the first place as he doesn’t seem to be very passionate about anything.

There’s Santorum who I wouldn’t vote for except as a last resort.

And finallly…Ron Paul who I nod in agreement for awhile until he starts talking about foreign policy where he loses me (we didn’t deserve 9/11 and won’t vote for anyone who suggests otherwise, even obliquely).

I am just baffled that the President is blocking the Keystone pipeline. It’s such a win-win on all fronts.

Powerline article:

Penny Arcade today:

So who has a Kinect? What do you think of it?

I have MacOS X Lion running on a 30 inch Cinema Display.  If you have the latest Xcode, you can use Quartz Debugger to enable it.  What it does is allow you to run in a sort of retinal display.  In my case, it turns my 2560x1440 to 1280x720 but with very high DPI. It looks absolutely gorgeous and is exactly what I think most people have wanted out of their high resolution displays all along.

Apparently, new Macs coming out this year are going to have screens that do crazy high resolution (2880 x 2400 for instance) so that users can run them like they would at 1440x1200 except for having everything be super sharp.

I have to say, it is a really great experience to see text and the UI this clear. In fact, it's going to be hard to go back to any other type of display.

On occasion, for those who are feeling daring, I'll be releasing a build off my own machine with some tweaks and changes that haven't been checked into the main project.

Here's this week's EXE update (unzip into to your fallen enchantress directory)

http://draginol.stardock.net/fe-012012.zip

Here's what is different versus the public beta:

+ AI better at expansion with regards to pioneers

+ AI handles magic *much* better strategically

+ Several crash fixes. There is one known crash issue that I have not been able to fix that I think relates to external improvements being destroyed. It's infrequent but it's there.

+ Fixed (I hope) the "stuck turn" problem some have reported -- this is a complex issue due to all the threads interacting.

+ Fixed (I hope) the lock up that some people have reported -- this is a deadlock that results from multiple threads locking conflicting game resources

+ Modified the process event manager to make animation a bit smoother late game when there's lots of things happening on screen

+ Performance improvements

+ Fixed -- I think, the bug that caused AI players to sometimes declare war when you hadn't met them.

Make sure you back up your existing .exe just to be safe. It should be fine but you never know.

If you are running this version, put all reports in this thread.

Derek and I have been passing on the messages and emails and of course various posts on the impressions of Elemental: Fallen Enchantress beta 1. Thank you for the kind comments and encouragement. We really appreciate it. You can imagine how anxious we were about this beta release.

We will be lurking the forums (and third party forums as well -- Si vous savez ce que je veux dire) to gather as much information as possible on everything from bugs, user interface tweaks, game play suggestions, to feature requests and sitting down to determine what to put in there.

We are still some months away from release. There is work to be done but it appears we’re on the right track. There’s still a lot of work ahead for us to do. Lot of cool stuff to get in there and of course lots of bug fixing.

The current plan is to open the beta up a bit more next week.  Eventually, everyone who bought Elemental: War of Magic in 2010 or earlier will be in the beta.

With any luck, by the time we release, Elemental: Fallen Enchantress will be the PC fantasy strategy game that players were looking for.  Stay tuned!