Mobile OS Showdown - iPhone, Android 2.2 Froyo : The Next Round

The mobile OS space has recently been flooded with a bevy of new devices and platforms.  Just a few years ago, if you wanted a smartphone, you basically had to get a WinMo phone or skip a bunch of smartphone features and go with a Blackberry.  These days you have Windows Phone 7, Kin, WebOS, Blackberry, Android and, isn't there one more?  Oh yeah, the giant pink elephant in the room, the iPhone.
In terms of usability by average users, specifically those people who don't like to spend most of their free time on forums trying to get their phones to do cool new things, the iPhone was king.  It was and remains the best designed device on the market.  It is also painfully easy to use (I have seen people who have trouble with Outlook do some amazing things with their iPhone).  Unfortunately, it also is an Apple device, with all that being an Apple device entails.  Like the Ford Model T, you can get it in any shape, color, size and price you want, as long as those all happen to be the ones that Apple thinks are best.  You also can get tons of apps on there, except the ones that Apple doesn't like and has turned down.  That is OK for 90%+ of the population, they can get their basic apps on a great device, supported by a company that stands behind its customers and they can use it on AT&T's network.  How cool is that? Well, I don't know about that last part, but the rest is pretty good.
I happen to be outside that 90%, I want my platform to be open.  I want to be able to develop apps for the device using any platform I want and I want the app store to only judge apps based on quality, not content (first amendment right to be annoying and all that).  Finally, I want the device I develop for to actually be a range of devices for all kinds of people.  Some should be sleek and cool for professionals and some should be cheap and colorful for teens and college kids.  The bigger the segment that can afford to buy the device, the better.
Oh, and I'd like Adobe Flash, because the modern web seems to have really sunk its teeth into this Flash thing and telling companies that they need to modify their web presence in order to work on your device is like going into every country in the world and telling them Democracy is better because we happen to use it and find it to be just so swell.  Unfortunately, just like in the real world, the web tends to have momentum, and getting it turned away from Flash and onto HTML5 and AJAX (or whatever Apple thinks CafeWorld should be rewritten in) will take time and we as consumers need to have a Flash patch to help us kick the habit instead of asking us to quit cold turkey.

That is the simple truth of it.  Transitions are needed in life and so too are they needed in technology.  When you move, it will take you a while to get used to your new place.  It will take a day or two to memorize where all of the light switches are and just where on the shower the hot water becomes scalding.  HTML5 is new, it is rough and we as developers need some time to get used to it.  While we do that, let's keep using Flash.
This is where Android 2.2 comes in.  At Google's I/O conference, they announced the official feature list of Froyo (version 2.2 of Android).  While I may get excited about Exchange support and some vague mention of 5X performance (5 times what and in what context), the addition of Flash to browsers is amazing.  Now, I too can waste time playing FarmVille in line (because I spend inordinate amounts of time in line apparently).

All kidding aside, this new update does have the potential to bring Android into the forefront of the Mobile OS market and more importantly, if Flash turns out not to suck, Google has their proverbial thumbs in their proverbial ears and say: "Nyah, nayh, na-nyah-na" to Apple.  And folks, let's face it, there's nothing better than one multi-billion dollar company fighting with another multi-billion dollar company in the same way that 5 year olds do on the playground.
So, let's see if Google gets the last "Uh-huh" or if Apple's emphatic "Nuh-uh" turned out to be correct. Stay tuned.

Employment: The Struggle for Life

I ran across this story earlier in the day and just wanted to bring this to everyone’s attention.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1267953/Job-seeker-Vicky-Harrison-commits-suicide-rejected-200-jobs.html

You should go and read the story in full since it is a powerful tale of the effects of an economic recession made all too real by its impact on the individual.

I do not claim to fully understand how the grading system works in England, but from what information I looked up, it seems as if Vicky Harrison was an average or an above average student.  She went to college and it did not work out and then proceeded to actively look for work over the course of 2 years and found nothing.  No job would take her after 2 years of searching.  The story also mentions that she applied to over 200 positions.

It is sad when an individual who is willing to work cannot find work.

Some people may say that there is always work available for a young woman who is down on her luck, but I do not believe that it is appropriate to second guess Vicky on apparent choice to not pursue professions that are available to all attractive young women.  I am of course referring to adult entertainment and escort services where work is always available.  That type of employment is frowned upon in most cultures and she may not have wanted to pursue such employment.  Again, I do not believe that it is appropriate for anyone to comment on this, so I ask that if you comment on this story, you simply do not comment on this aspect of it.

However, I feel that it is appropriate to comment on the situation of the world as a whole.  Experience opens doors and educations gives them a nice shove.  That is the way I view the world.  An experienced job seeker will generally have no problem finding a job.  If you are a proven worker who can make a positive impact from day one, companies will find someone to fire so they can bring you on if needed.

Education helps too, although not as much as the quality of an education is questionable from institution to institution and the actual amount of practical knowledge can vary greatly.  So, post-secondary education is a plus, but not always a deal maker.

I have found that overall, it is not your experience or your education that affects your chances for a job. It is your confidence and your ability to carry yourself.  I was technically completely unqualified for my current job.  But, I talked my way through the interview, the company had a position they needed filled quickly and were willing to give me an opportunity to shine or crash and burn and I made the most it through hard work and determination that no matter how overwhelmed I felt, that I was given a chance and was going to make something of it.

I hope that Vicky had the same attitude and frankly most people do on some level have that same attitude.  However, I am appalled at the fact that no one would even hire her to do menial jobs.  Frankly, if you have a high school graduate who wants to do menial work because they do not want to accept a government handout, you as an employer should think of it as an opportunity to allocate a miniscule amount of resources and use the opportunity to have that person work in your place of employment and prove themselves worthy of a higher position.

Overall, this story is just sad.  Sad for Vicky’s family, sad for her boyfriend and most of all sad for all of society.  Here was a woman who wanted to work, was willing to take any job and no one was willing to give her something to do.  We should all look at one another a little more closely and see the potential in one another before dismissing people who want to work.

War Economy: A Primer

War is an expensive business. Always has been, always will be.  You have to pay to train your troops, pay for their weapons, pay for their transport, pay for their food, pay their wages and then they can go out and get killed and all that invested value will be gone.

As technology advances, the costs of fielding an army also advance.  In ancient times, a fighting man needed a weapon, perhaps some personal protection and rations to subsist on while on campaign.  These days, the average fighting person needs the weapon, the protection and the rations, however, they also need transportation, medicinal supplies, cultural training, support personnel and a million other things.

The complexity of the supplies used in war has also increased.  In ancient times, armies could just bring livestock and grain with them and rely on the countryside they traveled through to provide anything they ran out of.  Looting has become a culturally unacceptable practice, so the amount of rations brought has increased.  The complexity of the ration has also increased.

It used to be that a can a baked beans would suffice for a meal, the meal would be eaten from the can and the soldier would just have to deal with it.  These days MREs contain dehydrated food, condiment packs, desert items, cutlery and even a chemical heating unit to provide the soldier with a hot meal.  I mean just look at the difference.

Note that there is a strawberry dairyshake powder packet.  Yeah, I’d like to see Patton popping open a C-ration and chugging a milkshake.

I am not saying the soldiers today are more pampered or anything like that, but you have to admit that all of this complex space age food costs more than a tin of meat and beans.

There is also the difference of weaponry, let’s compare a WWII era weapons with a 2010 era weapon.

What we have here is the M1 Garand, one of the best rifles ever used by the US Military. It was reliable, rugged and accurate.  Now let’s look at something a little newer.

This is the M4 Carbine, a modern rifle used by the US Military.  Frankly, holy shit.  Just look at all the shit you can bolt on to this damn thing.  And all this stuff actually works together.  Want a grenade launcher, a hollow stock, a sniper scope and a silencer, just go for it.  Yeah, again, lots of very expensive stuff.  And based on what some of my army buddies tell me, this thing is accurate as hell and if maintained properly, as reliable as anything on the planet.

You might be asking, where am I going with all of this?  Military spending has gone up, really up.  And it isn’t unreasonable spending mind you, you have to keep ahead of the other guy or he ends up with a bigger stick and ends up beating you up with it and you can’t stop him (or her, let’s be fair and balanced).  But how high of a level of spending can a country afford to have?

If history has anything to teach, then it is that as technology advances and the cost of maintaining a given military force outpaces the resources of a country, then that country must make cuts.  If the cuts are not possible due to military needs, then the country goes bankrupt.

The Roman West and the Byzantine East both show this at different times in history, but the result is always the same, you force the issue with spending that is not advisable and the entity doing the spending eventually falls.

So, the US Military can win any stand up, drag out fight, but the cost is so high that generations after the war end up paying for it.  You can win every war you fight until you can no longer afford to pay to go to war and you lose by forfeit.

Seeing without Seeing

So, I was reading random things online and stumbled upon this little story and it made me think.  Why do we sometimes drive home from work or play basketball or fill out a form and have so little memory of doing it?  Is our memory really that bad?

No, the story that I linked to above shows that when we see familiar pictures, it is almost like the visual center of our brain goes into standby mode and works from previous experience.  In computer terms, it would be like the Windows pre-fetch which puts commonly used files in an area of memory that runs faster so the things you do run faster than things you do more rarely.

My thought was this: If the visual center of our brain does this, is there any other part of our brain that works similarly?  Does a trained basketball player think less when shooting the ball at his home court since he has performed this action so many times before?  Does a racecar driver go faster on a familiar course because he doesn’t have to take so long to think about the dynamics of each corner?

If that is true, it does lend justification to the old adage of practice makes perfect and it provides the reason for people getting better with repetition.  They stop thinking about what they are doing since they already know the cause and effect.

You might be thinking:  Great captain obvious, we already knew that, so what?

If you consider the human mind in that way, then this idea should be used when designing educational systems.  Instead of having a high school basketball court be a smaller size than a professional one, they should all be the same size and use the same rules and as close to the same equipment as the professional ones (if we are to assume that the goal of high school basketball is to educate the players in the sport so that they can work as pro players).

Schools should teach what is current to the industry and accelerate past the basics and on to the practical education of students.  I am not saying that we should just dump students into real world situations and let them sink or swim, but a little more practical realism would go a long way toward preparing our students for the work life that they will follow.

For one, they should get used to the schedule of the adult employed worker.  They should be in school from 8 or 9 AM to 5 or 6 PM (as these are very common work hours) and be given an hour of free time around noon to eat or do work or whatever and an extra 2 15 minutes breaks throughout the day (again common work conditions).

Block schedules should also be implemented to teach students to keep track of their time in a frame of reference longer than 1 day.  In the real work world you might have weekly meetings, daily meetings, Monday-Friday meetings or just about any other combinations.  Classes should reflect this and should be constructed to reflect common workplace activities.  For example, a common practice is a scrum where team members go over what they have worked on and what they will be working on.  This can be done via a home-room system or something similar where you have to go and make some basic communications with an assigned group of peers to establish that concept of being accountable for your work getting done on a more immediate fashion than quarter or semester grades.

I personally think that reorganizing schools to be more like the real world will increase motivation of students and generally yield better results as a lot of the troublemaking that comes from students is a direct cause of lack of stimulation and a busy student won’t have as much time to go get into trouble.

Rigor should also be stressed, although we should not crush students under mountains of work unless it is to show that sometimes projects turn out to have heavy workloads.

I think that we should consider the fact that our students might be on auto-pilot and see what we can do to give them more unexpected stimuli to keep them engaged and increase the value of our educational system.

Book Suggestion: Bio of a Space Tyrant

 

Today, I’m going to start a semi-regular book suggestion series.  I have read many books over the years and while some are very well known there are some really great books out there that many people have not heard about and which are either out of print or not available in you local Borders or Barnes and Nobles (or whatever you may have close to your home).

The first suggestion I make is the Bio of a Space Tyrant series by Piers Anthony. This series was written in the 1980s and is a projection of the world at the time and some events from the last 50 years onto the canvas of the Solar System.  It is told from the point of view of small Hispanic boy who is a refugee and his eventual rise to power over as Tyrant of Jupiter.  This book series does take some liberties with common sense as the main character seems to have a ridiculous amount of luck, but aside from that, the books are very believable and well written.

The 5 books in the series are: Refugee, Mercenary, Politician, Executive and Statesman.  There is a 6th book released in 2001 which tells the story from another character’s point of view, but I consider that to be a companion book, not a book in the series.

You can find these at your local used book shops pretty cheap (I found all 5 for about $7 at Half Price Books, but you may not have the same luck).  I have read that there was a re-printing in the works.  I personally like the original cover art a lot as it really fits the books well, so I did not go looking for the re-printed version, but that is something to consider.

So, there we are, Bio of a Space Tyrant, my pick for a great and widely unknown series of books.

The New Meta-Biological System

These days worry has taken over a lot of people’s lives over the power of corporations.  They seem to gain more rights on a regular basis and can now donate as much as they want to candidates for the highest offices in government.  One might say, based on the record of the past, that a corporation with deep enough pockets can basically buy the government and have it pass the laws it needs to thrive.

Let’s take a step back and think about that last statement.  That statement treats corporations like a living breathing entity and most people would not think of inviting Microsoft or GE over for supper like you would you a friend or family member.

Which brings me to the crux of this entire argument: What constitutes life? If life can be viewed as some sort of carbon based entity that has distinct parts which serve different functions, has intelligence and a certain set of views and opinions based on information it has gathered over its lifetime (which is a really cold, but accurate definition of a human being), then corporations are alive.  Well, the big ones are anyway.

What do I mean by corporations are alive?  They are definitely carbon based.  They individual parts are people and people are carbon based so by simple transience corporations are carbon based.  There is also the constant talk of a corporation’s carbon footprint.  Most of the other carbon based life forms on this planet expel carbon as a bi-product, and so do corporations.

Large corporations have many divisions, each of which are super-specialized and which perform specific functions. This of the amount of specialization of HR or IT or janitorial services.  They cannot be switched out to perform can other’s jobs any more than a liver can pump blood or a spleen can take in oxygen and push it to the bloodstream.  If we consider each department of a corporation as an internal organ of a living being, then corporations are quite complex lifeforms.

Corporations also possess intelligence.  Now, some may argue that the intelligence comes from the individuals who work for the corporation, and that if the “bright boys” who come up with ideas and who manage corporations (note that “bright boys” is an old expression, not a comment on gender) were to leave then the intelligence would also be gone.  That is true, but some serious head trauma could probably render Albert Einstein into Forrest Gump.  So, if one perceives the intelligence of a person as coming from the arrangement of their synapses and the intelligence of a corporation from the arrangement of persons into teams, then the parallel is undeniable.

Finally, we come to opinions.  People have opinions.  Jeff Gordon is the best NASCAR driver, no Dale Earnhart Jr. is, NASCAR sucks. Obama is going to save the world, no wait, we’re all going to be communists, he’s the anti-christ.  I have heard these views expressed by people I know over the last few days and they serve as vivid examples of how varied the opinions of lifeforms can be on very specific subjects.

Certain corporations put environmental friendliness above all else, some pollute as much as needed and care only for profits, others yet do what they can while protecting their bottom line.  These seem like opinions to me.  Corporations learn from studies of other corporations, government laws and regulations and from personal experience.  This is similar to the concept of learning that individuals use and as such I think we can assume that corporations gain knowledge and form opinions just like all other lifeforms (they are just more efficient than the average NFL fan or literature buff).

Where does this leave us?  Have we created life?  Are corporations the next evolution of life in the universe?  Will we all just become numbered cells performing a menial task in the great machines that we have created?  Let’s stay away from the melodrama, but it does make one think.

This thought experiment does bring up an interesting idea.  In the past people were anchors and businesses were transient.  We come and go, we start businesses and they succeed or close.  But not anymore, businesses have now become too big to fail (or so we are told).  Corporations wield influence over congressmen and governors and hey maybe even presidents (I have no way of knowing one way or another).

I foresee a future where governments become less important than corporations and where governments exist to prop up and help corporations. 

This is not a bad thing or harmful, corporations, just like all living things do best when they take care of their parts.  If you have a cancerous lung, you get it removed, but if you don’t smoke in the first place, maybe you don’t get cancer in the first place.  In the same way, a car brand owned by a big car manufacturer might need to be shut down, but it would be best for the manufacturer if they manage the brand better so they can have more products to sell to a larger variety of people. 

We worry about corporations wringing us dry, but the truth is that those corporations end up shutting down since their customer base has been wrung dry.  The truly successful corporations find a price point where the consumers can continue to buy without ruining themselves (repeat business is the key to success today as in the past).

I for one welcome our corporate overlords and look forward to the day when I can work my way up to the synapse center of the corporate body (you know the part of the corporate body that receives the most resources like the brain does in the human body). I suggest that we all take a good hard look around us and not cling to old ideas more than we need to.  The future can never be stopped, it can only be fought fruitlessly. The Greeks learned this, the Romans learned this, the Byzantines learned this, the Han learned this.  But they all learned it through failure.  We should learn before failure comes and claims us like barbarians and revolutionaries raping and pillaging.

Why Healthcare Costs So Much

Medical costs are outrageous because people don't understand the concept of insurance. Let me break it down for you:
Insurance is at its core a pool.

Lots of people put money in and a few take money out. After all the people who needed to take money out have done so, what is left goes to the person offering the insurance and that's what they pay their employees and stock holders out of (think of it as their net revenue).
The problem with health insurance is that basically everyone needs to take some money out all of the time, which means that if the service was offered at the costs we had in the past, there would not be enough money to go around.

So, the insurance companies raise the cost of the service to make sure that there is enough money in the pool for all of the users and also enough left over afterwards for their own salaries and profit margins (which is why they offer the service in the first place, profit is not evil, it is what makes people offer goods and services).
The problem is that as it is structured now, preventative care costs money, so people don't use it. They prefer to just let their health slide and use the pool when they really need it. The problem with that is simply that if you were to add up the cost of the preventative care, it would not be as high as the cost of the emergency care. So, we should make preventative care cheaper or free (maybe not free, free always ends up with some fat chick beyond stomped to death in a Wal-Mart over some complementary toaster that comes with a TV).

The problem is that the insurance companies do not do anything to reward people for going to the doctor to get checked up or maintaining a higher level of health. They penalize the fat people. So, they use negative reinforcement instead of positive reinforcement. Unfortunately, insurance rates are not a "switch" and the American people are not toddlers, so negative reinforcement will not work here (I do advocate corporal punishement for young children where reason might not work).

What this bill should have done is encourage preventative care. Provide free preventative care to the really poor and they don't need to come in for heart surgery as often (I'm pretty sure you can have 1000 GP visits for the cost of every 1 open heart surgery).

Anyway, I just wanted to explain my thoughts on insurance.  If you share them or disagree, leave me a comment and we can discuss this further.

More Random Bullshit From Illinois

So, I am looking around on Facebook and an old grade school friend posted this story:

http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2010/03/impatient-driver-accused-of-trying-to-hit-cop-at-gas-pump-northlake-cook-county-sheriff-sams-club.html

Please, go read it.

Have you read it? If not, go read it.

Seriously, it’s a doozy.

So, this guy is angry because the police office didn’t move his car fast enough.  First off, there’s no time limit on a gas pump.  If you want to fill up and then go browse the energy drink section for 2 hours, you are free to do so. 

Second of all, the article states that there were 24 pumps at the station.  Go find another pump.

Third, the guy showed the offender his badge.  That’s code for do this again and you get arrested.

I hope they lock this guy up and throw away the key.  That kind of stupidity needs to be punished, harshly.

Final Fantasy XIII Review

So, Final Fantasy XIII came out last week.  I have been playing it and while I have not finished it yet (I have this thing called a life), I wanted to wait until I got at least 10-20 hours in before posting a review.

Here are my thoughts on the game:

Well, it is streamlined.  Very, very streamlined.  You basically have a frantic combat system that reminds of a stance system in an MMO and long corridors that you walk down between boss fights.

There are no towns as far as I can tell.  You get access to shops and crafting from save points.  Crafting is limited to pouring junk type items into your weapons and accessory items to give them experience and level them up.  You can disable old equipment to get high level junk.

The characters level up in basically the same way that we were doing it in Osiris originally where we had different constellations for each character and you had to put points into each constellation to power it up.  Some of the stats are shared (like HP) but most is abilities.  When you switch stance, you switch your constellation and you gain all of the abilities for that constellation.  Like I said stats stack (so, if you put points into HP across all constellations, you turn into a tank).

The stance switch is preset in a menu since you switch stances for your whole party.  You basically get to set up combinations you think are good ahead of time and you switch to the one you think is right in combat.  There is no limit on switches and switching accelerates your active time gauge (so you do it the entire time).

You only get to control the main character in the party, although you do eventually get to pick your party and who you control.  The AI is very good and picks attacks and abilities quickly and very effectively, so you don't have to mess about with each character's individual attacks.  You also get to do more attacks each turn, so the pace of combat is very fast.

The bosses rock as you have to really be quick with the stances and think about their moves and plan stuff out, but you do it in real time.  That sounds bad, but you get to retry if you lose and that basically puts you right before the fight so you can change party members/equipment or level up some more before trying again.  This is really well done and it doesn't feel like punishment for losing (really well implemented feature).

The story is your typical anime bullshit with racist undertones and "mystery" which is all very formulaic.  But it does feel pretty fresh and the setting is kind of neat.  The best part about it is the lack of technobabble or random MgGuffins as far as I can tell.  The characters don't wonder at every little fucking thing, because they live in that world and I like that.

Dialogue is well recorded, but poorly written.  And I swear, one of the girl characters sounds like she's fucking the whole time.  Plus, the one black guy sounds like a blaksploitation character.  I am waiting for him to call someone a jive turkey or a honky.

Music is good, but nothing stick like the classic stuff.  It is all high quality, but like I said not memorable.

Graphics are holy shit, just god fucking damn amazing.  I mean, just wow.  I have never, ever, ever seen anything like this before.  The CG stuff is barely discernable from the game and that's a compliment.  The game just looks sharp.  There's a few stretched textures here and there in dark corners, but the characters are amazing, the enemies are amazing and the sheer amount of particles and solid and animated effects are mind staggering.

Overall, it is a good game.  Does it have the replay value of a Chrono Trigger or FFVII or even FFX?  No, there's no minigames, no card battle, no blitzball, just combat and that's unfortunate.  I will give this game an 80% and most of it goes to production value and polish (if this was a car, it would a solid gold, chrome plated Mary Kay Pink Cadillac).  Yeah, its not practical and you can't exactly drive around in it, but it is definitely a thing to behold.

 

Gameplay: 75%

Graphics: 100%

Sound: 85%

Control: 95%

Story: 60%

Character Design: 65%

Google to Exit China

A new article from MSNBC states that Google’s vaunted content filtering software seems to be leaking like a broken collander.  In a personal test, both information about Tibet’s history (from Western sources) and Tiananmen Square returned meaningful results on www.google.cn

The same article also mentions the projected effects of Google’s predicted pullout from China on China’s economy and IT development ecosystem.

My personal take on the issue is: If a company is not willing to work within the laws of a country and the country is not willing to change the laws to work with the company, then a split is inevitable.  Logically, if neither side is willing to compromise on the issue at hand, then a relationship is not feasible.

From a moral standpoint, the idea that Google pulling out will put a lot of people in China out of job is a sticking point.  However, if Google is willing to give up revenue (however much or little revenue it might be) in order to stick to its morals, then that is their choice to make.  Just as no one can keep you as an individual from standing on the corner and handing out your money to passerby, no country can force a company to not do something that will hurt its bottom line.  Is it unfortunate that people will be put out of a job?  Sure.  Does that matter in business? No.  Should it matter in business? Absolutely not, businesses are moral-less entities and as such people’s employment does not affect a business.  It might affect individual people, but not businesses as a whole.

Overall, I am firmly against censorship so I am firmly on Google’s side on this issue.  If they don’t want to follow the law, then they should leave.  Otherwise they would be breaking the law and could be fined (or maybe even jailed although the logistics of that are kind of tough) for breaking the law.  If the Chinese government does not want to allow free flow of information, then they should not get access to the services provided by Google.

The End of Time: Guns and Life and Death Decisions

The Doctor Who finale.  The end of David Tennant as the Doctor. A choice: to kill or let the Earth be destroyed.  A choice that he must make with a gun and a bullet.

OK, so guns, something that the Doctor does not use and murder.  Must be a really good and juicy ending to the story arc.  Oh, wait he shoots a machine.  Really, he was given an A or B question and he chose C? RTD is just fucking with us at this point right?

Now, to put this into perspective, let’s look at a good use of a gun as a plot device.

Full Metal Jacket.  If you have seen it: congratulations, you have seen a great movie.  If you haven’t: get your ass down to the video store and get a copy.

So the movie starts out with a group of recruits being trained to go to Vietnam.  Their Gunnery Seargent uses mockery and verbal abuse to harden the recruits into fighting machines as he feels it is his job to product warriors to go fight overseas.

I mean just look at this guy.  The recruits are in their underwear and this maniac is screaming at them because of some petty shit he finds to be an insult to the American way of life.  That’s a scary dude and on top of that he’s trained to kill.

So he picks on this one guy, Pvt. Pyle who is overweight and probably borderline mentally retarded.  He makes this guy’s life miserable.  The rest of the platoon at one point haze Pyle and beat the shit out of him with bars of soap wrapped in towels.

After that, Pyle seems to improve, but he’s actually gone crazy and ends up going apeshit and killing the Gunnery Seargent before blowing his own brains out.

Now why did I mention all of that.  Throughout the training, the recruits have the importance of their rifle drilled into their heads.  When Pyle goes crazy, he starts talking to his gun.  He then uses the gun to kill the Seargent and then himself.

The gun is used as a plot device as it it’s usage defines the recruits as soldiers (that’s how they kill the enemy) and then is used by Pyle to kill the Seargent and himself.  OK, so that makes sense as you kind of see it coming and when the murder happens, it is a satisfying end to the story arc.  The reaction follows the action of training as Pyle had become desensitized to killing.

On the other hand, the shit that we get in The End of Time is not logical.  The Doctor is told that he must kill to sever the link.  It is almost like the woman in white and Wilf are training him to kill.  You would think that he would shoot The Master or Rassillon or maybe he is another part of the link, so maybe he kills himself.  Shooting the machine doesn’t make sense.  We are told that The Master is the link, the other side is Rassillon.  Having The Doctor be the bridge I could buy since he ended the time war, but the machine had no part in the Time War.

My advice to RTD: “Stop writing crappy endings, if you can’t come up with an ending for an arc yourself, just steal one from someone who could.  Your fans won’t be upset, heck you can even make it a nod to a fellow filmmaker and people will respect you for it.”

The old series was great because there were consequences for The Doctor’s actions.  Perry never made it back to Earth, The Doctor could have stopped the Daleks from existing but failed.  He changed the course of events on planets, but that hardly happens anymore.  RTD teased us about killing Rose, but then he didn’t kill her.  He teased us about a companion dying but then no one died.  Hell, even David Tennant’s own death sequence turned into a frigging walk down memory lane.

I just  hope that the next season brings some better stories.  Otherwise Dr Who is turning into another Heroes, but worse.  Even Heroes kills off some of its characters in order to show that a plot exists.

WoW Stats

I found this picture on a link on Digg.  Don’t know where it originally comes from but whoever they are, thank you for putting things into perpective.

Via: Online Schools

Those are some amazing stats.  I especially like how WoW has become a billion dollar a year business.

I know I have played it and enjoyed it and gotten bored and quit and then found reasons to come back and play some more, so it really is a compelling experience.

Acer Aspire Revo 1600 Review

I have been looking into getting one of these Nettop PCs for a while now.  The idea of having a super thin, super light terminal that I can hook up to my home network and my TV to view videos on and browse the web has always seemed like a basic thing to have in a home.

I found one of these Acer Aspire Revo 1600 units at TigerDirect.com for $170.  It was a refurb, but from my experience, these are actually higher quality since they are inspected more closely than the models that go out as new.  I have purchased a lot of refurbished things over the years and have come to the conclusion that the reason they were returned is due to lack of understanding of the product by the original buyer.

The first thing I noticed about this unit is how clogged it came with bloatware.  A dozen game demos, Office demos, MS Works, anti-virus, Google desktop, just tons of stuff.  So it ran slow and I mean very slow.  OK, so I went ahead and uninstalled all of that stuff since I know of lighter freeware alternatives and hey there’s a spry little box under all that clutter.

The model I have only has one GB of DDR2 which hamstrings it a bit, but it still putters around online pretty well.  Some video streaming sites don’t do so well, but basic web tasks are just fine.  From personal experience, it seems like it is slow because it is always paging to the hard drive.  So, it needs more memory.  Luckily, you can add up to 4 GB of memory and I do plan on doing so to give this little box a little more pep.

Another drawback is that it does not have integrated WiFi.  Well, that’s not a drawback to me since more integrated WiFi solutions in these little boxes has terrible range.  So, I find that it is better to just find a good performing dongle and use that.  I don’t have to worry about massive range since I live in a medium sized apartment, so I went for the Tenda WiFi 802.11N adapter.  It was $15 at MicroCenter and it was very easy to install.

I tried this box in the farthest corned of my apartment and it was still getting full bars, download speeds were also very good and definitely on par with other WiFi solutions I have found.  So, the lack of WiFi out of the box is not really a drawback.

The ION graphics do pretty well.  I installed World of Warcraft and with the settings set way down (as I knew I would have to set them for onboard graphics).  It ran at 25-30 fps.  Not great,  but not terrible considering the computer is so low on RAM.

The CPU kind of sucks, but it does its job well enough and for a $200 PC it is amazing.  It is Hyper-Threaded and handles multi-tasking far better than I expected.  The only thing that this machine doesn’t do well is Flash.  But then again, I’ve seen Quad-Core i7s where a bit of poorly written Flash code causes full loads on the CPU, so I won’t call that a big setback.

In terms of connectivity, this little guy is amazing.  It has 6 USB ports.  One of them is capped with a little rubber stopper, but it does work. It has a media-card reader on the front as well as audio inputs for a headset and an e-Sata port for external hard drive.  It also has VGA and HDMI on the back.  The HDMI is the main draw of this box as it will power a 1080p set making your thousand inch TV able to browse the web.  Yeah, that is as cool as it sounds.

The keyboard and mouse it comes with are pretty lackluster but they do function and do so well enough.  The keyboard has that chicklet layout that Apple pioneered with its laptops and the feel of the keys is actually quite good.  This is a compact keyboard, so you do not get a num-pad.  This is slightly better than a netbook keyboard.  Functional, but not much more.  It looks nice though with a nice finish on the face of the casing.

The mouse is crap.  It is too light and squeaks when you click it.  The scroll wheel is also too big for the mouse, but again it is functional and usable, but not great by any stretch of the imagination.

Overall, the unit is nice and small, and once you de-clutter it, it does a great job as an internet terminal.  Just don’t expect it to replace you full-tower box unless your full-tower box is from 2000 or earlier.

Heroes: The Angry History

OK, so I saw the season finale and wow, just wow.  What a pile of shit!

Really, the evil mastermind can be defeated if everyone just walks away?

He doesn't try to raise a bunch of walls to keep people from leaving?

How about locking the individuals away in cells and making them stay?

No, they puss out again and the whole season has built up to...drum roll please...a talking to.

That's right, they talked the bad guys down.  Sylar was so damn cool being able to fight off like one damn guy.  Oh wait, it should have ended with him fighting the entire carnival and not being able to let any of them die, so he goes all berserk and beats the shit out of all of them while protecting all of their lives at the same time.  How's that for an ending?  And I just came up with that...while I was writing it...and I'm on the john.  OK, that last part is a lie, but my point still stands.

And don't get me started on the Peter v. Samuel confrontation.  They pushed dirt.  I don't care how you slice it...they pushed dirt.

So, what did they stop, like 1000 people being violently killed by Samuel.  Oh, wait, in the time they did that more people died of hunger and disease in Haiti (probably).  So, why don't they just grab the guy who can make shit grow, convince him that Samuel is a douchy guy and have him grow cabbages for Haiti.  Why cabbages you ask?  Why not carrots and apple orchards and a bunch of other stuff that is really good for you? Because free food should not taste good, it should just nourish you so you don't die, otherwise you're OK with getting handouts, but that's a different matter.

Why didn't they make it more epic, like Samuel was going to cause an Earthquake and hit Manhattan with a tidal wave 600 feet tall so it will kill millions of people across the eastern seaboard.  You know, some really epic shit like in season one where they were going to nuke New York.  You see, that was really messed up and so had to be avoided.  1000 people dying at a carnival.  You can write that off as the ferris wheel spinning out of its holding and crushing them all to death.  You can't write off 6 million people, but 1000, well there's lots of example throughout history where a few people in an isolated area can just be written away by the media.

All in all, the bit with Claire revealing that she has powers was awesome and it does set up a neat next season, but the rest was a pile of crap.  I'm still waiting for the main characters to go all X-Men on us and they haven't.  I blame all of the bad ratings and the declining popularity on the writers and their inability to move forward with a perfect setup each season.

Season 1 ended well.  Then you had a rival team of supers in season 2.  So what happens, they go rob a bank.  Really a bank? Not a nuke silo or a toxic gas storage facility?  They want cash?  OK, why not.  They also have an immortal guy who wants to kill off humanity with a virus.  Great idea, but wait, he gets frozen in time and buried alive.  Yeah, that's a good use of evil Wolverine with a great accent and the ability to deliver awesome one liners.

Season 3 started off all right.  You had an evil corporation, headed up by a guy who can steal powers from the good guys.  You even had a pair of twins with the power of life and death. Awesome, oh wait, the life brother gets clubbed to death.  The death sister gives up her power (which she could not control, which basically writes plots by itself) and then the evil guy with the power over death gets his powers frozen and then shot in the head.  Does his regeneration kick in when everyone walks away?  I would think not otherwise he would have shown up again.  And surely they weren't stupid enough to just walk away without checking.  Oh and for good measure, why don't we make it so the main good guy who was the ying to Sylar's Yang can't have more than one power at once.  Yeah, that's some good writing.

And then we got the disaster that was Season 4.  Carnies...the bad guys are carnies...think about it.  Oh, and the main bad guy is a walking Irish stereotype.  He should have just had a rant about potatoes at some point just to complete the insult.  Plus he attacks civilian population and has a family of outcasts.  Why didn't we just call Samuel Ira and complete the idea.  He could have worked for a snobby British family and had then shit all over him in his childhood.  While we're stealing random things from history and mixing them with racist stereotypes, let's just to town on it.

Overall, I used to be a huge fan of this series and it has become a very sad thing over the years.

Lack of Speech Skills in Star Trek

So, before you all jump on me for going down this rabbit hole, I want to state that this is just a mental exercise and should be taken lightly and as a humorous logical argument.

In Star Trek, every time the Federation crew meet a new species (with a new an exotic set of forehead ridges or funny looking ears) that species speaks English.  Maybe they speak British English or with a strange accent, but they still speak English.  Why is that?  According to the show’s creators’ the Federation has universal translators that translate on the fly.  Let’s go ahead and assume that such a thing is possible and proceed from there.

First, why do the universal translators translate to English and if so, why the funny accents?  Well, you can see how you can poke holes in this all day and have a lot of fun with that mental exercise, but let’s assume that the programmers wanted to throw some flair in their translator and wrote the code to do funny accents and dialects.

The bigger question is: since the translators work both ways, what do the Federation crewmembers speak? You would think English, but let’s think about that.  Even if the whole world were to start speaking English, after a while, everyone would just use the universal translators, so the words would be lost and only the most basic sounds required to convey ideas would remain.

If you follow that train of thought through and apply what we see with modern language evolution (think texting and how some people can read it as if it was plain English), then you realize that in reality the Federation must speak in formalized grunts.  So if the power ever fails, then they would be stuck grunting to one another.

That would make for some terrible television, but it does make logical sense and I dare you to watch Star Trek after reading this and not smiling about Picard and Riker grunting at each other about the meaning of life and command.

Star Trek Online: A Brief Beta Impression

I pre-ordered Star Trek Online as it is one MMO that I have been awaiting for a long time.  The open beta has started a few days ago and aside from some technical issue which I’ve seen in just about every beta I have ever played (server downtime, a random crash here and there, some goofy animations that are clearly not quite done yet), the game is great.

The ground combat is nothing to write home about, but the feeling of being with an away team (red-shirts and all) is pretty cool.  You get to zap bad guys with phasers and pulse rifles, go hand to hand and coordinate fire with other team members.  Overall, a pretty decent experience based on the source material’s rather blase ground combat.

The space combat is where the game really shines.  You have to consider your shield, the placement of your weapon arrays, reload time and  the shielding of the enemy vessel.  I have found that the best way to beat someone is to pound on one section of their shields and then hit them with a torpedo.

The combat looks like Trek, sounds like Trek and feels like Trek.  Overall, a really good job there.

The interface is a little confusing, but you do get used to it pretty quick and it is just a beta, so I cannot really complain.

You can also customize your ship’s look and color scheme, which is pretty neat, although not really that important in my opinion as I personally want my ship to look like a Federation vessel.

The uniform customization is pretty neat as you get a big variety of styles and colors to pick from.  So, if you want to walk around in formal wear all the time, you can.

I am really hyped for the release of this game, when we will hopefully have a lot more servers up so the server issues that have kept me from playing the game more get resolved.

Mockups: A Guide to Visual Design

A picture is worth 1000 words.  We have all heard this expression before and there is a lot of truth to that expression.

When going through the initial phases of any project, vision is important.  In fact, I believe that vision is the most important part of all projects.  If you know what it is that you are trying to make, you know when you get there.  If your vision is blurred, you can never be sure that you have achieved what you set out to do.

I decided to refer to the goal of a project as vision since words are such abstract things.  You might think that words are fairly absolute things, but think about their usage.  Inflection, context and culture can warp and change the meaning of a given word to the point where the root is lost and its meaning is totally changed.  However, pictures are more absolute.

At this point you might be thinking that I have lost my mind.  You might think that I am suggesting that pictures should replace words or something along those lines.  That is not the case.  However, pictures should be present to re-enforce and clarify words.

What do I mean specifically?  Well, let’s say I am describing something to you.  It is an object, has tufts of cotton coming out of the top, a floral pattern over most of its surface, is covered in a plastic wrap for protection and can only be used a given number of times before it should be discarded.

Based on that description you might thing that I am talking about some sort of medical scrubs or pillow for senior citizens.  However, I am referring to the facial tissue box on my desk.  In this example, I could have just said facial tissue box, however, what about new ideas, processes or products.

How does one describe a MacBook Air in words.  Well, it is doable, but if you have ever seen the whitepaper for a complex product, you know that it takes a lot of words and most whitepapers contain diagrams to aid comprehension.

Wireframes, mockups and pre-visualizations all help in getting concepts across to your customers.  And from a business standpoint, if you can get signoff on pictures that show the product, you at least have a vague idea of what the customer wants.  Otherwise, you risk scope-creep and loss of money on every project.

Holiday Travel: A Postmortem

The holidays have come and gone and so have I.  Travel was again in the cards for me this year and it was an unpleasant experience.

The first clue that I had that this was not going to be a good travel season came on my first day of travel.  I bought a ticket online like most people do these days.  The ticket was a US Airways flight.  I had never flown US Airways, but it also mentioned something about United Airlines, so I assumed they were some sort of United Airlines subsidiary.

The day of the flight comes and I go to the area near the gate from which the flight is supposed to take off.  It is a United Airlines check-in area.  I ask one of the agents in the area if this is where I am supposed to check in and am told that I need to go to the US Airways check-in area.  OK, I have never flown US Airways before, no problem, I’ll just walk down to the US Airways area.  The US Airways area is 30 gates down (about a 20 minute walk in the spacious DFW terminal).

I then queue in line at US Airways and after a long wait (expected due to holiday traffic), I am told that I am actually on a United Airlines flight, so I need to make the walk back to the United Airlines area.  After rushing back to the United Airlines area and checking in as quickly as possible I barely make it to the gate as boarding is happening.

My issue with the whole episode is the person who told me that I was to check in at US Airways.  I did not see them when I came back, but word to the wise, US Airways flights operated by United Airlines are simply United Airlines flights, just forget that US Airways is even mentioned.

On my way back to Dallas, I sat in abject anxiety waiting to hear that my flight would be cancelled.  It turned out that my flight was not canceled, not late, but in fact early.  However, the fact that up until 30 minutes before takeoff, they were not sure if it was going to be ready or not.

So, moral of the story, don’t fly, it sucks and apparently the fine folks at all the airlines barely know what they are doing after being in business for almost 100 years.