Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Friday Feb 17, 2006

Filed under: Rants 6 comments

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From Fox News comes this article on personal finance, about how one could better spend an annual $260 that would otherwise go to the lottery, comes a number of suggestions from Eva Rosenberg. This is just beyond satire:

Use the $260 for a one-night stay at a bed-and-breakfast inn with your spouse. Use the short getaway to have a long walk together and a long conversation over dinner and a bottle of wine about your financial plan for the future. Leave the inn with a budget in hand, and return each year to rewrite the plan.

First off, if people are playing the lottery, do you really think they are Bottle of Wine / Bed & Breakfast type people? But more to the point: Here is a woman who’s financial advice is to go out to eat, drink wine, and have a long conversation. This is not going to help women overcome common stereotypes anytime soon. I’m surprised she doesn’t follow up by suggesting you invest in shoes, fur coats and diamond rings. If a man were to suggest taking your spouse hunting and discussing investment plans while perched in the treestand with a case of beer, he would be regarded as a self-interested idiot. I don’t see why the same shouldn’t happen to Rosenberg.

As financial advice, this is preposterous. Note that the only “financial” aspect of this plan is to have a “long conversation”, which you could easly have for free in your own living room. A conversation that would, one expects, be easier to conduct with financial records at hand. Records that will not be around if you go to a Bed & Breakfast. As marital advice, it doesn’t seem very sensible either. If you’re having trouble getting your man to engage you in conversation under normal circumstances, does it make sense to ask him to take you out for a very expensive night and have a long converstion? About money?!?

The rest of the article is just as silly. And remember, at some point along the line, an editor approved this. Amazing.

UPDATE:

Eva Rosenberg has responded in the comments, and her response is quite temperate considering the abrasive nature of my original post. And, while she claims I’m almost right, I’m not sure how. The Bed and Breakfast suggestion came from a man, which sort of pokes holes in just about everything I had to say. In fact, that even makes the title of the post itself incorrect. *wince*

But how would I spend the $260? Well, I guess it depends on if you’re asking “How would you spend $260?”, or “How would you spend $260 responsibly?” Because, if you’re just asking what I’d do with $260, then honestly my top 10 list would just be a bunch of computer games and hardware. For my wife, it would no doubt be art supplies and antiques.

I doubt I’d have 10 different ideas of how to put the $260 to work. My top 10 list is only 3 items long:

Put it in the bank (savings, not checking). Not the best idea. If I was really putting it away for a while, then I would be better off…

Putting it into the mutual fund, which is doing very well. However, my most likely course of action would be to…

Spend it on the house, probably by surfacing the driveway, getting some carpet put in, or some other general improvement. This lets me “invest” the money in the house by raising the resale value, but also lets me enjoy the money by getting to live in a nicer home.

But really: It isn’t very hard coming up with better ways to blow $260 than on the lottery. In fact, it would be better to take the $260, put it in a pile and set it on fire, and then use the fire to cook a toasted cheese sandwich. Sure, it’s a stupid waste of $260, but I managed to cook a tasty sandwich, which is still way more than what the lottery-players got for their $260.

And finally: Thanks to Eva Rosenberg for the polite correction to a not-so-polite post. We don’t get many National Columnists ’round here, and I would like to have made a better first impression.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Single-Player Gaming is Doomed!

By Shamus Posted Thursday Feb 16, 2006

Filed under: Video Games 30 comments

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From the spamming shills at Gamespot, comes the article: Luminaries with ties to EA, Ubisoft, Sony, Microsoft converge to talk about the online future of the gaming industry. Here a bunch of industry heavyweights get together and bloviate about the future of games, while making it clear they don’t even understand the present. Earlier I already took them to task for making silly predictions of a disc-free future. Now I want to savage some of the idiotic things they have to say about multiplayer gaming. I mean rebut. Not savage. I don’t even know why I said that.

Anyway, let me just cherry-pick a few of the most senseless comments:

Doomed to obscurity: I’ll bet people never tried this game because it didn’t have multiplayer.

Lars Butler, former vice president of global online for Electronic Arts and current CEO of the upstart TWN, “Linear entertainment in single-player is to media what masturbation is to sex. It’ll always be there, but it is not the real experience.”

Very classy. And also total nonsense. Some poeple, even in this day of fancy board games and multiplayer ping-pong still choose to do the crossword. Playing against a human and playing against a system are totally different experiences, but each have their place and one is not superior to the other.

Raph Koster, chief creative officer of Sony Online Entertainment, “The players, once they go connected, they don’t go back. They find it difficult to go back to experiences where they can’t share experiences with others. Even any single-player game today is going to have wrapped around it the forums, the cheat sites, and so on endlessly.”

This is not true. I tried on-line gaming. I’ve played a few massively multiplayer games. I’ve played online deathmatch. I’ve played online RTS games. And I still prefer the single-player experience.

I like how he tries to include forums and cheat sites in as part of the multiplayer experience. I’m not buying that. I don’t care how you make your console system, nobody wants to surf the forums using a dual shock controller. When they go to the forums, they walk away from their Sony Playstation, sit down at the computer, and are clearly no longer playing your game. Trying to include the fun of fansites and forum chatter as part of the game itself is just silly. Pac-Man is a single-player game, and talking about Pac-Man with other people doesn’t transform it into a multiplayer game.

Koster again, “The entire video game industry’s history thus far has been an aberration. It has been a mutant monster only made possible by unconnected computers. People always play games together. All of you learned to play games with each other. When you were kids, you played tag, tea parties, cops and robbers, what have you. The single-player game is a strange mutant monster which has only existed for 21 years and is about to go away because it is unnatural and abnormal.”

These idiots are acting like they just invented online gaming. PC users have had online gaming for roughly a decade now, and single-player games like the The Sims and Roller Coaster Tycoon still top the charts.

Take the massive, record-breaking success of the bestselling series and money-making dynamo The Sims. Now add the magic of multiplayer to create The Sims Online, a mediocre also-ran that has yet to turn a profit.

All of this makes it clear that none of these guys have really sat down and done any actual multiplayer gaming. You know what multiplayer gaming is? It’s a 14-year old kid calling you a fag 100 times during the game because he thinks it’s funny. It’s cheaters. It’s people accusing YOU of cheating whenever they lose. It’s people disconnecting whenever they are about to lose. It’s lag and frustration over ping times. It’s people scamming and selling game items in EBay. It’s enduring a bunch of bad grammar, worse spelling, and inane chatter while looking for a suitable matchup in the lobby chatroom. It’s PK’s and teamkillers. It’s endless debate and ranting about game balance issues. It’s fat middle-aged men pretending to be 16-year-old elven girls. It’s hardcore gamers and casual gamers being thrown together and each group concluding the other is a bunch of freaks. It’s trying to learn a game by playing against people who have long since mastered it and who now derive enjoyment from taunting newbies. It’s not being able to play when the server or your net service goes down.

The multiplayer experience has a lot to offer games, but it won’t replace single-player gaming any more than the subway replaced cars. What is really going on here is that the console makers and console game publishers have seen how great multiplayer games are to their bottom line. This isn’t about “a better gaming experience”. This is about “not having to work so hard”. Connectivity in PC’s has led to the practice of releasing shoddy, bug-filled games and then patching them. This lets the developer ship a game before it’s done, which is critical to sales near the holidays or when facing a quickly flooding market. Publishers would also rather collect a monthly fee for games as opposed to a flat-rate. (Or better yet, both!) And finally, multiplayer gaming gives publishers the ultimate weapon against piracy, which is requiring users to identify themselves and create an account. It doesn’t matter if the user has mod chips or DVD burners, there is no way around the login screen.

I don’t have a problem with multiplayer. I’m all for it. What bugs me about this article is that a bunch of flacks were treated like objective visionaries. The industry is growing up, and people should know better by now.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Terrain, Part 8

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Feb 15, 2006

Filed under: Programming 3 comments

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If you recall back in Part 6 I introduced shadowing, and then I did some tests on the terrain to see how it looks at various resolutions. I’ve noticed that most of the problem with the lower resolutions is not that the hills look undefined or blocky, but that the lighting looks bad. The light and dark side of hills get blurred, and shadows become big dark blobs.

Notice how the shadows are kind of vague blobs of darkness. I’ve turned down the the resolution on the terrain, and the result was that the shadows became undefined.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Terrain, Part 8”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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The Price is Wrong, Bob

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Feb 14, 2006

Filed under: Pictures 2 comments

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I was going through a bunch of old photoshops I’d done. Most are unfinished ideas of some sort. Many of them are dated sometime in 2003. While wading through these, I found this:

I assume this was going to be some sort of joke, but I don’t remember making it, much less what the idea was. It isn’t very funny like this. Still, it’s clearly something I did (I have it saved as a .psp in seperate layers, which wouldn’t be the case if I’d just found it someplace) and it was odd to find something I’d done, and of which I have no clear memory.

I wish I could remember the joke. I must be getting old.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Are Gamespot spammers?

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Feb 14, 2006

Filed under: Nerd Culture 0 comments

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Digg has a writeup of how Gamespot has been progressively leaking private email addresses to random spammers. Gamespot has been completely non-responsive when contacted.

Based on the comments I’m seeing, it looks like old users are left alone, and new users are being harvested / sold.

I wrote about this last month and the problem remains. I should add that I’ve never used the forums. All I did was create an account so I could download a file.

Terrain, Part 7

By Shamus Posted Monday Feb 13, 2006

Filed under: Programming 5 comments

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A Failed experiment

So far the terrain has been colored using a half-baked scheme I cooked up at the beginning. This system was intended to be temporary, until I can use proper texture mapping.

If you recall, here is how things look now:

Continue reading ⟩⟩

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Information wants to be profitable

By Shamus Posted Monday Feb 13, 2006

Filed under: Nerd Culture 2 comments

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Mark has a post on “Unintended Customers”, where he talks about companies offering a product or service and then being shocked when someone wants to use the thing in a way the company didn’t anticipate.

“Randy Waterhouse works for the company that’s attempting to set up a data haven, and he finds that the most of his customers want to use the data haven to store money. Pretty straightforward, right? Well, most of the people who want to store their money their are criminals of the worst sort. I guess in that particular case, there is reason to freak out at these unexpected customers, but I thought the reference was interesting because while there may be lots of legitimate uses for a data haven, the criminal element would almost certainly be attracted to a way to store their drug money (or whatever) with impugnity (that and probably spam, pornography, and gambling). Like all advances in technology, the data haven could be used for good or for ill… “

This reminds me of a controvery on Slashdot a while ago. People were concerned that open-source software (Linux, in particular) was being used by terrorists, and were debating about how they might stop it from happening. This was a bit like inventing a hammer, and then finding out people were using the hammer to build gallows on which heretics were hung. Many inventors, when confronted with this, attempt to make their hammer unable to build gallows and yet still be as useful as the original hammer. I can’t recall an instance where this has worked, but it’s understandable that they try. Nobody wants to see their work benefitting their enemies.

Which brings me to the bizzare Google controversy of last week, which seems to be some sort of inversion of this problem. Google is already the most popular search engine by far, so they don’t need to go out of their way to attract “better” customers. And yet, they were working to accomodate Chineese censors. This would be like Avi and Randy sitting atop a successful data haven and saying, “Sure we have lots of regular customers, but criminals refuse to do business with us unless we make some changes. So let’s do it!” The great thing about being big and successful is that you no longer need to worry about pleasing unsavory customers, because you have plenty of regular ones. (Okay, we are talking about everyone in China, which is an awful lot of “customers”.)

Lots of people pointed out that Google is a public company, and can’t sacrifice profits for ideals, even if the ideals are popular, resonable ones like the freedom for people to communicate. This is true enough, but I think Google has made a disasterous business decision as well.

Setting aside the free speech issues, the real danger for both Google and the hypothetical data haven is that once you prove you are both willing and able to bend your system to someone’s will, a lot of people are going to begin exerting power against you to make you bend it their way. Some people have already pointed out that Google is now willing to censor political dissent (in China), but not child porn (in the US). If a court suddnly demands that Google start blocking child porn, they can no longer claim it isn’t feasible from a technical standpoint, and they can’t refuse without looking like they support child porn. Keeping this in mind, there is no end to the types of information people would like to block, limit, or control. What about detailed plans for building bombs from common items? What about methods of tax evasion? Hate speech? Regular porn? Gambling? Swastikas in Germany? Swimsuit pictures in Egypt? Danish political cartoons?

Google may soon find itself being dragged into courts around the world, forced to filter all sorts of things for different powers, and being held accountable for things they “should” have filtered but didn’t. This could get very messy for them. If this happens, they will need to do lots of unprofitable coding to meet these demands. Going back to the hammer analogy, they are going to be bullied into making all sorts of special hammers that can and cannot do various taks, just to keep the customers they have now. In the end, their search engine may be less useful because people will trust in the results less. (For example, a support website aimed at victims of child porn may be tagged as actual child porn, and indeed this post might be labeled as such because I’m using the term so often.)

Google should fear the day when people see something offsensive in the search results, and instead of thinking, “Why does that website exist?” they think, “Why did Google index that site?” If people percieve them as being responsible for the contents of the internet, there is no end of the trouble they will have.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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