Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Selling you the same thing for more money.

So, CNN has this article on how the new 15" MacBook will have a "retina display".

Doing some back-of-the-envelope calculation, using typical viewing distances, and based on the iPhone 4 and specs for the upcoming iPad 3, I'd guess this would put the display somewhere in the realm of 2048x1152.

That's nice and all, but there are plenty of 15" laptops out there with 1920x1080 - and have been for years. And while it's just a bit less than the figure above, it has the advantage of being the native resolution of HDTV and Blu-Ray video streams, which means that TV and movies will look better (no scaling or blurring or letterbox borders) than on an odd resolution "retina display".

I just wish Apple didn't try to pull these gimmicks to make their products seem better than they really are. For heaven's sake, my phone has a higher resolution than my wife's iPhone 4S, and it's exactly 720p to boot, which means it's perfect for watching HD movies and sports. "Retina display" my big ol' butt...

Posted by Dave at 1:57 PM | Comments (0) | Tags: tech

Just another symptom of the problem.

An editorial by Adam Hartung in Forbes Magazine just listed the "Worst 5 CEOs in America" and guess who tops the list? Steve Ballmer of Microsoft. Hartung's biggest complaint? Microsoft's share price is down from $60 in 2000 to $30 today.

What happened? Pretty much just this: the dot-com bubble burst. All tech stocks were hyper-inflated in 2000. That Microsoft has survived and is trading at only half that value today (while many of its competitors have gone under) speaks to the company's stability. Microsoft also pays dividends to shareholders, something not reflected in Hartung's analysis.

But besides that, what is the columnist really saying? A CEO's worth should be measured by the value of his company's stock, right now. But isn't that the problem? Too much risk; too much short-term thinking? It's what drove the dot-com bubble, and the housing bubble, and the derivatives bubble. It's what sank the big banks and it's what is killing J.P. Morgan-Chase as we speak. Shouldn't we be rewarding companies with stable stock prices and reliable dividends? They're the ones which are creating long-term value for their shareholders - and reliable jobs for their employees. They're the ones who are keeping the economy afloat, not venture capital firms and hedge funds.

12% annual growth is unrealistic and unsustainable. The Forbes guys have got to pull their heads out of their butts and stop living in 2006.

Posted by Dave at 10:03 AM | Comments (0) | Tags: economics, tech

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Incentives

So there's a new blog by game designer Liam Burke, whose Dog Eat Dog I intend to buy at some point. He's got an interesting post on moral choices in games - he argues that if you want to explore morality, rewarding good behavior is actually counterproductive.

He's right, but the principle doesn't apply everywhere. In a game where rewards are largely mechanical (World of Warcraft, Dungeons & Dragons) players will to do the expedient thing regardless of its rectitude. It's only in games where the player can relate to the narrative and characters (Burke's example of Bioshock is probably only a border-case) that you have the kind of real moral conflict that makes the point relevant.

Dragon Age: Origins is probably a much better example - and a game that wholeheartedly follows Burke's strategy (spoilers follow).

... Read all of "Incentives"

Posted by Dave at 7:26 AM | Comments (0) | Tags: games, life

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Toponymical!

All place names come from words. Most are horribly mangled beyond recognition because the people living there don't speak the language that the words were taken from (either due to conquest or natural language evolution) and/or because place names tend to get worn down over time faster than the rest of the language.

My favorite example of the latter effect is the famous (or infamous) Bethlehem Royal Hospital in London, known in literature as Bedlam. The hospital, which specialized in mental disorder, developed such a reputation that the shortened name was re-imported into English as a synonym for "chaos".

But again, if you drill back far enough (and assuming the original language is re-constructable), you can trace any name back to the actual words it is built from.

That's just what the Atlas of True Names does. The authors have gone back and researched the origin of every geographical feature, city, and country, and created maps where the names reflect the original meaning. One of my favorites: the Spanish named the Yucatán peninsula based on a phrase spoken to them in the native Mayan language that means something to the effect of "I don't understand you."1

So if you're ever in need of a few place-names for a fantasy or alternate-Earth story, the Atlas is a pretty good place to go. You could just steal some of them, translate them into your peoples' native languages, do that and then transliterate them into a conquering people's language (perhaps more than once), or just take some inspiration from what's there.

(Link courtesy of Making Light.)

1 There's some controversy over exactly what the phrase was; it could have also bee "Look how strangely they talk!" or similar.

Posted by Dave at 6:14 PM | Comments (0) | Tags: language, politics

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Two Great Tools

I finally tracked these down in the internet wayback machine, because the site they were from is dead now. But they're from the old home of one of my favorite RPG theory/advice sites:

I need to do some more work on flags, but I used the conflict web in my Dresden Files game and it worked really, really well. With a conflict web I had a much better grasp on who the characters were and good conflicts just sort of sprang up without much effort on my part.

Posted by Dave at 1:38 AM | Comments (0) | Tags: games, tabletop

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

"How to be a fan of problematic things."

Rachael at Social Justice League (neat name, btw) has a great post on how to be a fan of things which are problematic for one reason or another. Seriously, go read it. I think this dovetails nicely with (and makes some of the same points as) my recent post on ways to be a good ally.

90% of the good advice in this area basically boils down to "respect other people's feelings and experiences". 90% of the difficulty comes from people not listening to each other. These are not actually hard problems to fix.

Posted by Dave at 2:51 PM | Comments (0) | Tags: activism, media

What's wrong with Ron Paul

...and American Libertarianism in general.

We can make all the arguments we want about how, without any social contract, all the power and wealth accumulates in the hands of a small number of individuals and society collapses. We can say these things, and be guaranteed to be called "communists" or "socialists" and ignored. We can point out that in places where the government governs least (Somalia, Afghanistan), awful things happen. But the libertarians won't listen to us because we're America, not some third-world country.1

Libertarians are convinced that their flavor of "freedom" is the best, and that everyone should have it. The thing is, their "freedom" isn't really freedom at all, as Noah Smith points out:

[T]he founders of libertarianism ... obviously understood the principle that freedoms are often mutually exclusive - that my freedom to punch you in the face curtails quite a number of your freedoms. For this reason, they endorsed "minarchy," or a government whose only role is to protect people from violence and protect property rights. But they didn't extend the principle to covertly violent, semi-violent, or nonviolent forms of coercion.

Not surprisingly, this gigantic loophole has made modern American libertarianism the favorite philosophy of a vast array of local bullies, who want to keep the big bully (government) off their backs so they can bully to their hearts' content. The curtailment of government legitimacy, in the name of "liberty," allows abusive bosses to abuse workers, racists to curtail opportunities for minorities, polluters to pollute without cost, religious groups to make religious minorities feel excluded, etc. In theory, libertarianism is about the freedom of the individual, but in practice it is often about the freedom of local bullies to bully. It's a "don't tattle to the teacher" ideology.

Democracy itself cannot exist in such a society. In a democracy, people vote to create the social contract by setting policy. A true minarchy would so bound by its restrictions that meaningful policy could not be made. Not to mention that, with people made desperate, buying votes would be trivial.2 And if, at the behest of someone with great sway (the biggest of the bullies), the government overstepped its bounds or a court failed to protect individual rights, who would have the power to confront the system?

In Libertaria, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The only real "freedom" libertarians advocate is the freedom for the biggest dog to have his day. Perhaps they're convinced they would be the biggest dog. They almost certainly wouldn't, of course, but that hardly matters.3 In their minds, they're envisioning getting to be that "local bully" and making people do things their way. Else they're not really thinking about the implications of their philosophy at all.

Either way, it doesn't make for a very appealing vision of the future.

(Link via Making Light.)

1 A dismissal that has nothing to do with racism, I'm sure.

2 And perfectly legal, as long as the contract is drawn up properly.

3 You can even ask them: "Have you ever worked for someone who made your life miserable but couldn't quit?"

Addendum: The Libertarian asks: "If we want to curtail the power of the local bully, why do we allow the biggest bully (government) to act unfettered?" And the answer is, "Because a democratic government restricted by a Bill of Rights is more responsive to the will of the people and more strongly bound to protect their individual liberties than any of the other bullies." The government is the biggest bully, but it is also us, allowing power to flow back down to the bottom of the social hierarchy instead of only upwards.

Posted by Dave at 2:17 PM | Comments (0) | Tags: politics

Monday, April 16, 2012

Eight Commandments for Allies

As a friend of mine would say: "I has a sad." It's nothing serious and nothing personal, so don't worry.

No, it's sort of a "I hate to see two friends fighting" type of thing - mostly having to do with this post, its author's awesome blog (which I link to a lot), and the community he represents (people of color in tabletop gaming); and this guy, his incredible group blog, and the community he represents (speculative fiction writers, editors, and publishers).

Both of these folks and their respective communities are very progressive. They routinely advocate for equality both in their hobbies/industries and in the larger society. By all rights, Deeper in the Game and Making Light should be staunch allies. And yet, the authors and their communities don't get along. This mostly stems from an incident ignominiously dubbed "RaceFail '09".

... Read all of "Eight Commandments for Allies"

Posted by Dave at 2:55 AM | Comments (0) | Tags: activism, games, media, web

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Sperm whales are total badasses.

Not sure how I ended up on the sperm whale Wikipedia page (something to do with today's XKCD) but... man. Sperm whales kind of kick ass. They're like the Chuck Norris of the ocean.

Here are a few awesome facts about sperm whales:

... Read all of "Sperm whales are total badasses."

Posted by Dave at 12:42 AM | Comments (0) | Tags: science

Monday, April 9, 2012

Fictional languages and real linguistics (plus a plug - scroll down)

Some authors - especially those in the speculative genres (sci-fi, fantasy) - create fictional languages for their stories.

J.R.R. Tolkien (Lord of the Rings) was one of the first authors to do this and probably still the most famous. Tolkien created two or three nearly-complete elven languages (loosely based on Finnish, Latin, and Welsh) as well as fragments of others for the dwarves and orcs. You can hear samples of elvish in the recent film trilogy.

Other examples of fictional languages made famous in film are Klingon (Star Trek), Na'vi (Avatar), and Dothraki (Game of Thrones). Novel artificial languages like Esperanto, Interlingua, and Lobjan have been created for real-world use, though the most successful and widely-spoken artificial language - Modern Hebrew - is a reconstruction from ancient texts.

... Read all of "Fictional languages and real linguistics (plus a plug - scroll down)"

Posted by Dave at 11:16 PM | Comments (0) | Tags: language, media, web

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