The Gears of War

The Crusher is a new remote-controlled heavy warfare battle vehicle, designed to smash through enemy territory and defenses. Clad in seemingly impervious armor, potentially bristling with weapons, and essentially expendable (though I imagine the price tag isn't really so), it just might be one of the most helpful Urban Warfare tools out there. What's really interesting, though, is how the robot's controlled. Remotely, operators control The Crusher using an Xbox 360 Controller and a hacked version of an Iphone.

...Huh?

This makes a lot of sense though. Costs are often a function of time; by capitalizing off of the easily-usable 360 controller, your younger soldiers will have little necessary adaptation time. They'll be off fighting terrorists with your robotic abortion of life and death sooner, and you'll be spending less on remote peripheral systems thanks to an equally horrifying combination of a 360 controller and an iPod. Everyone walks away happy.

I think that the relationship between military technology and video games is somewhat similar to that of science fiction and applied technology. The lessons we've learned in UI design, programming, algorithms, and game strategy can easily be applied in a combat setting towards more efficient fighting tools and methods. Likewise, a little government investment in the capitol-rich video game sector can't hurt. Everyone gains.

The Grass is Greener on the Other Side

I haunt a few listservs, and my school is no exception. We have a forum for Economics students there, which gets filled with some very intellectually-incendiary (read: provocative) conversation. Recently, an all to familiar evil crept out of the dark recesses of the internet and struck forth. Someone posted a comment about how Business students pervert Economics, and, well, read for yourself:

Being an amateur economist (it's really more of a hobby, crazy as that may sound), I have a question perhaps too redundant for this forum. Nevertheless, I would appreciate anyone's and everyone's help. I was a business minor in school per my tuition financier's wishes. I met
some rather stuck up business majors in my time and can understand to some extent the animosity between economists and business specialists. But recently, I have met more people that have strong distaste for the actual concepts of business applications, such as
business math. Anyone have any thoughts on the matter? Please speak freely and consider this a chance to get some bad feelings off of your chest or defend business experts if you see fit.

Yours,
TTirk

Given that this is nearly the exact-same argument I've heard flung at the social sciences from my Computer Science side, I thought I'd jump in the ring. The following is my response to this all:

This seems like a very provocative topic. Recently, Russ Roberts' Economics Podcast (http://www.econtalk.org/) covered a portion on Strategic Intuition. It covered a sort of Game Theory-esque way of maximizing creativity by minimizing opportunities to otherwise drain one's self of creative energies. More pertinent to this topic, Russ' conversation with a professor at a Business school somewhere East included a score of scathing comments about the education and attitude at Bus. Schools. While some of them seemed incredibly legitimate (come on, some of the meetings one'll be forced to go to are indeed useless), a lot of it simply smelled of passionate but ill-thought out ranting.

The sort of view of a "stuck up" individual who's only interested in elements of the science for their personal gain and has a harsh distaste for seemingly more difficult pursuits like Applied Math and analysis is not regulated to Economics versus Business students. I got hooked on Economics for its tangible application of Mathematics, and jumped over from Computer Science. There, C.S. majors will often conspire too against the greedy, evil Business majors who're out to steal their code for proprietary use, and pimp it out over the vast and terrible wasteland known as the free market. But the C.S. people often come under fire from Physics majors, who might think that their 'paltry' knowledge of mathematics makes them slackers who're only in it for the small gains for algorithm analysis. Meanwhile, mathematicians in general will scowl and point their hooked fingers at the lot of Science and Engineering majors, and chastise them for their perversion of Mathematics into a bunch of curve-fitting nonsense that neither reflects the real world truly nor pays homage to the holy discipline which spawned it. This is, of course, only after Pure Math majors and Applied Majors find time to stop calling each others' studies useless and nonsensical.

In general, this is whole business of trying to generalize character traits off of someone's major is nonsense in my opinion. The passion that one studies has little to do with a person, other than that it's their passion. There isn't a 1:1 relationship between personality archetype and major, much to the dismay of most students everywhere. It's a simple case of generalization, true enough.

I've taken a few business classes at SJSU. While I felt particularly uninspired by the otherwise life-changing religious experience that is Financial Accounting, I rather enjoyed Business Law. While I find myself owning a headpiece, I don't wake up every morning now plotting to acquire failing businesses through hostile acquisition and legal chicanery. If I cannot be so affected by this business class (and I can be lulled with little more than a flashing light or shiny object), I significantly doubt others can be molded into the sorts of pretentious and lazy oafs that you're describing here. True: what you study in college will change your opinion and influence how you think. But to think of this as a sort of mutagen in changing your character into a suit-wearing ambulance-chasing shark is a bit naive. Wouldn't the character traits for this behavior have to be there in the first place? If someone wants to study Business because they want to become a devil-spawned version of Larry Ellison, is it Business' fault that they graduate with a degree and begin to maraud the technology market like it's some sort of securities-based Silicon Valley Chainsaw Massacre? Hardly.

I believe a lot of this sort of “they suck”-syndrome comes from a typical student response to generalize other students' studies into something 'easier' or 'more simplified.' It's a sort of academic masturbation to indulge in the idea that your studies are more effectual (or at least, more difficult) than the other guys', and this lends itself well to the “sibling rivalry” that seems to develop between similar fields of study. Coming to terms with the full dimensions of your major may be a difficult measure, but it's far easier to take out your pent up aggression and stress by pointing your finger at the Boccardo center and saying that “those chumps have it easier.” Certainly, it doesn't help that we get pointed at by the even MORE [traditionally] math-inclined Natural Sciences and Engineering majors, who say the exact same things about the otherwise 'simplified' and seemingly quaint ruminations of the also seemingly math-inept Social Sciences. A vicious cycle ensues, and it appears that this one doesn't lead to hyperinflation.

In short, I caution myself against agreeing with you, Ttirk. It's easy enough to point and label, but I can't come to terms with myself that it's anyhing else other than a product of stress and “grass is greener on the other side”-syndrome.

P.S. I'm floored with the discussion with this group, and more than know that my choice in majors was a good one. I'm blown away that some of the very professors I take classes with will go at it on here so passionately, and eagerly continue to read this board. Thanks for the great discussion!

Fighting the Unpopular Fight

I hate Rush Limbaugh. In my opinion, he's a short-sighted, racist, naive fool whose vision of the world is best delivered in the form of Yoko Onno yelling loudly after being disqualified from an elementary school spelling bee. But, despite all of his faults, the guy isn't stupid.

I opened up Valleywag to read the latest gossip (read: who got fired today from Yahoo!), and found an article about Rush Limbaugh imploring Jobs to release a set of bugfixes for his Mac. Naturally, I expected to read an article about Rush being pissed that his right-click doesn't work. Instead, I read a very sane request for fixes on a Mac VPN client (oh piss off you elitest pricks, it's a damn VPN client) and well-documented problems with Time Machine. Very impressive. Very reasonable, and a bit of a shock to my otherwise infernal impression of the man.

My problem with positing at Rush Limbaugh's intelligence is bias. I wasn't willing to look beyond my own despise at the man, and frankly was reinforced by an overall popular sentiment for such a despise. Rush is far from moderate, and has certainly made some enemies out there. Still though, none of these things had to do with Rush's intelligence. Maybe you could take a jab at his reasoning skills for his analysis, but opinions are far from often intellectually-branded. It's more likely that you're going to be angry at your best friend for something stupid, rather than some well-deduced kernel of truth.

This sort of critical review is necessary, I think, in the case of Microsoft. I spend a lot of my time during the day studying and messing around at my school's Computer Science club. During the long hours I spend either getting my ass kicked in TopCoder, playing Smash Brothers, or joining in a 10 man, 1 girl conversation about sexual positions, I hear a lot of Microsoft bashing. Frankly, it's fashionable: in every tech circle I've run around, the Slashdot sort of disdain for the "closed-source evil behemoth of the shadowy north" is the lingua franca. You don't like my version of Linux because it's too user friendly? Wah! I hate you! Wait, we both hate Microsoft. Let's put aside our differences and sack Redmond together.

And while such a pillaging trip might be very profitable (Nintendo has their American headquarters in Redmond also, and there's a great Caimjumper restaurant downtown), its reasons are pretty damn faulty. Look, it's just retarded to come at Microsoft and deride their success by calling them a bunch of dumb, terrible programmers who're evil by conception. This is stupid. This is bullshit.

I'd like to review the charges I often hear levied on the corporation one by one, because all of them are some of the dumbest things I've ever heard.

• FACT: Microsoft is Evil because they're Closed-Source.
  
  I guess all corporations that respect the importance of trade secrets are evil. I can't wait to travel to the fairytale land where stockholders appreciate having proprietary knowledge given out willey-nilley, personal property rights are inconsequential, and everything magically works. Just because a corporation doesn't want to give out the code it spent millions on, doesn't mean that the firm in question is the spawn of Satan. This is about protecting themselves from competitors that otherwise would turn into this large behemoth of "closed source" code. What incentive would I have to give you my homework for class, if all I knew you'd do with it was use it as your homework then go about life?
  
  
• FACT: Bill Gates and Melinda Gates are evil people.
  
  Don't hate the player, kids. Bill's easily one of the most brilliant business men of all time, and he and his wife have donated millions to various charities around the world. The Mercury News recently had an article asking to describe who was funding the majority of worldwide AIDS research. Guess which firm donated more money to AIDS research than all of the R.E.D. movement combined? The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Man, you guys are evil, wanting to keep people healthy and stuff. Evil, vicious people.
  
  
• FACT: Microsoft is evil because it's a monopoly, and keeps people inside it.
  
  Let's leave the economics to the people that study it. Being a monopoly has nothing to do with ethics: it simply has to do with the positive analysis on how you gather revenue. Yes, there is a clear oligopoly in the operating system market, and Microsoft is sitting atop the fattest amount of the gold. This doesn't make them evil though, nor do their attempts to raise prices on an inelastically-demanded product stink of evil. This simply happens because, well, all firms operate like this. We maximize marginal revenue where possible, and with a product with few close substitutes, we have an opportunity to reasonably raise prices over a new feature set. Welcome to the real world.
  
  If we're really going to hose someone down for this, let's go target Apple. The average Macbook Pro is well above the CPI of all non-Mac PCs. Now, why does this happen? Simple: Apple has a clear monopoly over Apple Computers. They have to maximize marginal revenue by searching for a price in a certain way. Their way is to simply raise each unit's price by a certain amount. Simple. At least my soon-to-be-purchased Dell with the same specs doesn't cost as much as a Mac Pro. Still, I can't blame Apple. It's what they're supposed to do.
  
  It's what any company would do. I guess then that every company is evil.
  
  
• Open Source Products Are Better than Clunky, Not Working Microsoft Products
  
  I like open source: I really do. I like the ability to tamper, screw around with, break, and tear apart my software. What I don't like is when FSF nuts decide to make this a Jihad-style war against Microsoft (coughcough where's the attacking Google's highly-protected search algorithm guys) because they're a closed-source company. Worse, I hate them calling Microsoft's software comparatively "buggy" or "beta-ware". And Ubuntu, running on a perpetually-unstable build of Debian, isn't buggy also?
  
  Let's look at this from a non-techie user's perspective. On Windows Vista, I can actually use the broadcom wireless card (you remember that one: the brand of chipset that almost 2/3 of the world uses) natively without any problems. On Linux, I have to pray to God that either the buggy-as-hell bcmw4 driver works, or wrap it through ndiswrapper. God help me if I try to connect to an access point using WAP; if WPA supplicant does its usual song and dance, and my card for some reason isn't supported, I'm screwed. For a Windows machine, all I need to do is have my drivers and an OS later than XP SP1. Wow, that's some intense "working" you've got there open source.
  
  Or, I can really throw down the gauntlet and talk of gaming. The die-hard Linux fanboys I know say that just because Wine supports Pixel Shader 2.0, it can play any game just as well as a PC. Well, that might be true if that game is Jedi Academy, but considering that only 10 games top WINE's platinum support list at any time, I doubt you'll be able to play PC games as they were meant ot be played. Even Counter-Strike: Source, the game widely known on Wine to be working fine and a poster child of current gaming support, still acts up a lot with sound and texture issues. Worst of all, you have to play the game in directx-8 mode, meaning you're gimping yourself both in the quality of visuals and the performance. It's an admirable attempt, but Linux will never usurp Windows in gaming potential if the present is any indication of things to come.
  
  Again, nothing against open source. But frankly, most open source projects are the work of hobbyists who're contributing their free time. If it's your job, there's a greater level of incentive and specialization (the product of corporations' revenue, and economies of scale in the long run) that allows you and your team to produce high quality code. This also isn't to preclude any corporation from producing open source projects: quite the contrary, really. But I loathe how people use it as a vehicle for their wild diatribe against Microsoft, and just slander the hell out of the company with little more than false promises.
  
  As a wise man said, best 'check yo'self fo' you wreckity wreck yo' self.
  
  
  
  

Where Brain Failed.

Much like the mouse Brain from the animated series Pinky and the Brain, I too have world-domination aspirations. Well, digitally speaking of course - studying Economics has taught me enough about how much it would suck to be the leader of the free world. Instead of conquering nations in wet-space, having my digital armies march forth to conquer and erect my grand empire is much more fun. There's no social cost to my decisions, no real people hurt, and nothing really broken. It's like a perfect war.

So, when midterms are otherwise tearing me apart like a school-yard gang of black holes, I like to kick back and play some video games. Usually, I take out the day's aggressions with a fuillisade of trick shots in Counter-Strike Source. Recently, though, I picked up Stardock Studios' (the guys who brought you Galactic Civilizations I and II) new game: Sins of a Solar Empire. And man, am I hooked.

Sins is a fusion of the Civilization-style empire-building genre, and the Warcraft 3-esque heroic real-time strategy game. In it, you control one of three races as you attempt to conquer anything from a solar system to a galaxy using a variety of methods. From military brute force to cultural submission, your empire spreads like a cough on a plague-wind. It's a ton of fun, and mind-blowing in its ability to unify two seemingly disparate types of strategy games into one.

What's great about Sins is how it takes what works from 3X strategy games and imports them into a traditional build-attack-conquer RTS chassis with a minimalistic design. The last part's important, because in larger games you're easily controlling fleets of hundreds of cruisers, thousands of lances of fighters, and several behemoth capital ships as you rain death and mayhem on your enemies. It would be downright impossible to control each front directly, much less the front you're on itself, had Stardock not used its professional UI-design acumen (otherwise garnered from their line of XP-theme products like Object Dock and Windowsblinds) to produce such a fluid interface. You flow in and out of sector wide battles, zooming in effortlessly to a fighter's bombing run on an enemy carrier and coordinating that lance's attack only to seconds later fly out to another system and control the exchange of goods to maximize your revenue. This game is brilliant with the polish of such excellent user controls, which makes it all the more pleasurable when crunch-time comes and you're facing off against a massive armada of enemy vessels.

Capital ships act like hero units in Warcraft 3, and gain a certain importance with your ability to name them (you can also name your planets). With a fleet of smaller cruisers and frigates behind them, you can coordinate impressive strategies for maximum effect. Once you can control the multiple elements of a fleet, you can time your strikes on enemy outposts by waiting for your ships' antimatter (read: mana) to peak. Then, in unison, your ships crystalize at the edge of their current planet's gravity well, and blast into the dark wilderness between planets and asteroids in preparation to make an Inchon-style landing in enemy territory. During their travel, controlling your empire Ala Civilization is key. Making sure you have reserve forces, optimum economic policies, and key research going in-synch is important. You can even hire pirate forces to raid enemy systems, thus allowing you to pull Divide-and-Conquer sorts of shenanigans on an interstellar scale.

Battles are furious and intense, though the formation element of each fleet (read: control group) is a bit limited. I'd like to have seen the ability to set formations like the Total War series, but I can only specify how close I'd like each unit to be as they travel. While this is enough for mitigating the effects of area effect weapons such as nukes, it does little justice to a 3D naval space combat engine. I'd love to have been able to march outward with an armored speartip of battlecruisers, but instead I get the same sort of wall of ships every time. These faults are more than made up for by the inclusion of fighter and bombercraft from deployable carriers and fighter bays in capital sihps. This adds a huge level of depth, as intelligent use of fighters and bombers can turn a dull frigate rush into a mad orgy of laser fire and missles. The graphics are beautiful, and extremely optimized so that even a midrange system could smile at all the pretty colors.

I like to measure my level of enjoyment of certain games in how much time I'd blow on them, given the chance. The dark circles under my eyes should be testament to how much I love this game.

I guess it's just another case of the same thing we do every night, Pinky: try and take over the world.

Walking Along The Skull's Trail.

A few friends of mine are familiar with the fact that I name all of my computers after Greek or Roman gods; they know this solely because I badger them with this in a vain attempt to use 4 years of otherwise inapplicable Latin. Among these, the pretty-shiny name of Mercury is reserved for my dream computer - a dual-socket SLI beast whose carbon footprint is roughly the same as a sub-saharan African country. Given that I constantly window-shop to find ways to better pimp out my lusty maid, the recent reviews of Intel’s enthusiast Skulltrail board have really peaked my interest.

I’m disappointed, though.

With an abusive price of around $500-$1000 dollars (TechReport.com’s review states that the kit, with the QX series processor, is somewhere around $2000. The QX itself is roughly 1k), the term “enthusiast” apparently is synonymous with “cash cow.” For those of you who say that this is senseless bitching from a cheapskate who isn’t ready to put his money where his mouth is - well, you’re right. Still though, as seen in the 8800 GT, we don’t need to hike up the price so high to have performence hardware. And such a high cost for a motherboard is disconcerting to say the least. How about the video card? The case? The power supply?

And the RAM, oh man, the RAM. Skulltrail’s requisite RAM is mindblowingly expensive, and comparatively slower. As we’re on the cusp of DDR3, having an enthusiast board support only DRAM is depressing. Moreover, it’s kind of offensive: where’s the work? Supporting only server RAM makes the user assume that Intel did absolutely nothing to change its current lineup of server socket 771 boards other than rename it and release it for a higher price. Why buy this dual socket board when I could pick up an Opteron board with PCI-e x16 for absurdly less?

This isn’t to say that this is all Intel’s fault, though. Not enough games out there are supporting some of the mad hyperthreading needed to harness the raw power of an Octal-core gaming rig. Even Crysis, whose sole job as of late appears to be in molesting nubile computers into shriveling, single-digit FPS shells of themselves, doesn’t show a massive gain when swapped from an overclocked Q6600 to a QX octal. We’re not at the point where it matters enough to run an octal core for gaming, yet.

Sorry, Mac Pro.

Still though, bragging rights seem to trump both the Income Elasticity of Demand and rational thought when it comes to enthusiast platforms. Will bleeding-edge gamers drop money on this? Absolutely.