Cisco doesn't support their VPN's on Windows Vista 64. What does this have to do with Galactic Civilizations? A lot actually.

I have been working on the GalCiv II v2.0 (tentative release date is November 5) to update the AI and take care of a long list of little pet peeves of when I'm playing.

When I do this from home, I need to use the VPN because I use Vista 64-bit. And Cisco's VPN doesn't support 64-bit Vista which makes it tougher to get updates back into the main source tree.  I can still do it, I just have to use other machines at home to transfer but it's annoying.

Speaking of 64-bit, I will tell you right now that no future Stardock developed games will go out that don't explicitly support 64-bit Windows Vista and beyond. And what I mean by that are native 64-bit versions.  Not 32-bit games running in compatibility but full native 64-bit.  Of course we'll still support 32bit too but there's a lot of performance boosts we could provide to 64-bit players in the future.

Some Mac users are pretty unhappy that the latest Macbook doesn't include a Fireware connection.

The article below shows how Apple has a long history of dropping technologies that are heading into the twilight:

http://technologizer.com/2008/10/17/firewire-isnt-alone-a-brief-history-of-features-apple-has-killed/

Great article outlining the different views of left and right wing Americans.

http://townhall.com/columnists/DennisPrager/2008/10/14/there_are_two_irreconcilable_americas

Good article at the WSJ discussing the likely results of the upcoming election.

- Medicare for all. When HillaryCare cratered in 1994, the Democrats concluded they had overreached, so they carved up the old agenda into smaller incremental steps, such as Schip for children. A strongly Democratic Congress is now likely to lay the final flagstones on the path to government-run health insurance from cradle to grave.

Mr. Obama wants to build a public insurance program, modeled after Medicare and open to everyone of any income. According to the Lewin Group, the gold standard of health policy analysis, the Obama plan would shift between 32 million and 52 million from private coverage to the huge new entitlement. Like Medicare or the Canadian system, this would never be repealed.

The commitments would start slow, so as not to cause immediate alarm. But as U.S. health-care spending flowed into the default government options, taxes would have to rise or services would be rationed, or both. Single payer is the inevitable next step, as Mr. Obama has already said is his ultimate ideal.

- The business climate. "We have some harsh decisions to make," Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned recently, speaking about retribution for the financial panic. Look for a replay of the Pecora hearings of the 1930s, with Henry Waxman, John Conyers and Ed Markey sponsoring ritual hangings to further their agenda to control more of the private economy. The financial industry will get an overhaul in any case, but telecom, biotech and drug makers, among many others, can expect to be investigated and face new, more onerous rules. See the "Issues and Legislation" tab on Mr. Waxman's Web site for a not-so-brief target list.

The danger is that Democrats could cause the economic downturn to last longer than it otherwise will by enacting regulatory overkill like Sarbanes-Oxley. Something more punitive is likely as well, for instance a windfall profits tax on oil, and maybe other industries.

- Union supremacy. One program certain to be given right of way is "card check." Unions have been in decline for decades, now claiming only 7.4% of the private-sector work force, so Big Labor wants to trash the secret-ballot elections that have been in place since the 1930s. The "Employee Free Choice Act" would convert workplaces into union shops merely by gathering signatures from a majority of employees, which means organizers could strongarm those who opposed such a petition.

The bill also imposes a compulsory arbitration regime that results in an automatic two-year union "contract" after 130 days of failed negotiation. The point is to force businesses to recognize a union whether the workers support it or not. This would be the biggest pro-union shift in the balance of labor-management power since the Wagner Act of 1935.

Read the whole thing: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122420205889842989.html

I have some advice for all those people thinking about getting a solid state hard drive: Don't do it until AFTER you have at least gone to 64-bit Vista and gotten your memory up to 8 GIGS.

Since the days of Windows 3.0 (or OS/2 2.0) the mantra has been "add more RAM" when it comes to improving system performance.  But a few years ago, people started to quit saying that because, well, power users realized they had bumped up against the 4 gigabyte (really 3 gigabyte) limit of 32-bit Windows XP/Vista.

That's when we started looking for other ways to improve performance. For example, if our 32-bit OS could only see 3 gigs or so and a typical Vista set up is using say 1.5 gigs when doing serious work, that doesn't leave a lot for disk caching.

In days gone by, my 8 megabyte Windows 3.1 or OS/2 box would have at least 25% of those 8 gigs dedicated to disk caching (SmartDrv or OS/2's cache).  I remember having a 4 gig disk cache when I went to 16 megabytes of system RAM.

And yet here we are in 2008, because of the limitations of a 32-bit OS, we find ourselves with very little memory available for things like disk caching. So what do we do? We discover the benefits of having the hard drive be RAM instead of addressing the underlying problem - we need more RAM.

So I upgrade my Thinkpad T400 to 8 gigs and the results are shocking. Despite the machine being far slower than my monster desktop machine at work, its performance feels about the same when it comes to loading things because there's so much memory available for caching.  Right now, as I type this, Windows says it's using 2.6 GIGS for the disk cache.  I've gotten rid of the swap file entirely and the system is just wonderful.

An SSD would be nice to be sure but they're extremely expensive (I know, I have 3 on various machines) and the performance gain is never as much as people hope outside of booting up which most power users rarely do.

Migrating to 64-bit Windows has been one of the most exciting things I've done with regards to PC tech since Windows 2000 came out. 

One last point about 64-bit computing, the faster we get to it, the better off we all will be.  Right now, PC games are up against the 2-gig limit per process of 32-bit Windows.  It's a big problem (all those wonderful high resolution textures use a lot of RAM).  Going to 64-bit will revolutionize games and many other applications and let's face it, memory is pretty cheap compared to the alternatives.

Watching Obama absolutely crush McCain in the third debate. It's just so painful. 

Republicans decided to have a "moderate" old maverick. They got their wish.

Like most companies, Stardock puts together an internal business plan for setting up goals and objectives for the company for the forthcoming year (Stardock's fiscal year begins its execution phase every October 1).  As part of this business plan is an appendix that acts as a critical analysis of what Stardock customers can expect to see and what challenges the company faces to better satisfy customer expectations. 

For this year, it has been decided to make this appendix available to the public. The Stardock 2008 customer report goes over some of the successes Stardock has experienced but also looks at the failings with a considerable amount of criticism in areas that the company needs to improve on.

The contents include:

• Impulse digital distribution status report
• The status on Stardock game projects
• Stardock's position on "DRM" and copy protection explained
• An update on the Gamer's Bill of Rights
• The status of Object Desktop
• A look at the dock technology now used by Dell and others.
• The results of the 2008 customer survey report (VERY interesting results)

If you're interested in the inner workings of a consumer PC software company, you may find this document to be very interesting.

URL: https://www.stardock.com/media/stardockcustomerreport-2008.pdf

The first Demigod ad has gone to press. 

As someone who has been a fan boy of Gas Powered Games since Chris Taylor founded it 10 years ago, I am getting a very good feeling about the direction Demigod is taking.  I feel almost (okay completely) evil in that what is available to the beta testers is such a subset of what's actually available internally.  But Beta 2 which is due out in a few weeks aims to begin changing that.

Demigod is going to be a challenge to market because it's not a typical real-time-strategy game and it's not really an action RPG either. It's a blend.  People who like Defense of the Ancients (DotA) will likely understand the game the best but even there, it's not DotA either, it's its own thing.

But one thing is for sure, Demigod won't be lacking in promotion. With any luck, Demigod will be one of those games that is actively played for years to come.

The Thinkpad T400 laptop from Lenovo is brand new. It's a great laptop - best I've owned so far though it's a little glitchy right now with docking stations.

The gotcha I've had is that it only has two DIMM slots (two memory slots). It requires DDR3 memory too.  But this week, Crucial has started selling 4 GB memory DIMMS (so I can now get 8 gigs).  So I have the order in and hopefully this week I'll be able to upgrade.

I realize this seems incredibly geeky but I'm very excited about going up to 8 gigs. Vista 64 has performed marvelously and having a ton of free RAM for caching is likely to have a significant performance benefit.

Stay tuned.

I really can't wait until this election comes and GOES.

I'm a conservative and I make no bones about it. I keep up on politics and foreign affairs as a hobby all the time. But every 4 years, suddenly lay people who barely pay attention suddenly become political experts ready to insult the intelligence of those who disagree with them.

It's particularly annoying reading Digg, a site I usually like but is populated by left-wingers who, if asked, say that Digg is dominated by left-wingers because Digg attracts intelligent people and intelligent people tend to be liberal (despite ample evidence to the contrary gathered over the years but I digress).

I just want to be able to read tech news or whatever without having some arm-chair political analysis by "some guy" who is clueless about economics or foreign policy.

If people hold different political philosophies and opinions from you, it's not because they're necessarily ignorant or racist or stupid. 

Sometimes people can look at the same data and come to a different conclusion. A little respect for other people's intelligence can go a long way.

Nothing bugs me more than when people insist that their opinions are the same as facts.

As someone who wouldn't be caught dead voting for either Obama or McCain, I am just shocked at the patronizing and arrogance directed towards other individuals purely because their political philosophies are different.

I won't vote for McCain because I don't like his political positions. But I certainly think he's "worthy" of leading the country. Similarly, while I won't vote for Obama, I don't think he's some sort of terrorist. But I think there's plenty of legitimate concern that the man has surrounded himself by people (Ayers, Wright, etc.) who overtly hate our society as it is and whose motto is "change" without defining very explicitly what he hopes to change. It certainly makes me nervous.

But I think both people are decent people and that people support these men not out of ignorance but because they believe that these men represent the way they think the United States should be administered.

If you're for Obama, you probably are unhappy with Bush's foreign policy decisions, you believe that it isn't fair that some people make so much more money than other people, and think that the federal government should ensure a basic standard of living for its citizens.

If you're for McCain, you probably support, to a certain degree, Bush's foreign policy including the invasion of Iraq. You probably believe that it is not the government's business how much people make and that generally, the federal government should try not to be involved in people's daily lives.

I hold the latter position but won't support McCain because he doesn't really have a political ideology other than getting elected (Campaign Finance Reform, poor undertanding of economics, etc.). He might make a good secretary of defense but not a very good President.

But nothing pisses me off more than seeing people showing such naked intolerance for the opinions of other individuals. Thinking Obama would be a terrible President does not make someone ignorant or evil or stupid or racist.