Who are the faceless masses?

Ok so I’ve been doing this blog thing for a while now and I used to do it long before it had a name. Back then it was just writing for a personal website. Shoot I should have named it WFPW or something catchy like blogging. Ah well can’t win em’ all. One thing I have not had much luck in is really having contact with my audience. For some reason I rarely get comments and if I do it’s from some one I all ready have day to day contact with. So if you read this blog please,  please, leave me comments or shoot me an e-mail. Let me know what you want to see me write more about. Let me know what you think about some of my thoughts and ideas. And to all of you who keep coming back thank you for reading and I hope some of the writing has been either helpful or entertaining. Keep an eye out for more.

I’m in the process of moving in to a new apartment and making the transition in our work rotation as well as preparing for a command inspection at drill this weekend. So if I don’t write some time in the near future please keep coming back and checking I will write again soon.

Myspace = AOL

So I found today that after a long time of having had no new comments or posts on my Myspace page my friend from the Army sent me a message. Great! So of course I follow the link that Myspace sent me in the e-mail to my profile and then follow the link on my profile to the new comment. Simple enough. What I find in that message is really weird and kind of sad. It reminded me of a time when I joined a mass exodus from another similar service back in the day. Queue blurry wavy Waynes World effect. Dodalado, dodalado, dodalado dodalado…

So it was the early 90’s and AOL was king. All the cool kids were doing it and so was I. This is where the problem comes in. Something gets so popular that it can’t handle it’s popularity. AOL had this issue. Any one out there remember re-dialing for like half an hour just get an open line? Then some people decide to feed on the wealth of people online through various means like advertising, spamming and general crappyness like virus, worms and miss guided linking. That coupled with service issues drive the people away and destory the service that was so glitzy and cool. This my friends is the shambles that is now Myspace.

So what did I find in that message? Well the message read like this “..”. Yeah, thats it. Two periods. Those two periods were a link to a nasty piece of adware/spyware that does who knows what. It was sent from a legitimate account but I’m sure with out the knowledge of my friend. Crap like this has been going on at Myspace for the past several months and to be honest I’m pretty well done using the service. Facebook on the other hand seems to have gotten it right. Limitations on who can join and how the people on the service can access other peoples information.

I’m sure Facebook has had it’s fair share of technical issues dealing with such high jacking of its service but they have managed to control the influx of their users and allowed themselves time to cope and correct before letting more people in. Thus they have not become a victim of their own success. Let this be a lesson to any one trying to start a website/network focused on social interaction. Don’t be AOL or Myspace. Better yet don’t use either of them. You’ll just generate more crap that I have to deal with.
P.S.

Macworld must have read my blog. Check them posting dates. Booyah!

Why Apple should tackle gaming.

I’m going to venture where I’m sure others have ventured before and that is in to the realm and possibilites of Apple’s possible future with gaming. I have several reasons why Apple should do this and I’ll cover those here shortly. They have a lot going for them and I think they could clean house if they put some of that Apple penache in to it.

First things first is software. Most people reading this probably are not familiar with the *nix operating systems other than possible having heard of Linux before. Probably coming from my own mouth. One of the things that linux does nicely is run nicely on hardware far beneath the requirements of the latest and greatest Windows equivelant. It doesn’t do things like swapping in the background slowing down you’re hard drive unless it absolutely has to. It manages memory better than Windows in most cases and this means it leaves a lot more room on your hardware for other things like games. OS X being a relative of the BSD family means it acts like it’s *nix brothers/sisters. In fact suprisingly Call of Duty 2 is playable even on the onboard GMA950 built in to the system board. Given it isn’t the latest and greatest but it is obvious that you couldn’t make that happen with Windows running on the box.

This brings us to the hardware end of things. Gamers are willing to pay out money to get the best gaming performance money can buy, in general. This makes Apple a nice fit to gamers because they are good at making high end hardware appealing and priceing it a little high but not outrageous. This would make their hardware very appealing to gamers. You throw in the style Apple all ready has and add some gamer flare to it and Apple hardware would become irresistable to the gamer crowd.

Finally is the developers point of view. I’m not a developer but I have done a fair amount of beta testing and a good understanding of the over all process that takes place during video game creation. One of the things that I would think would be appealing to game developers is the limited platform variation. Console game designers on average have an easier job because they don’t have to write their software to run on a large variety of different hardware. PC game designers unfortunately do. Game designers/creators will be able to focus more on the game play and graphical look of their games and less on making sure the game has features to scale to fit all hardware because Apple offers up a slightly more limited set of hardware the game could run on.

Imagine getting in to a game of Quake 5 and going to options and having one slider bar. That slider bar having the options for Intel Mac Core 2, Core 2 Duo, Core 4 quad and Core !. Each setting being properly optimized to provide 60+ FPS(max fps the average human eye can discern) and the prettiest look to the game possible. It’s what a properly designed non-pc ported game should look like on a Mac.

I know there are Mac games out there and a few of the more popular games have been ported to the Mac but it looks like that work is being done by a 3rd party company. I also seem to recall an article about Mac games being pirated more than purchased but I can’t seem to find it. Wonder why? May be because Mac games are in short supply no one wants to pay Aspyr $40 for a game that on Windows is now down around $20 or $30.

Apple needs to grab the gaming market by the throat. They need to throw some money in to back porting and bringing the price of pre-existing games for Mac down and then work with game developers to bring all that gaming goodness to the platform that is really going to do it better. Apple can do this fairly easily. They’ve all ready got the 3d multimedia support built in to their OS and I don’t think it would be hard for developers to leverage this for things such as UI etc.

So to Apple I say why not!? Why don’t you take this step and bring your platform the last thing it’s missing to make it a truely rounded system. Grow some bawls!

Brain Scatter

So today my brain is all over the place. I’m having trouble staying focused. This is pretty typical when I get immersed in such things as Zelda Twilight Princess, Mario Paper and Rampage: Total Destruction. I don’t know to many people who focus particularly well when sleep deprived. Is this a bad thing, I’m not sure. It does mean that I read a lot about many different things and so I’m left with a lot of little chunks of info to share.

The first thing is Linux/Geek related. Linux.com just featured an article on the freeNAS.org project. It’s based on BSD so you know it’s solid. It’s released under the BSD license so it’s free and the best part is that it’s small and fast. I just happened uppon a couple of router boards recently and had been looking at an NSLU2 from linksys. Now I don’t have to pick one up and my NAS can go wireless with easy. I’m sure I’ll post some info on how that project comes together.

Thanks to the InDigital video podcast that pointed me to what will probably become a focal point for my future media center if the Sling doesn’t work out so well. A company named TAVI makes this portable media player that looks a lot like a Gameboy Advance SP but is slightly larger and does a heck of a lot more. The new revision 030 is set to replace the 020 which looks like it all ready does the same thing. I’m sure there is some significant difference I missed but either way these things will play back almost anything and they will do it even at high def resolutions on your TV. Throw in 6 hours of video playback(thats 2.5-3 movies) and the thing isn’t to shabby on the road. How sweet is that?

As if I don’t have enough to play to keep me up nights there are still the likes of Call of Duty 3, Wario Ware Smooth Moves and I’ll probably try something different eventually like Trauma Center. Don’t get me started on DS games or PC games. What’s a guy to do? Oh thats right! Look to the future. Xbox 360 revision 2 is on the way with a new lower price, cooler running and DVI built in. Oh what fun! At the very least I’ll wait till Halo 3 comes out. We’ll see how long I can hold out once that happens. MS is also working on sweetening the deal with IP TV and tivo like features. Jinkys!

Well thats part of the jumble. Unfortunately I don’t have time to sort any other thoughts. I’ll try to come back in later and link things up real nice. Till then Google is your best friend. Peace!

You’re NOP going to believe this!

So there is this technology that has been coming for years and years and years and now it’s finally here and it’s good and sweet! Originally they were going to try to get broadband internet over power line to every one who was connected to the grid. For some reason that never played out. Any way…Some place in the ancient past. I think my stay at MidAmerican Energy. I picked up a 1mbps Network Over Powerline pci adapter kit. I though it was a brilliant idea but far to slow for the types of things I was doing with my network. Streaming video, playing video games things that could use some bandwidth. So the box sat and sat and sat.

This morning I was poking around the internet and stumbled on some video from CES. This particular video I started watching because I have a big interest in the SlingBox. I was pleasently suprised to find that Linksys has taken that old slow networking over powerline technology and gotten it up to 100mbps. That is just sweet! All you’re networked devices have to have power so why not get both from the same plug? It just makes sense and now it performs like it should. It’s still a little on the pricey side but I’m hoping the price comes down fast. If they want to really make this killer they gotta get the adapter price in to the same range as your average wifi card. That’s going to be tough to do with you’re mPCI wireless cards hitting as low as $17.

Talk about potential(yes thats an electricity joke)! Whew!