Discussion I had on Treehugger.com:

We all need to make money, that's a given in this modern day and age. The issue greens have with "capitalism" is that it is done almost completely devoid of conscience and consideration for the long term outcomes. ("This asthma medicine may help control your asthma symptoms that have not been brought under control by existing medications.... this medication may increase your risk of death from asthma.")

Capitalism is certainly no panacea. It's just the best of the worst options we have. " src="//forums.treehugger.com/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif" /> Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were certainly not environmental paradises.

My belief is that the most effective means for change is to persuade people that helping the environment is in their best interest in one way or other. Once that happens, that creates a demand for products and services that cater to the people that companies will in turn fill.

In the home I'm building, I'm spending a lot of time dealing with the contractors who produce and install the environmental friendly products -- the solar panels, the LED lights, the close/open cell insulation, the geothermal, the gray water system, the inverters, etc. And every step of the way I'm dealing with people who are to the RIGHT of me politically. 

That takes nothing away from people here. It was TreeHugger.com that set me on the path of finding out what I needed to do to make sure my new house was as green as possible. So I'm certainly not arguing that people here aren't having an impact.

The issue is when one group demonizes people who aren't in lock-step. Or worse, creating strawmen of their political opponents and imbuing them with traits that are simply figments of their imagination.

In one conversation on this forum, I was told I was anti-green specifically because I don't buy the CO2 hypothesis on AGW. My deeds meant nothing, only my faith. As a conservative, it is just as easy to build a liberal strawman - the hapless hippie whose idea of helping the environment is bitching on forums and composting twice a year while driving some 30 year old van 50,000 miles a year. But that's just as much of a strawman as the one SgtMaj constructed for conservatives.

We simply do not accept the notion that straight, short term economic gains should be the driving force in making business decisions. Which at this point in time, is exactly the way the majority of "Capitalists" do business. 

We do not support companies that continue to throw all other considerations and concerns under the bus in their single-minded pursuit of ever growing profit margins.

The problem I have with this is that it's so subjective as to be meaningless. 

IMO, true environmentalism is already winning -- at least in the United States. And it's almost entirely due through increased awareness which has created a demand that business look to fill. Even Walmart is now stocking organic products. That's a big deal.

In just the past decade, there have been tangible results in the realm of energy conservation, reduction of waste (people bringing their own bags to the grocery store), a focus on cleaner water and air, more awareness of taking care of the environment around us.

Compare how people live today versus the 70s. I can still practically smell the lead that used to be in the air and people cutting down all their trees to make room for their grass or dumping fertilizer on their lake front grass. 

In another decade or two, windows will start providing solar power to homes, virtually all new cars will be EV, new homes will increasingly have geothermal to lower costs even further, and on and on. 

And the reason this will happen is because people will demand this sort of thing in their products and it will increasingly be reflected in basic building standards in local communities.

It won't happen because a bunch of militant greenies bullied their way to getting oppressive federal laws in place. It'll happen in spite of that.

Original: http://forums.treehugger.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=13782&start=30

So much going on this year. 2010 is THE year.

2009…ugh.

For our family, 2009 was awful.  My wife’s closest friend since childhood died of cancer. It is something that we are still coming to terms with. Few people have close friends from the time they’re small children all the way through their adult lives consistently. 

And professionally 2009 was rough. Demigod’s launch was a very difficult time.  When it came out, the network libraries we had licensed just didn’t work right.  Those of you who know me know I don’t care who’s fault it is. I am all about making something work. Demigod pushed that to the limit. Our name was on the box. It was my job to make good but the effort took its toll one me and my team that I recruited in to fix Demigod.

2010…w00t. 

2010, by contrast I am very much looking forward to.

Personally, our family is very excited about “Future House” coming to completion.  It’s supposed to be done next Fall. As it’s come together I fully admit it’s excessive. I didn’t really mean for the house to be so ridiculous. That’s the problem with blue prints. The whole house was only like 16 inches on 14 inches on paper. That’s not big right? How it became a 20,000 square foot monstrosity was a long journey.

Our three children continue to be amazing for us. Each one so different and interesting. Debbie and I are so relieved that the kids are so healthy. I’m not sure if any of them have actually ever been “sick”.  They’re so bright and so kind, it makes them very enjoyable to be around.

“I will work harder”

Professionally, things are shaping up very well. This year will be a challenger.  Now, at work, I relate the most to Boxer from Animal Farm. Whatever challenge there is, my answer is to just work harder. That almost did me in on Demigod. There was a week last Spring where I would work all day and all night with the dev team to code up a new networking system and then stay on the next day to work with QA and GPG on integration and then repeat again and again for weeks straight. I gained weight, lost some hair, went a bit gray. I’m mostly back to normal now though I still have to lose some weight.

Control..or not?

This year, the constant hiring has made it harder and harder for me to be directly involved in every facet of the company. The first time this really hit home was with an incident in which Impulse had a game called Warlords Battlecry 3 where the publisher had removed its copy protection but not the code in the actual game that looked for it resulting in a diminished game experience. In the old days, I’d have played the game myself. But as we’ve gotten larger, I’ve had to rely on managers – which is still fine. But now my managers have to rely on their own minions who report to the managers who then report to me and that got us into some pain there. 

The main things at work that I  “control” have been Elemental and well that was it.  In October, I added Object Desktop back to my list of things I directly ran because I wasn’t happy with the attempt to mainstream. Everyone wants to go after (no pun intended) Joe User.  I don’t want to go after them. I want Power User. 

I have started to get back into Sins of a Solar Empire. Diplomacy, the new add on, does improve the game a lot. I spent a couple days making new maps for it and torturing those involved on various changes I wanted to get in in order to keep players from gaming it (too easy right now but tomorrow will be much better).

Digital Distribution

The other area that I’ve been involved but not as directly has been Impulse.  That’s been more collaborative because there are so many moving parts.  It’s been hard to compete with Steam since I’m a fan of Steam. More than a fan. A fanboy. But it really does need the competition. The whole forcing people to bundle the Steam client in order to make use of Steamworks is BS. It’s shameful. If Microsoft pulled that, there’d be riots. But because it’s Valve, they get cut slack (including by me – fanboy). But I’m not thinking of Valve 2010. I’m thinking of Valve 2015 when it’s owned by some mega company and then it won’t be so cool if someone were to own the whole market. 

If Impulse had dominant market share, I’d be tempted to start a competitor to it.  Heck, when WindowBlinds started dominating skinning so much, I used to promote our competitors (Chroma at the time) – much to the consternation of my team. I just don’t like anyone dominating something.

Kids growing up

My oldest son turned 13 this year.  He’s such a good kid. I just am not prepared for having a child that has reached that stage. It’s amazing how fast he grew from his being a little kid to the young man he’s growing into.  I always imagined being a better dad than I actually am. I had always assumed I would play LEGOs with my kids. Or want to be the coach of the various sports they play. I don’t. 

The year I gave up politics

I used to follow politics a lot more than I do now. As a conservative, I was pretty excited when the Republicans took over congress and Bush was President. But given how badly they screwed things up, it’s pushed me more and more towards the libertarian camp. Government seems to attract dumb people. Don’t give them power.

Last year I got into trouble because I remarked on Facebook that if UPS was going to boycott Fox News then I’d use a different shipper. This got picked up everywhere. Ironically, I don’t watch Fox News except on the rare occasion. I prefer the Internet for my news. But holy cow did the political nuts come out of the woodwork for that. I instantly became a “Neocon”.  I never realized that ones choice of shipper was so crucial.

The book

I never thought I’d get to write books that would be published in an actual store. This year, I have the opportunity. But it’s a lot harder than I thought. I have a new respect for good writers. I salute you.

Lenovo has come out with the T410 – a major update to their laptop line. It has a better screen. Built in eSATA. High quality camera built in. And of course a massively better processor than what I have in my T400.

But the thing is, my T400, as beat up as it has gotten over the past 2 and a half years, is still ridiculously fast and useful thanks to a few decisions that have really worked out.

First, I got 8 GB of memory and 64-bit Windows (first Vista, now Windows 7). This was a huge deal because after awhile, everything is in the disk cache and I can load up Word or Outlook as fast as those programs take to restore from the taskbar on most computers.

Second, I got an Intel X-25 SSD. When combined with the above, loading programs is instantaneous.

In fact, let me show you:

And mind you, this is a 2.5 year old laptop.

And I didn’t do something special in that video. Heck, you guys know what kind of hit to performance doing a video capture does.

Third, I got the Verizon WAN option which I didn’t think would be nearly as useful as it has been. I use this feature a LOT. There are just so many times when it is a pain to hook up to some WiFi and the Verizon performance is so good that, as a practical matter, it’s “good enough” for whatever it is I have to do.

Put these factors together and the Lenovo ThinkPad T400 is still just a wonderful machine. No new laptop for me but if you’re looking for a new PC that’s USEFUL and not too expensive, check out the new ThinkPad T410.

http://gammasquad.uproxx.com/2010/01/this-is-cgi-all-of-this

That video is ALL CGI!

My 9 year old loves to design games.

We need your help.

For DesktopX 4 our goal is to clean up DesktopX and put it in a place where we can start to build up on it again in a way that is, to be candid, economically viable.

So to start here is what we have in mind specifically for DesktopX 4.0:

New objects

It has been a long time since we have updated the content in DesktopX 4.

To many of you, this sort of thing isn’t that big of a deal. But to end users, having animated objects on their desktop that do interesting things can be very enticing.

Cleaning up old problems

This is where we need your help. I’m sure there are plenty of posts that outline this or that issue that users would like to see addressed. If someone can consolidate them that would be extremely helpful so that we can look and see which are doable, which are doable but only helpful to a tiny number of users, and which ones just can’t realistically be done.

Windows 7 and UAC

As a practical matter, we won’t officially include or support anything that doesn’t work perfectly on Windows 7 with UAC on its default setting.  That doesn’t mean users can’t create things that require UAC to be off or only work on Windows XP but those things won’t be supported by us.

Open Sourcing the plugins

These are the plugins that come with DesktopX. Some of these will likely go away but the source code will be made available.  Note that right now, none of these are certified for Windows 7. Until they are certified for Windows 7, they’re at risk of being removed.

Adding new plugins

Going forward, we won’t be developing new plugins. We just don’t have the budget for it. We never had intended on creating any plugins beyond samples (otherwise, we would have just made the features a base part of the program).

If someone wants to submit to us plugins they’d like to include with the program (we’d need source code for liability purposes) let us know.

Things likely to go away

We will probably move away from taskbar and system tray functionality. It gets increasingly difficult to manage that sort of thing. If someone wants to create a plugin for it, that’s great but we want to move away from having to having to support such functionality because every version of Windows ends up with a different way of getting to that data (particularly the system tray).

So that’s where we’re at

Please comment here on what you’d like to see. Be as specific as you can.

Thanks!

I don't think the build I have is the public build but here are 5 big deals for me personally about Sins Diplomacy;

#1 In single player, I now have some means of influencing relations with different players that I didn't have before.

#2 Three words: Diplomatic Victory Condition

#3 Cruel AI level. Yea, the AI isn't always as intelligent as I'd like but at Cruel, it's pretty bloody challenging.

#4 Envoys. 'nuff said.

#5 Pirate Missions. Now I actually have the option to play the game as an economic power rather than just a military power. The more money you pump into pirates, the nastier their attack.

The WinCustomize forums going to be getting some serious upgrades in the coming weeks. For one thing, they'll return to the original design of a more flattened experience with sub-forums being "tags". It make it much much easier for people to find things than it is currently.

Another area of improvement is the search. We plan to do a lot there.

And lastly, we want to have skin comments be tied into the forums.  

Stay tuned!