Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category.
January 27, 2012, 2:53 pm
As you may know if you’ve been reading for a while, I’m a gamer. Have been pretty much my whole life. In fact, it was the prospect of creating my own video games that first got me into programming.
A while back, I purchased Elemental, the latest game by Stardock, a company with a reputation for making high-quality games and for being a lot more ethical than many gaming companies. Their Sins of a Solar Empire was the best-selling game of 2008, for example, even though they refused to put any DRM on their software. (So much for piracy destroying sales!) They’re also the guys who created Impulse, a Steam competitor that ended up getting bought by GameStop last year.
Elemental, unfortunately, was not a high-quality game. The basic concept was decent–not exceptional, but not *bad* either–but the game itself was a slow, crashy, bug-ridden mess. Several patches over the course of several months eventually got it to a mostly-decent state, but in no way did it live up to expectations.
They just did something that does a lot to redeem them in my eyes. I woke up this morning with the following letter in my email: Continue reading ‘An email from Stardock’ »
January 18, 2012, 10:29 am
Have you heard of the Golden Mean Fallacy? I would link to the Wikipedia page, but they’re blacked out today, so here’s an excerpt from its description:
…a logical fallacy which asserts that given two positions there exists a compromise between them which must be correct. [It] implies that the positions being considered represent extremes of a continuum of opinions, and that such extremes are always wrong, and the middle ground is always correct. This is not always the case. Sometimes only X or Y is acceptable, with no middle ground possible. Additionally, the middle ground fallacy allows any position to be invalidated, even those that have been reached by previous applications of the same method; all one must do is present yet another, radically opposed position, and the middle-ground compromise will be forced closer to that position.
I added emphasis to a very important part of the explanation. All you have to do to make something bad look good is come up with something even worse to compare it to. And given the human capacity for imagination, that’s not such a difficult task. Continue reading ‘The worst thing about SOPA’ »
June 10, 2011, 1:03 pm
Someone recently asked a very interesting question over at programmers.stackexchange.com. Unfortunately, though somewhat predictably, people jumped all over it and it ended up getting closed and then deleted within 20 minutes of being asked. That’s actually happening a lot recently, to the detriment of the community IMO, but that’s a subject for another time. But I think there’s some actual, worthwhile discussion to be had in this deleted question, so I’m preserving it here, along with the answer I would have posted. Hopefully it’ll be of interest to some people. Continue reading ‘Programmers and social skills’ »