I'm a little short on time so I will have to revisit this topic later but I wanted to write it down before I headed out.

I have occasionally contended that Islam is an ideology that is also a religion. The religion part I have no problem with. But the ideology I do.  I believe there is something inherent in the Islamic ideology that promote violence and intolerance.

But let's put that aside for a moment and look at Communism.

Communism, as an ideology IS peaceful.  The theory behind communism is that we all work together to contribute to the whole of society equally.  We do what we're best at to help society as a whole.  It is a Utopian philosophy.

Yet, Communism resulted in the deaths of more human beings in history than any other ideology (Fascism is a distant second).

Why is this? Because for whatever reason, Communism seems to lead its most vigilant believers into enacting policies to enforce the ideology which results in deaths.  Because most people aren't natural communists (not all people contribute equally) the "true believers" realize they have to force them to adhere to communism.  When this is done, the results are catastrophic (famine being the biggest problem but elimination of non-believers as well).

Christianity had its issues as well.  In Christianity, only those who accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior have the ability to go to heaven. Therefore, the true believers went to great lengths to convert as many people over in order to "save them".  Zealots ultimately killed thousands of people in the process of doing this.  But the "save them" part of Christianity is, in my view, not potent enough to be really considered an ideology.

The point is, ideologies have different effects on the truly hard core.  To know whether an ideology is a problem or not we have to look at it over a long period of time and on a global scale.  We need to make sure that it isn't local culture, or race, or local politics getting intermixed in with the actions of people who adhere to a particular religion or ideology.

That is why I see Islam as a dangerous ideology. That no matter where you go, no matter how materially content they are, they are much more prone (as a percent) than believers in other religions to violence and intolerance. 

And just as with Communism, which in itself is a Utopian philosophy that contains no violence at its core, Islam seems to cause its true believers to be much more likely to do things that are very very bad.

In the on-going Google vs. Microsoft war of cool map technology, I would say Microsoft at this point has the definitive advantage.  While not a new feature, the "Birds Eye View" feature of Maps.Live.Com is pretty incredible (you can see the Stardock building from above in stunning close up detail).  The Google equivalent is basically black and white, far less detailed and so old that it's from before the building was constructed (Google doesn't have a "Birds Eye View").  To switch Live Maps into Birds Eye View, click on the second icon on the right side of the toolbar over on the right side of the screen (the one with pictures of buildings and such on it).  While Birds Eye View isn't available in rural area, it is available for large swaths of the populated area. 

You can even look at it from different points of view:

(it's not just rotated, it's a different shot entirely).   I can see my car!

To try it out, go to http://maps.live.com and pay around with the toolbar.

There's been a lot of debate this past week over the survey of American Muslims and their views.

The left has used the survey to paint American Muslims as being "mainstream" while the right has been using it to present American Muslims as being ready for Jihad?

What's the truth? I have linked to the actual 108 page survey below so you can read it for yourself.  But here are the facts of the survey:

47% of American Muslims see themselves as Muslims first and Americans second.

35% of Muslims support the war in Afghanistan

8% support suicide bombing sometimes or often

40% believe Arabs were responsible for 9/11 attacks (60% either don't know or don't think so)

63% say they are Democrats

Just a day after getting into an on-air debate on the day-time TV show, "The View" with co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Rosie has announced she's leaving the view immediately.

On the show, Rosie accused American troops in Iraq of being terrorists. "655,000 Iraqi civilians have died. Who are the terrorists?" Rosie, a stranger to reality, fabricated a number that has no backing anywhere to tar our troops.  Hasselbeck, who is the lone conservative on the show, asked her to clarify.

In a lengthy heated exchange Rosie called Hasselbeck a coward not responding to the questions of critics of the war (how does one respond to an idiotic, out of her mind nut job who makes up facts and believes fringe conspiracy theories?). Hasselbeck retorted "What's cowardly is not answering ones own rhetorical questions."

Rosie examplifies the bully - stand up to them and they fall apart.  But more accurately, Rosie is typical of the American far-left -- as soon as they're faced with opposition that forces them to back up their looney positions they flee. 

I never watched The View. My wife used to until Rosie came on and turned it into a crazy left-wing talk show.  But I certainly am glad that the show will no longer be such a ready vehicle of crazy left-wing rantings. 

Good for Elisabeth Hasselbeck for standing up to Rosie. I wish she'd done it sooner. And thanks for her demonstrating once again that far-left loonies tend to crumble when faced with resistance.  The intolerance of the left strikes again.

Worst Modern Presidents in my opinion and why:

#1 Johnson. He created the "Great Society" which resulted in a massive entitlement culture that has created multiple generations of dependents and an ever increasing drain on society with little to show for it.  He also got us into Vietnam with a strategy that makes Iraq look like a masterpiece.

#2 Carter. Incompetent on so many levels. His handling of the domestic economy showed a complete lack of understanding of economics. His foreign policy was a disaster -- every time we hear about a nuclear Iran, think Jimmy Carter. It was his decision to not support the Shah that we have the Iran we have. His handling of the hostage crisis was demoralizing. And like many American liberals, he believes in showing his own principle by having othres sacrifice such as his boycotting the 1980 Summer Olympics.

#3 George W. Bush. Incompetent to the extreme. The man with no ideology. It's as if that lazy sales guy you know somehow managed to become President. Inept and inarticulate. He has wrecked the Republican party for the forseable future. More prone to croneyism than any modern President. Encouraged reckless spending in congress while still managing to get no credit for being "compassionate" even as he expanded entitlements, supports amnesty on immigration, and bloated up the EPA and Education budgets. Too stupid to manage foreign policy, he ignored advice from people who actually know what they're talking about to stick by his buddies who took a successful liberation of Iraq and turned it into a mess. 

#4 Woodrow Wilson.  The racist, elitist, knows-better-than-you President got the US into World War I, a war in which the US had zero interest in and cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.  Anyone who thinks Iraq was something we shouldn't have been involved in and mourns the 3,000 American dead, then you should really despise Wilson.

#5 Warren G. Harding. Having him on this list is like shooting a fish in a barrel. Of course he was awful but he didn't really do any serious damage either. He was just a petty, corrupt, blah blah blah.  But he corruptness didn't result in 117,000 American deaths like Wilson's did or set up his country for long-term economic disaster like Johnson or destroy his political party like Bush.  So while Harding was a bad President, he was mostly harmless.

I've been doing a lot of interviewing lately for hiring new people and one thing that has become abundantly clear is how unprepared most people are for job interviews.

Here are a few handy tips that may seem like common sense to some but amazingly are not done by 75% of the people I interview (especially recent college graduates):

#1 KNOW THE COMPANY.  Get on the website and research the company. Make sure you know as much as you can about the company.  When I interview people, I tend to do a quick search for them. Do they have a MySpace page or Facebook page or something else that lets me find out a bit about them.  You'd be surprised how many people are tripped up when they are caught knowing nothing about our company but I know the name of their dog.

#2 BE CONFIDENT & ENERGETIC.  Believe in yourself. Nobody wants to hire someone that they think will need to be nursed for months.  We hire people in order to have LESS work to do.  People who aren't confident or energetic are more likely to be the people who sit around waiting to be managed.

#3 KNOW WHY YOU SHOULD HAVE THE JOB. The question "Why do you think we should hire you for this position versus other people who have applied" is a pretty common question.  Don't answer "Because I'm a nice person." Sell yourself, make the case. If you've researched the job, you should be able to come up with a good rationale for your unique capabilities.

#4 DON'T BULLSHIT. Male interviewees are much worse about this. Especially young (right out of college) males.  It takes a serious amount of arrogance for some kid to think they can actually bullshit us on our field of expertise. If I ask "How strong is your math background? Do you know Calc?" and you say "Oh yea, I'm awesome at calculus!" then you're pretty doomed if you don't know the derivative of 4X^2.

#5 FOLLOWUP.  I had some awesome candidates that just didn't followup or didn't follow-up quickly enough.  You should followup with any correspendence you had with the company within 24 hours. This is especially true after the final interview.  You absolutely must followup with an email after the interview.

#6 HUMILITY IS GOOD. We always ask people to rate themselves on a scale from 1 to 10 on a variety of issues depending on the job.  The number of recent graduates who rate themselves a 9 out of 10  or 10 out of 10 (and we tell them that a 10 would be "total expert") is remarkable.  There's nothing more deflating for a candidate who has just answered a 10 out of 10 in C++ knowledge or math or general computer knowledge than being quickly crushed by a series if expert questions that they have no idea about.  A good answer is 6 or 7 -- even if you feel pretty confident.  Unless you have software on the shelves or a book or whatever, answering above 7 reeks of arrogance. 

As a side note, also be nice to the office staff. Amazingly, a decent % of candidates will be rude or short with my office assistants thinking their opinions are of know consequence. First thing I ask my office assistants was how polite the candidate was to them.

#7 HAVE A PLAN.  Where do you see yourself in 5 years is a typical question. Have some idea of where you're going.

#8 "LIKE" and "YOU KNOW" are not your friends. Drives me crazy when candidates pepper their responses with immense amounts of "Like" and "You know".  Females seem much worse about this.  Practice speaking and eliminate those two phrases from your vocabular as much as you can.

#9 DON'T BE ASHAMED OF OLD JOBS. Sometimes I'll discover that someone has removed from their resume menial jobs they've had.  Don't.  Those are very important jobs that show character building.  I won't even consider hiring someone who has never worked a "crap job".  The kid with the 3.7 GPA is not very impressive if they've never had a job. They'll lose everytime to the kid with the 2.9 who worked through school.  People without crap jobs are historically much less reliable.

#10 INTEGRITY IS KING.  More so than your job knowledge, employers will look at your integrity and ability to deal with conflict. We're at work 8+ hours a day, who wants to deal with someone who's difficult? Be honest.  The worst answer to the question "How have you dealt with interpersonal conflict at previous jobs" is to say "I've never had any." As it means either you have no job experience or you aren't telling the whole truth either of which is doom. We all have disagreements with coworkers from time to time, even if they're mild, it's a question of finding out how you deal with those disagreements.

Hope this helps!

Transform your entire Windows desktop experience with the new Pirate Premium Suite! This suite, when applied, will change nearly every element of your Windows GUI!

Some users have asked to be "wowed" by Stardock Design and the Pirate suite aims to deliver that WOW.

The suite includes:

• A WindowBlinds visual style (which supports both XP and Windows Vista)
• An icon package that not only has 117 icons but has full Windows Vista icon package support (that means 256x256 sized icons and live folder support!)
• Multiple wallpaper backgrounds
• A CursorXP cursor pack that will work both with the current CursorXP and with the upcoming CursorVista enhanced cursor applying program.
• A new Logon screen 
• A boot screen
• ObjectDock background
• A weather, clock calendar, media player gadget!
• And to top it all off, a talking Pirate gadget!

This is definitely one of the best suites ever made. Check out these screenshots below:

Pirate Suite in action 

Pirate CursorXP cursors

Get the Pirate Suite now! 

 NOTE: Requires Theme Manager 2.5 (Object Desktop users use Stardock Central to update).

Tom Francis at PC Gamer has just completed a 20-day game of Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar. Started back in April, Tom chronicles the rise of his interstellar empire and how he interacted with the often hostile aliens of the galaxy controlled by the GalCiv artificial intelligence engine.

It's an absolute must read.

[View PC Gamer Blog]

So beta 4 of the upcoming new version (v1.6) of Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar has resulted in massively improved performance for most users. Yay.  I can't really explain why we decided to go and do it other than the fact that we have learned so much new stuff in the past several months working on the unnamed fantasy strategy game that we wanted to incorporate some of the techniques into Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar.

On the downside, a small % of users have found no speed increase and a few have had weird graphics glitches. Which is a bummer.  Down the line we hope to resolve it but since we need to get this show on the road, we're going to have to put in an option to let people choose between the existing engine and the new Enhanced Graphics Engine.  On my somewhat wimpier home machine, when I'm playing in a large galaxy with lots of ships I was getting around 20 frames per second when enough ships were on the screen. Now, I get 60 (it's capped at 60) on the same screen. 

A couple people have emailed asking what Stardock's building looks like. Here's where we work:

The game team is on the top floor.  The web team is on the main floor.  The bottom floor is empty right now as we prepare for expanion in the next year or two (we're always hiring).

On the West side of the property we're located on

When I was a kid I lived next to a wetland and always thought it was a great place to grow up by.  As the company grew and became more successful, I saved up and bought this property with a wetland and fields for the company. I just like critters (My main handle is "Frogboy" after all <g>).

Controversies

One controversy in the forums has to do with a "bug" in how turns are handled.  Right now, turns go like this (where 0 is the AI and 1 is the human player):

0101010101010

So when I load a game, the AI plans his moves, then turns it over to the human player. The human player then takes his or her turn and then the AI takes their turn and so on.

But you may understand the issue: If I save a game where the AI has already taken their turn, load up the game and the AI gets to take another turn, you've got a slight disavantage for the human.  I use the word slight here.  The AI doesn't get to actually move ships or get additional production. What they do get is the ability to pick planetary social and military projects. It's a slight advantage but an advantage nevertheless. Of course, compared to the fact that human players get to save and restore games, I'd say humans still end up with the better deal. How many times has someone loaded a saved game because they got a random event they didn't like or an engagement went poorly? The AI doesn't get to do it.

But still, it's a bug and it's in the database now.  It's actually been this way since the original beta of GalCiv 1 back in 2002. That's one of the reasons why nobody wants to touch it. It's ancient code. 

Getting 1.6 done and moving to 1.7

There's been a lot of very good tweaks and changes in 1.6 that I think will make the game even more fun.  For 1.7, there's a number of new features that we're looking to add. I want to tackle some of the constructor management and starbase handling.

Cranky people and private companies

One thing that I've noticed recently is that as our games get more popular, we get a higher incidence of cranky people.  I sometimes think it's one guy who has many different names and goes on all forums because they seem to have the same background.

Cranky person post goes like this:

• Game is buggy
• Product should never have been released
• I have been a programmer/IT manager/developer for 20 years (and it's always 20 years -- not 5, not 10, not 25, but 20)
• Vague description of problem and little to no information on system.
• Expect prompt and courteous support

Now, a few things about that.  Stardock isn't a store.  If someone wants to be cranky to someone, they should probably go to the store and yell about it there.  I'm not a clerk.  I make games because I enjoy it. I enjoy hanging out with people like you guys.  It's fun. It's rewarding. 

But someone buying our game doesn't give them the right to be rude and nasty and condescending. It's an equal proposition -- someone wants a product or service and is willing to exchange money for it.  No one has leverage over the others. It's an equal trade.  Someone insulting me personally or being obnoxious on the forum is not going to be put up with. I have no incentive to put up with it.  We'll absolutely jump through hoops and bend over backwards to help people. But we don't expect to be treated with utter disrepect or have our work insulted. It's one of the reasons why so many game companies don't have forums, they don't want to put up with nasty users.

Luckily, our forums are full of helpful gamers who are really part of our team. We are all in it together making cool stuff.  We put out extra updates because we like to. Privately held companies can do that -- do things simply because they want to.  And we like doing it because we like interacting with the players as much as we can.  It's something I hope we can expand on.

But any users who thinks that they have the right to insult us should think twice.  We don't want those people playing our games and I'd prefer they never bought anything from us ever again. I hope that doesn't sound elitist. But I just don't want to deal with people who think it's okay to be nasty to other people simply because they bought a product.

Future Community Features

I suspect that down the line that we'll make a system in which only active people in the community can participate in post-release betas.  Right now, some people download these betas and I guess I don't know what they're expecting but apparently they expect them to be the same as releases.  Beta 4 of 1.6 introduces a new graphics engine for instance.  I'd like to see people thorugh their stardock.net account be able to go to a page to get private beta builds. It probably won't happen for GalCiv II but maybe for Sins and definitely for the fantasy strategy game.