Paul Boyer has concluded his icon-a-day series, the most extensive on-line icon creation tutorial ever! And as an encore, he has packaged them up using IconPackager 3 (which, btw, is a free upgrade for IconPackager 1/2 users).
The Dangeruss project is now underway. Russ Schwenkler, one of the all time great skinners has consented to let us update his entire library of WindowBlinds skins to use the latest/greatest features. And the person doing the update it one of today's greatest skinners, Mike Bryant. Already, two skins are done. Envision and Liquid 2. For the rest of the summer, you will see Dangeruss Skins being updated bringing the best of Russ's classic style with MikeB's state-of-the-art talent.
Softpedia has an interesting article about Longhorn. Is Microsoft's Longhorn design proactive or reactive? That is, is the development of Longhorn based on Microsoft's own vision or is it playing "me too" to Google and Apple? And as a result, is Microsoft gambling the future of Windows by seemingly hastily refocusing on these feature?
Personally, I think Microsoft has more than enough talent on hand to do what needs to be done. Windows XP is a very solid OS, and SP2 makes it quite secure in the bigger scheme of things. So what "problem" does Longhorn really need to solve? I can think of 3 basic problems in Windows XP that Longhorn needs to address:
1) Search. It's ridiculously time consuming to find stuff in Windows XP.
2) Display. Monitor resolution is being held back by the OS. I want to be able to run at 2800x1600 someday but what good would that do me? I wouldn't be able to see anything on Windows XP, it would be tiny. I want to be able to run at very high resolutions and have my GUI, text, icons, scale appropriately.
3) Security. SP2 does a pretty good job overall on tightening things up. But sometimes I feel like it's a bit hacked. I just want my network stuff secure. I want to know I can surf the net and read my email without worrying that someone's installed a key-logger on my machine or something.
I think Microsoft can deliver on all 3 items. But I too worry that Microsoft's desires to compete a little bit with everyone may distract it from these core things. RSS integration? Who cares. Fancier Media Player? Whatever.
Microsoft is announcing the results of a long-running study that pits Linux vs. Windows 2003 Server and finds Microsoft Windows to have an overall lower cost of ownership and better security. Wipro surveyed 90 companies in the U.S. and Western Europe with 2,500 to 113,000 employees where both the Windows and open source operating systems were simultaneously being run. When the costs of updating are distributed across the size of the environment and evaluated on a per-asset basis, the study shows Microsoft software to be less expensive to patch than open source equivalents. These findings confirm what many customers are experiencing in their deployment scenarios.
Source: Neowin.net
I read on a forum a concern from a user about Galactic Civilizations II -- that because the planets are now part of the main game map, the game was now so unrealistic as to be distracting for him. The problem is, any space-based game is going to have to make some concessions in order to be fun.
Here's the problem: Space is big. No, I mean BIG. It's ridiculously, mind boggling, incomprehensively big. It's just plain enormous.
Some years ago, we released a game called Stellar Frontier. During the beta, the team tried to keep it realistic. Your ship could travel up to the speed of light. Light travels pretty fast right? The game took place in our own solar system. Which meant if you wanted to travel out to say Pluto, it took SEVEN hours at maximum speed. That's how long it takes light to get from the sun to Pluto. Your ship traveled very fast on the game-screen, it was just that the planets were spaced really far apart. It was one of the first massively multiplayer games and we knew that if the points of interest were so isolated then people would never..you know..get together to kill each other. So we had to make some changes.
In Galactic Civilizations I, we didn't display planets on the main map. So I suppose purists could imagine that the ships were symbolic (obviously not to scale) and hence since we were dealing with stars, it was okay since star to star relations could be rationalized. But now we have planets on the map too and all sense of proportion goes out the window.
So what if we wanted to have it both ways -- what if we wanted to have planets on the map, to scale even, and distances between stars still relative. Let's imagine that for moment. A Jupiter-sized good planet would look something like this:
Okay, you're going to need to click on that thumbnail to see the planet because it's so tiny. Good thing we're talking about our puny sun (Sol) and not some other star. You see, a red giant, for example, is about 1000 times wider than the sun. So if we were going to maintain any sense of scale, you would need to have the red giants be 1000 times bigger. Now in this screenshot, our sun is only 296 pixels. Not too bad. A red giant at the same magnification would be 296,000 pixels. Scrolling across the screen at say 500 pixels per second (typical scroll speed in an RTS) it would take approximately 10 minutes to actually scroll the diameter of a red giant.
But that's okay, because compared to our other realism problems, a 10 minute scroll speed is nothing. There's a dirty little secret sci-fi has been hiding from you all this time. Not just games like Galactic Civilizations, Space Empires, Master of Orion, etc. But sci-fi like Babylon 5, Star Trek, etc. You see, it turns out that most star systems are binary. That's right, there are two stars involved in the star system. That's not the exception, that's the norm. Alpha Centauri is just one of three stars that make up its star system. That's right, THREE stars for a single star system. That's more common than a single star with a series of planets around it. What's worse, we're not even sure our star system is truly a unitary star system. There are many astronomers that believe that beyond Pluto there is something huge that is essentially a star that didn't quite make it. Basically our own dead star that messes around with the orbits of the outer planets a bit.
Our own star system, Sol, contains (As far as we know) 9 planets. With Pluto being the last one (and it's barely a planet). But that's not the end of our star system. A big pile of debris known as the "Oort cloud" marks the exit of our home star system. And it's really far away. And I mean really far away. Pluto, it turns out, is only 1/50,000th of the way there. Consider that for a moment -- if we had any sort of scale, let's say it took our ship 5 moves to go from the first planet in a star system to the last planet in a star system. It would take another 250,000 moves just to get to the edge of that star system. Let's say you wailed on the keyboard as fast as you could -- 4 times per second, it would take you 17 hours to get to the Oort cloud and get into interstellar space. That would definitely affect our reviews I suspect.
Of course, we've only discussed getting out of our own star system. Now we want to colonize the Alpha Centuari system (which is made up of Alpha Centuari, Alpha Centuari B, and Proxima Centauri as you may recall). It's "only" 4.7 light years. I'll spare you how many months you'd be scrolling the screen to get over to that.
You also have other scaling issues:
From a purely size point of view, the planets vary greatly in size. But in distances, it just gets more and more painful. Take this picture for instance, if they were spaced to scale, Jupiter would be about a 1000 feet away. Pluto would be nearly a half-mile away. And the next star system? 10,000 miles away. Like I said, space is big. It's really really big. It's so big it's just ridiculous. It's like wiping your nose in its bigness, saying to you "Hey, loser, look how big I am!" and then for no apparent reason adding a gratuitous etra "Loser!" after -- leaving you wondering whether space has some sort of..you know, inferiority complex about being so empty and all.
So from a game-play point of view, realism is just not very fun. Besides, even if we did try to be more realistic on scaling, then we'd open the door to all the other areas we've taken creative liberties (like the fact that Earth seems to reside in random galaxies full of life and that we have a magical "Hyperdrive" to fold space and let us get around it so fast). We have to balance realism and fun. It's more fun to have the planets be on the map. It saves a click, it allows for intuitive multi-civilization ownership of a star system. It allows the visuals to be a lot more exciting. In short, it makes the game more fun which, at the end of the day, is our goal.
Well tomorrow is my birthday. Which means, naturally, my family has come down with a virus. I've finished tucking them all in and can now surf the net a bit before getting some late night work done.
Linda Folely demonstrates why people don't trust the media anymore even if her demonstration is unintentional.
Democrats are mad at Karl Rove for pointing out a stereo-type between the left and the right when it's come to the war on terror. The American Right: "Let's go get the guys who did this!" and the left: "We need to understand why they hate us and fix ourselves." I'm not sure what exactly is offensive about poining out the obvious, especially during a week when Democratic senators are comparing our troops with Nazis and Pol Pot.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court Ruling that the state can now confiscate lands from people to hand over to richer people (i.e. ones who will create more bucks for the state) has created quite an uproar on the net. Talk about playing into Bush's hands. Now Bush can truthfully say that this is why we have to be assertive on getting conservative judges on the bench. When the court starts handing the government new powers like candy, it should be a wake-up call that this judge issue is serious. Or perhaps they'll wait until the state starts evicting churches (tax exempt, tsk tsk) in favor of Walmart.
Looks like bionic arms are getting better.
Is Longhorn going to be worth the wait? Here is someone with some thoughts on it.
On a different topic, for all the screaming about Gitmo being a gullag, it's interesting how rarely it gets mentioned that no one has died in captivity there. I suppose it's a good thing that the people complaining now weren't in charge back in World War II when treatment of POWs was decidedly rougher.
Glaciers seem to come and go over the years. The thing that annoys me about global warming advocates (other than that they usually know very little about the science and hence come across like people trying to argue that the bible is scientifically proven because "scientists" have "shown that to be the case") is that they often really aren't solid on what global warming actually is supposed to be around. According to global warming theory, the earth's atmosphere is warming up because of an increase in greenhouse gasses. People then point out how much warmer some places seem to be. How about this theory -- warming surfaces. Cities are heat sinks. Go to New York some summer day. I wouldn't be surprised that the earth's surface is warmer, particularly in areas that have been built up. The evidence for amospheric temperature increases is pretty sparse IMO.
So now local authorities can unilaterally confiscate private property from one citizen to give to another citizen. That's according to the US Supreme court in a narrow 5 to 4 ruling. Not surprising, the 5 votes in favor of the ruling come from the left. After all, the best run country is the one in which the central government assigns each of us to our allotted duties. A central government that decides where we live, how we work, how we live, and where we can go.
Okay, maybe that's reading more into the decision that the case merits. But consider the logical conclusion of this case -- local governments can now evict someone from their property and hand it over to another based on the local government's own criteria of what is good for society. Anyone who has had to deal with local governments for any length of time can cringe collectively. If you think national politics are mean-spirited, petty, and arbitrary, you should see what local politics looks like. If you think federally elected politicians -- senators, representatives, the President are fools, idiots, corrupt, or just useless, then you should see the pieces of work that sit on many local councils. And now these people will have the right to evict property holders if they so choose.
One can imagine the scenarios that could potentially play out. One local government decides they want to rezone vast swaths of their community to be something completely new and different. So they invite some investors and start kicking out the people who inconveniently happen to live and work on this land.
Here in Canton Michigan, they're trying to build a new urban "Cherry Hill Village" complete with a theater, shops, etc. Unfortunately, it's too far from where people live so things aren't going so well. If only they had built this new urban area closer to where people live. Like say 5 miles east where there's a lot of new development, big houses, and near the highway. Oh, but wait, there's a few square miles of older homes in that perfect spot. No problem, just kick those people out. Out out you go. We have various chain restaurants and stores that need to go in.
And that's not even the worse scenarios. One can imagine some personal disputes between private citizens and elected local officials in some rural area where the elected official gets his revenge by rezoning the land his opponent lives on for commercial use -- a perfect place for Walmart or Starbucks. Obviously I don't think these scenarios are likely to be widespread, but it wouldn't surprise me to see some incidents of this.
The state should not have the right to take away the land of one citizen to give to another. This is supposed to be one of the founding principles of our country. Consider that in the Declaration of Independence the colonists were ripped that British Soldiers were being housed in the homes of colonists. They were ripped enough about it that it was put into the constitution. And yet now, the state can do much worse, they can just take away the house entirely and turn it into a barracks (and they could before but now the bar has been lowered so much that if you can take away land from the Johnsons to give to Starbucks then certainly you can take away property from them to give to the US military..).
This is definitely not a shining day in our nation's history.
