Dawngrrl has some friends in town and while they were out doing Girls Night in Seattle, we took our swinging bachelor freedom to the game store to pick up some entertainment for the evening. After picking up Rock Band for Wii for Andy at a steal of $100, I decided on Fallout 3 and chose Xbox 360 purely for the comfort of the controller.

I started the game and while I have a few tweaks with it, over all the game seems to be loads of fun. The world is humongous and incredibly detailed. The character interaction is expansive and in my opinion a much more unobtrusive way to get the story than sitting through lengthy cut scenes.

The combat system takes some getting used to, you can tell it’s an RPG with first-person combat as an afterthought. The movement isn’t fluid and aiming projectile weapons is pretty flaky. Luckily the depth and scale of the game is big enough to make you forgive the cludgy combat system.

I picked up the strategy guide while I was in the store, if for nothing but the maps. The strategy guide is a bit intimidating. It really puts the size of this game on display. The maps are humongous and the system for talents and skills is incredibly complex.

I can’t comment much on the soundtrack, other than some during loading scenes, there doesn’t seem to be one. The sound effects are haunting and hearing the radio blasting from the roaming robots is a bit creepy. Atmospherically it really sets the post-apocalyptic mood. It’s dry, dusty, dirty, rusty and sparse. I am sure designing and texturing an environment this size had to have been an incredible undertaking.

I am only a day in, but this is about the point in most games where I decide not to bother messing with it again. I am definitely intrigued, and much more so than I was by Oblivion which is from the same company on the same engine.

I think the game itself is much more attractive than Oblivion and game seems much more satisfying. If you are not yet into Fallout 3 and are looking for something new to play, I recommend this one for sure.

Fallout 3 is available for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

Amy Taylor, 28, said her three-year marriage to David Pollard, 40, came to an end when she twice walked in on him watching his online character, Dave Barmy, having sex with other virtual women.

Second Life enables players to create online lives in which their virtual alter ego, or avatar, can socialize, develop relationships, buy property and set up businesses in an imagined world using the game’s virtual currency.

The couple met in an internet chatroom in 2003 and married in real life and in a fantasy tropical setting in Second Life.

However, Taylor always had suspicions about Pollard’s online loyalty. At one point she hired a virtual detective to test whether his avatar was cheating on her, after finding him at the computer watching his character having sex with a prostitute.

Pollard passed that honeytrap test but earlier this year Taylor found his character in a compromising position with another virtual woman.

"He confessed he’d been talking to this woman player in America for one or two weeks and said our marriage was over and he didn’t love me any more," said Taylor, who filed for divorce the next day.

"The solicitor wasn’t at all surprised — she said it was her second divorce case involving Second Life that week."

From MSNBC.com

Well, if you pay attention to dates, and I do, then it looks like we have a huge list of failures on our hands, let’s take a look at a few of such familiar utter software failures, shall we?

Here we go, in no particular order:

Apple OS X v10.5 Leopard

Yea, you know I would go there, so let’s just get it out of the way shall we? OS X 10.4 “Tiger” was released on April 29th, 2005. Due to obvious market failure and un-acceptance (note the sarcasm) Apple was forced to release OS X 10.5 “Leopard” just a mere 2 1/2 years after the release of Tiger. The shame! Oh, and in case you aren’t getting my cynicism just yet, “Isn’t Leopard just an updated version of Tiger?”

Adobe Creative Suite CS3

That’s right folks, apparently everyone hated all of the CS3 applications. Released in March of 2007, Adobe was forced to release CS4 in less than two years from the launch of CS3. It offers modest updates to CS3 in many categories and is apparently one big bug fix, why else release it so quickly.

Microsoft Windows 95

Credited for much of the internet boom, as well as being one of the most prolific operating systems ever, Windows 95 was released on August 24th 1995. Around 2 1/2 years later, Microsoft released Windows 98. Realistically it was much like Windows 95, the User Interface was nearly identical. Drivers were compatible and almost all software claimed it was Windows 95/98 compatible. I am sure this should sound familiar.

Apple iPhone 3G

Ok, fine, I am picking on them, but seriously. The new iPhone came out so fast people were flat out pissed that they bought the first one. The original iPhone shipped in June of 2007 and the 3G version (which everyone really wanted) shipped in July of 2008 with zero incentive program to help early adopters upgrade. Ouch!

The Truth About Software

I am going to let you in on a little secret. Software companies are, wait for it… trying to make money. I can tell you from someone who lives inside the Microsoft machine, that when a version of software is shipped, the next version is already in development and the version after that is being planned. I am not exaggerating, that’s how it works. For people to be surprised that Windows 7 is being talked about is pretty funny to be honest. Microsoft has admitted that Windows Vista went through some growing pains and shipped late. All that means is the Windows 7 team had plenty of time to work on their code.

I don’t consider Windows Vista a failure, and I would bet the sales figures don’t tell that story either. I understand the mountain of bad press Vista has received and some of it is warranted. But when the bandwagon got rolling, boy did it start spitting out negativity from tons of people who had never even seen Vista, much less used it. We can thank Apple’s ads that are, to be nice, less than truthful in their depiction of Windows Vista.

The legacy has some really good points outside of that. I am betting it will be Windows Vista that goes down in history as the operating system that brought true 64-bit operating systems to the masses. Go to Best Buy and see how many new PCs are running Vista 64-bit edition.

Windows Vista will also be the operating system that made Windows Media center move from a boutique version of Windows to giving users true, seamless and fantastic media capabilities on their computer, features that you still won’t find anywhere near the Apple OS X/Front Row/Apple TV ecosystem.

Sure there are many other new features in Vista, and all new OS versions have tons of new features, but these two are huge, just you watch.

Andy is a pretty bright 11 year old kid. Bright enough that I feel like he would really enjoy learning more about how and why the computer does what it does. The only problem is that I don’t think I could ever get him to eschew Pokémon and Nintendo Wii to have long conversations about object oriented development and learning the structure required to do anything in C# or some of the even more strict languages.

Recently Microsoft has brought back what has been missing for awhile, and given it a child like spit polish that makes me want to sit down and teach Andy about software.

Introducing Microsoft Small Basic

The problem has stood for awhile, when QuickBasic disappeared and computers stopped shipping with BASIC interpreters of any kind, you were left to start with a compiler based IDE and at that point any kid is probably going to tune out.

Microsoft has trimmed the getting started down to an easily consumable 61 pages and made the tool look fun and simple. There are a grand total of 11 buttons and a cute version of intellisense that has a cool way to show you what all of your options are.

They have included some basic graphic libraries that are designed to keep kids interested as well as flickr support. But don’t think this has to be child like. Based on .net 3.5, you can create your own classes all day long in Visual Studio to help your kids around a more difficult project.

I think back to my basic days fondly and know it’s the simplicity that got me really engrossed into it. I thank my dad for breaking down the barriers to keep me interested and not giving me crap for staying up for two days straight on a weekend to learn at the voracious pace only a true computer geek can appreciate.

So what do you get? You get a kid friendly version of BASIC with an easily workable 15 keyboards. The development environment is very simple but provides help, has intellisense and the language is pluggable.

It requires Windows XP or Vista and the .net 3.5 framework. Lately Andy has been completely enamored with a Dice Game our friend Ian gave him. I think this weekend project will be teaching him how to recreate the game in software. I for one am looking forward to the task.

Download it today for FREE!

Now I have worked hard to hone my skill and am quite proud of the position I have attained and live quite comfortably on the salary I receive for my work. But now that we are in 2019, and open source software has vanquished the likes of Microsoft (my employer), Adobe, Autodesk, Oracle, Apple and their contemporaries, I find myself out of a job. Why is that you ask? Well the nature of open-source software, is that it is distributed with all of it’s un-compiled source code, clean and pretty and in it’s existence nullifying any shred of intellectual property the individuals who wrote it could have possibly hoped to maintain.

Now, I know that open-source software doesn’t always mean the crowd-source, written by Joe average developer and thrown into the wild with no guarantee. Sometimes there are corporations that develop software, release it open source, and still make some money. Usually those companies (like IBM and Sun) are making their money with hardware and aren’t true “software” companies. So ruling those out, we now find a company like my employer with absolutely zero incentive to spend the billions of dollars it spends on research and development so it can be copied (reverse-engineered is over stating it when you can look at the damned code) by anyone who wants to.

There is a humble reality that open-source software today has yet to accept as truth. 90% of open-source software applications are direct copies of some closed-source proprietary software. The problem with open-source software when all of the proprietary software companies die, is that they have nothing to copy from and will be our only provider of innovation. The billions of dollars that major software companies spend on things like research and development, training, focus testing, market research…. Not to mention the quiet agreements that allow them to start working on hardware that has not been released yet so they can have products ready when the new hardware ships…is gone.

The 900,000 paid developers dwindle down to a fraction, and the vendors that supply training and documentation for development dry up. Let’s face it, without large corporations with huge budgets, they don’t sell enough copies of their books to stay in business.

So now, I still love to write software, but I do it in my spare time because I no longer get paid for it. I work my day job as a Geek Squad member at Best Buy and develop at night for free.

It’s now 2022 and the situation is getting really strange. Just like Linux, we now have 50 different flavors of productivity suites, the are all nearly exactly alike, but are just incompatible enough to where it’s hard to figure out what will read what. You thought deciding to develop for Mac or Windows was bad? Now you have to decide if you are developing for Red-Hat or Debian, or is it Solaris, are they using KDE or Gnome? Oh, and since nobody is writing software to push users to new hardware, you also have to make sure that your software will work on a 10 year old PC.

I know this is a sarcastic, bleak and exaggerated scenario, but I think that the open-source community really fails to see the service and value that proprietary software fills. I know that you can argue that the millions of users across the net will provide all of the feedback you could want but let’s be honest. Even though all of those users cover a large spectrum of hardware configurations, will they be diligent in testing? Will they file all the bugs they find? Those are big ifs on mission critical software.

I work on software that deals with sensitive financial information. Are the world’s largest corporations going to trust their information to software that was written by anyone and everyone? Is the government going to have to spin up compliancy code reviewers to make sure that Sarbanes-Oxley rules are met?

There are many questions and there are perhaps answers that will satisfy many people, but I for one am not really that concerned.

I think open-source software has made incredible inroads to the server world and I have no reason to second guess the usage of the Linux operating system or server applications like Apache or Tomcat. The alternative is my desktop and millions of desktops across the world. I am a pretty savvy user with a good bit of experience with Linux in it’s many flavors. I would never in a million years choose Gimp of Photoshop, OpenOffice over Microsoft Office or Amarok over iTunes. The music and video production tools are just shadows of much previous versions of Final Cut or ProTools, and let’s face it, Electronic Arts, Bungie and Ubisoft are in no hurry to spin up new teams to port their games to Linux. I wouldn’t either knowing that I have to release the code along with it and the community is going to spin off a hundred variants that take away from their bottom line.

I don’t think I’ll ever understand the logic. Why is it that there is this contingent of people who think that companies don’t have the right to intellectual property, or to charge for their time and resources? Why is it that so many think that companies that create closed source software have some evil motive that drives them to keep secrets.

But it’s only software for some reason. Nobody faults GM for trade secrets. Nobody is upset at KFC for hanging on to their secret recipe. I have never heard anyone cry out in shock and rage at Google for keeping their page ranking formula proprietary (except the SEO experts that want to cheat it of course)

The point is, Capitalism fails when nobody has incentive and competition is leveled to an even playing field. As far as I know America is still based on capitalism and I for one am in favor of free competition.

What are your thoughts on the debate? I am sure I will get tons of Linux fanboy hate, but it’s a big deal. I am just pretty content knowing that the desktop is safe. Open-source software has a long way to go and no gas to make the trip.

We all love new music and since I have been on the Zune Pass diet, which is all you can eat, I have been finding tons of it.

I thought I would share one of those jewels with you. Senses Fail is an American Pop-Punk band from Ridgewood New Jersey.

I have been listening to the albums “Life is not a waiting room” and “Still Searching” and have been totally loving them. If you are heading to the CD store, about to rock iTunes or are lucky enough to be kickin the Zune/Zune Pass, download these guys. If you would like a more mature Blink 182, this is just the ticket.

Does Yahoo even matter anymore? Is it relevant? Would it be missed?

I am starting to think not. When I go over the list of all the things I do on the web, I come up with two interaction points with Yahoo, and both of them are very easily replaced. Let’s take a peek at Yahoo’s core business units and see how fragile they really are as a company. I think a good litmus test for validity is how they would be missed tomorrow. So let’s say for argument’s sake that they closed shop and let infrastructure in tact for a reasonable period to forward email, etc.

Communication

Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger could both be instantly replaced by any consumer with very little effort by a myriad of services. A few that come to mind are it’s two largest competitors, so some walk to Gmail and Gtalk and the rest go to Live Mail (Hotmail) and MSN, check, done and call it a day.

Content

Yahoo! Sports, Finance, Music, Movies, Answers, Games… all of these services are duplicated all over the net and in many cases done better. Sure they are widely used and generate billions in ad revenue, but if they fell silent tomorrow, how big of a raise in traffic would MSN.com receive, I am betting alot, and I am also betting that other than a few disparate bookmarks scattered across millions of PCs, they would be quickly forgotten. If you don’t believe me, ask AOL.

Mobile

Again, the biggies cover you with Live services on Windows Mobile and plenty of Google services on standard phones. iPhone has them all covered in spades. I don’t see a great consumer outcry here.

Search

Ok, so 80% change their home page to Google and the rest leave their default on Live when they install the Microsoft Live! services to replace Yahoo! Messenger. Ask.com gets four more users and five people notice that Altavista still exists…how?

Commerce

Yea, cause it’s so hard to find places to shop on the web

Small Business

I hope my big daddy employer gets some big wins here with some of the awesome services we have coming soon (I can’t talk about them yet but keep your eyes peeled) but Google’s got tons of solutions here that would sap up Yahoo in minutes. It would also make room for many more capable boutique services to show what they can do.

Advertising

Duh, Microsoft and Google have an open cage fight and there are justice officials on all four corners of the ring to make sure nobody brings in a folding chair…ARE YOU READY TO RUMBLE!!!!

Conclusion

The point is, who cares? This is one cut throat industry and if you aren’t truly innovating and providing fast, seamless, unobtrusive services, you die. Yahoo! is crumbling and the wolves are circling, it’s time for Jerry Yang to rethink what he means by “fair price.” While is stock holders stoke the fire they are building to burn him for not taking Microsoft’s first offer, he better start trying to figure out how he can beg them to make a second one. With the economy where it is, even Microsoft is wary of spending money so Yahoo! would have to come with one hell of a Big Lots style clearance tag to get a taker.

Those words mean a lot of different things to different people, but I will explain a little bit about what they mean to me. There is very little need to go over his stance on all the issues, but there are a few issues that I think we will all keep an eye on besides the economy. While everyone has high hopes that Obama can fix the economy, it’s important to remember that the economy is not a dial that the president turns. It’s not something that George W. Bush has been sitting in a room plotting to trash with Dr. Evil, Gargamel and Sauron. The economy is a fragile ecosystem that rides the hopes and fears of our public just as much as it rides the price of fuel, interest rates and credit debt.

Now I am all for Joe the Plumber, and there was a time I tried to be Joe the Plumber, but I think that in a world economy, where success is won in scale and breadth, betting the farm on small business is a losing strategy. Sure, we should break down barriers and make it much less treacherous for anyone to start their own business, but the world markets don’t trade on the popularity of Gramma’s Kitchen and I am not watching my 401k sink like a stone because the Bikini Barista got closed. Perhaps we made some mistakes (NAFTA) that made it a bit too easy for big companies and more importantly employers to hire very nearly slave labor in all sorts of armpits of this globe. Maybe we went a little too far with tax breaks for companies who can truly afford it while we watched behemoths like Wal-Mart play our zoning and tax-break rules like financial hop-scotch. Maybe lots of things I guess, the point is that 52% of Americans chose our next president and I just hope they have the patience to watch Mr. Obama struggle with the same issues that faced George Bush.

How will the public weigh Obama when the next Katrina devastates a coast and the public sees that it wasn’t a tyrannical George Bush hoarding aid like a Somalian warlord? How will the public weigh Obama in two years when we are most likely still in Iraq? How will we judge what appears to be an honorable man when just like 43 presidents before him, he fails to keep the promises he made because in reality, they just aren’t his decisions alone to make?

I think that about covers my curious, skeptical side. But why do I say I am excited, interested and optimistic. I think Barack Obama has the unique position and ability to bring together a lot of people who just yesterday were incredibly divided. I can’t speak for all Republicans, but I like many I am guessing, won’t pitch our tools in the back of the truck and leave the work site in disgust. The job has to be done and it really doesn’t matter what color suit the foreman is wearing. I love America, I love this country and support the leadership even when they do things that make me scratch my head or curse. I have no intentions of following Johnny Depp to France and I still pledged allegiance when Slick Willy was getting, um, oral assistance in the oval office. I even give him the distinct honor of being human, just like George Bush.

If you think he was sitting up there with horns on his head trying to run America into the ground, I feel sorry for you. If you disagree with his policy, I respect you. If you think he did it alone, I wonder about you. And last, if you think it was done with zero Democratic Party involvement, I only ask you pick up a text book from your child’s civics class and take a peek at how our government works, it’s important.

I am glad that African-Americans have a reason to be proud. I only hope that everyone was still proud to be Americans in 2004, and 2000, and every other day that we have called ourselves Americans. I just hope we can all be proud and for the same reasons. Intelligent leadership, competent policy and a good measure of strength and compassion make a good leader. I truly believe these are characteristics that will define Barack Obama’s tenure as president.

I will continue to blog about technology with passion and excitement, and I will continue to be American with those same qualities. I hope you excuse this short interruption of my normal content.

God Bless America.

I am also writing this post in the browser instead of using Windows Live Writer. Mostly because I am on my Macbook Pro, but also because it’s a quite improved experience, especially when you add Google Gears to the mix to speed up the UI.

So far the UI doesn’t seem that much faster with Google Gears installed, but I think I can possibly tell some difference. The next thing I am going to attempt is bulk edit to clean up some of my categories, things have gotten a little out of control at Philoking.com when it comes to categories and tags.

The new UI is gorgeous. There are too many new features to list so I will mention a few that I find really interesting. The ability to insert, upload and well format images is very welcome. One of the reasons I avoided posting through the back end UI was that it just wasn’t a good experience. It’s very much improved.

Bulk edit to posts is extremely welcome, when you get where I am with thousands of posts, making changes is a huge problem. Instant install for plugins is also very nice, but that was in 2.6 also. The last feature I want to call out is the ability to reply to comments being built into the comment moderation. I have used a plugin for this for a long time. It’s a very welcome addition.

I am not sure if I would suggest running it on a production site, even though I have not seen any errors so far, but if you have a local test setup or want to check it out, it’s well worth your time, the new admin alone is fantastic.