Debian is attempting to marginalize itself by taking a position analogous to the people who go after Starbucks for its business practices. You know, that big, evil corporation with bellowing smokestacks belching toxic coffee scent and peddling fattening whipped cream to unsuspecting “thirsties.”
Tim Buckley of Ctrl-Alt-Del mentioned on his current post that he is planning to buy a PS3 for one game in particular (my link is better than his, despite the flash ad), and “just in case [BluRay] wins the HD format war.”
I know I’m kind of in a post-exam tailspin here, but the profit diagram on that little investment strategy looks a lot like a prison shower scene. Putting down serious wampum on both sides of a format war with Sony involved is just asking for it in a couple of years, when the peace treaty involves a third format, or affordable dual-format players, or simply a crushing Sony defeat at the hands of market feasibility and reasonable compromise on technical merits.
My perspective on consoles is as follows: if you’re not giving me a novel reason to sit in front of a television screen, I’m already wondering why I don’t have WASD and an optical mouse. As a brief former student of models for precise instrumental control, a keyboard and mouse is a near-ideal compromise for a translational (WASD) and rotational (mouse) control. You have 4 degrees of freedom, from what I can tell: left/right and forward/backward on the keyboard, plus yaw and pitch from the mouse. Trying to do that with two analog sticks always feels like playing darts to me.
“Hitman,” for example, while being a great challenge to play, increases its difficulty by forcing the player to monkey with the pitch (up/down tilt) of the view all the time. Casting to reality, this would be like having trouble with your head rolling backwards when you walk, especially when climbing stairs. Adding in a non-targeting gun aspect just makes things more complicated.
The Bond game I’m playing with my roommate kind of does the neck work for you, leaving you to yaw-steer with the right thumb and do the ambulating on the left thumb. This works, but you have this weird zeroeth-order thing on the pitch and first-order thing on the yaw and translation. To the nonintrospective player, this is probably optimally easy, but it’s bothersome to me in terms of the science of the motion. It also does a GTA-style L1 autotarget. It’s Bond, for goodness sakes. The man doesn’t miss.
All this is why I’m looking for Wiimotes, plastic guitars, and touch-sensitive floor mats for the consoles, in addition to good RPGs, which at this point I think I’m conditioned to like better on consoles.
Open source magnate Hans Reiser has been arrested under suspicion of murder.
He is the author of ReiserFS, with a new version Reiser4 to be merged in the Linux kernel at some point.
Honestly, I had the title already written before knowing what I was going to write, so I’ll talk about Cluster.
Definitely crazy. I have my central ideas already down, and I’m hoping to flesh out a full story this weekend, during some (in my point of view) well-deserved downtime, despite the fairly low-velocity nature of my studies as of recently.
I have been caught a few times needing to take care of a week’s worth of work in a day or two. While this has obvious downstream benefits, I think it erodes the burnout resistance a bit.
In fact, being able to get through a week’s worth of work in a day is a bit suggestive of the engagement some of these duties require.
It’s a little frustrating. BNL comes to mind: “I wish I could step from this scaffold, onto soft green pastures, shopping malls, …” I guess that sounds pretty stupid if you haven’t heard the song. Whatever.
To affirm Josh’s Pandora comment, it does feel a little ADD with regards to maintaining a genre match. I had some nice Zeppelin/Scorpions/Black Sabbath/etc. stuff going. It started playing emo shortly thereafter, and continued on that way consistently.
I think that their licensing is contingent upon selling fairly new artists to music enthusiasts, so such is life.
I’m gearing up to figure out what happens next in Cluster…
But I have a question: is Ernie in the room? Ernie heard the Count’s voice in the room… was that really Bert hearing him, or has Ernie entered the story again?
I hate the radio and TV for not revealing this treasure trove to me. Wow. What a guitar player and singer.
Pandora is beginning to get more consistent in picking good stuff for me. Its current justification goes as follows:
Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features pop rock qualities, a subtle use of vocal harmony, repetitive melodic phrasing, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, and major key tonality.
You had me at “Hello.”
Maybe I’ve been living in a hole, but Cardinal Trait is an amazing Oklahoma band. You can listen to 2:00 per song samples of the whole CD at the link. I found them on Pandora and am working my way through the album.
This is like a smart rebirth of young Matchbox 20 / Vertical Horizon with an electric guitar yet country sensibility. I think I will be a customer ASAP.
Update: Apparently, the CD is not to be found in stock online. They played at a bar called Al’s in Norman this past August, and they are awesome. Maybe about to get some national exposure, but basically a regional/local band at this point.
Track 9 rocks.
T. O. = Sucks
Flea Flickers = Awesome