Most of you are too young to know of Sid Meier’s Pirates!, originally released in 1987. It is, in my opinion, one of the most addictive games ever and it vies with the likes of Zork, Balance Of Power, BattleHawk’s 42, and Silent Service for the title of the best game of the 1980’s. Pirates! was simple, yet so incredibly fun and educational … I learned more about real Pirates and general life in the 1600’s from this game (and the manual) than I did in all my years in school (so far). The game had ground-breaking graphics (read: EGA), all types of action (sword fights, ship-to-ship battles, land battles), all the options (different time periods, each one with a unique map, goals, and roles to choose from), and just the whole role-playing aspect. You actually became a pirate! You did what you wanted, you sailed where you willed … you were the captain … unless your crew got unhappy and you had a mutiny on your hands … but even then if you fought well you might still keep your ship. You could attack other ships, sieze their cargo and the ship themselves and build your own pirate fleet. You could attack ports, towns, raid villages, etc. It was great. The only thing I disliked about the game was the 8 ship limit. This is one of those, just one more turn type games (well in this case, just one more ship … or one more port … or …) … and it will cause you to miss an entire night if you’re not careful.

Why am I suddenly raving about a game that is like 17 years old? A couple of years ago Firaxis, Sid Meier’s company, hired a bunch of 3D artists. Firaxis, well know for Alpha Centauri and Civilization (all 2D games), was going to make a 3D game? Well I now what they were hired for Sid Meier’s Pirates!, a remake of the original game.

Tara Reid and the Future of Game Development: An interesting article about how very few developers are promoted by their distributors. The article covers the presentation by Jason Rubin, president of Naughty Dog (makers of Crash Bandicoot, and Jax and Daxter). In which he explained his difficulty in getting into the Sony celebrity party at E3 2003, in painful detail, and people like Tara Reid just walked in. He argued that no one would turn Spielberg from a movie premier or a party, but he couldn’t even get into a party by his own parent company. He then goes on to illustrate that this is a problem with the way games are promoted. The developers of the game are very rarely promoted, but the brand — ie the game name — is promoted ad infinitium. He stated that this could create false expectations in sequels which were not created by the original development team/company (as the writer of the article notes, he was probably talking about the recent Crash Bandicoot games produced by another company for Sony). It’s a good read and I think you’ll enjoy it.

Cool Movie Trailers For Movies That Will Likely Never Show Here

Casshern: Cool looking movie. In Japanese I think. Can’t understand a word of it but it looks really neat. [view trailer]

Immortel Ad Vitam: I’m very confused. It’s a movie, for french audiences, with a trailer that is in english with French subtitles … did I miss a memo or something? When did the French start making movies in English for French audiences … or is this an English movie being imported for French audience before sending it over to the English speaking Canada? In any case, very neat visuals … bad plot idea I think, but meh, looks neat. [view trailer]

I, Robot: Okay so this one is likely to show but still … “I, Robot”, decried by Asimov fans as a mutliation (which no one is disputing) of Asimov’s collection of short stories entitled “I, Robot”, now has a trailer. Wow is an accurate description if I ever came up with one. “I did not murder him!” IIRC, the three laws are a little messed. *rummage* *rummage* Ah, here we go:

• First Law: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
• Second Law: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
• Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

“Somehow I told you so just doesn’t seem to say it.” LOL. They are too many loop holes in the ones in the trailer. [view trailer]

General Movie News

Aeon Flux: According to cinescape, Charlize Theron has been confirmed as the lead for the upcoming live-action Aeon Flux movie. Should be interesting.

Fionna says shes out shopping,
But she’s under me and I’m not stopping.
Cos Scotty doesn’t know,
Scotty doesn’t know,
Scotty doesn’t know,
Scotty doesn’t know,
So don’t tell Scotty.
Lustra - Scotty Doesn’t Know

So last Friday I was one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a while, Eurotrip! I highly recommend it. It’s got all the elements of a great movie: random celebrity cameos, a catchy theme song, traditionally disgusting scenes, making fun of the Pope and Hitler, and an excessive amount of boobies. Go see it. At the very least, pirate yourself a shiny new copy of Scotty Doesn’t Know by Lustra, because it’s ridiculously catchy and I want it as my ring tone. It is also performed by Lustra (with Matt Damon playing their lead) in the movie. Very funny song.

From Slashdot:

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms is our constitution. It was signed into law by King Pierre in 1982, shortly before he was assassinated by Joe Clarke. Clarke enjoyed a breif stint as PM (kinda like a president, only with complete power), until he was dethroned by Brian the Black. Brian tried his best to destroy the will of the Canadian people, and he was deposed in a bloody coup lead by Jean Cretien. (Brian actually escaped the coup with his life, by setting up Kim Campbell as a puppet PM, just before the revolution.)

Followed by another poster’s modification

King Pierre first obtained power in 1968 after a bloody internal power stuggle within the palace. This reign was interupted by a short period (June 1979 through March 1980) [by a] insurrection led by Joe Clarke. King Pierre was then able to muster the proper forces and [keep] power until March [...] 1984. At this time, [a squabble] within the royal family led to a distant cousin, John Turner, briefly (June 1984 through [September] 1984) [seizing] power.

Turner was violently overthrown in September 1984 by Brian Mulroney (some said he was Ronnald Reagan’s bastard brother) [aka Brian the Black]. [Brian the Black] held power until June 1993 at which time tensions within the country had reached a boiling point. [R]ealizing his days were numbered, [Brian the Black] installed Kim Campbell as puppet leader.

Lady Kim was able to hold power for a remarkable 4 months until [she was] deposed in November of 1993 by Prince Jean Chretien, a close cousin of the former King Pierre.

Prince Jean was able to rule with an iron fist until December 2003 when he was deposed by Duke Paul Martin in a bloody internal power struggle whose waves are still agitating the normally placid Canadian politcal waters.

Personally I’d rewrite the end to be something like “Prince Jean was able to rule with an iron fist until December 2003. At which time Prince Jean, realizing his days were numbered, installed Duke Paul Martin as a puppet leader and arranged the entire incident to appear as a bloody internal power struggle. Duke Martin ruled peacably until late February 2004 when news of internal corruption emerged. Duke Martin, realizing he had been royally screwed by Prince Jean valiantly attempted to retain power, but … “

I heard an interesting rumour that Seth MacFarlane (creator of Family Guy) would be appearing as an engineer in an upcoming episode of Enterprise. A quick search confirmed he’d be in the episode “The Forgotten”, would would be two new episodes away … whenever it is they air again. While on TV Tome I decided to look at his profile there and was utterly shocked:

“On the morning of September 11, 2001, Seth was booked on American Airlines Flight 11 to fly from Boston to Los Angeles. His travel agent, however, mix-uped the departure time and he arrived at Logan Airport a half-hour late. Flight 11 was hijacked by terrorists that morning and was crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.”

This means he was almost killed in the middle of the third season of Family Guy and it would have meant that I wouldn’t be getting a new Family Guy Episode on Jan 1, 2005 … Thank god for incompetence is all I can say.

Just spotted this bit of info over at The Inquirer! seems there are unused areas of the hard drive in the form of hidden partitions that you can recover. One of their samples was on a 200GB SATA drive which created a 510 GB total space. It may be valid, or it may be creating overlapping partitions (which is totally useless). The article *seems* to claim that this is not the case, but one would have to try it to find out. Read the article.

The article sparked some comments though. The most relevant is from Jeff Garzik, the guy who wrote the Linux Kernel SATA code:

[...] First, users are usually amused to learn that the capacity of modern hard drives is _unknown_, until it goes through the factory’s qualification tests. The 120GB hard drive you purchased may have been physically identical to a 250GB hard drive, but simply it only passed qualification at 120GB.

[...] Second, in the ATA standard there is a feature known as the “host protected area”. This area is accessible from any OS — but it requires special ATA commands in order to make this area available to the OS.

Third, all hard drives reserve a certain amount of free space to use for reallocation of bad sectors. These “spare sectors” are free space on your drive… completely unused until your hard drive starts finding problems on the physical media.

[...] Although the host-protected area (HPA) can be used for insidious purposes such as DRM/CPRM that is completely hidden from the users, most of the “invisible free space” exists for a purpose — either it’s spare sectors for bad sector remapping, or its capacity that didn’t pass factory qualification, that you don’t want to use anyway.

An incredibly good article on Photo Matt’s Blog to explain to non-HTML coders why non-CSS HTML is bad … in language most people can understand. All this sparked ’cause Lockergnome changing back to a table layout. Great Read.

Y’all might be interested in this book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow

I ran across it a while back and wasn’t sure if I would be interested in it, then I found his presentation from an O’Reilly Conference on Emerging Technologies:

He is advocating removing all non-commercial copyright restrictions on books. Give everyone the right to do what ever they want with the book, non-commercially of course. He states that most authors never make enough money to live on the revenues of their books alone, and most do it for either artistic integrity or for notoriety. The few that actually do become huge are “rounding errors”. He then goes on to say Baen Books is a good example of a company that gets it. They are giving away electronic copies of books to market their authours and the next book. Not only did this practice increase the sale of the new book ten-fold, but it also increased the sales of the old books they released for free as well. It completely boggles the mind, he says, that people don’t say hey hippie, I just took your book for free, oh yah, feeling stupid yet hippie? He also claims it helps combat Trolls (the posting trolls, not the huge, green regenerating ones).

From the presentation text:

Here’s a bit of a review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom that was recently posted to Amazon by “A reader from Redwood City, CA”:



[QUOTED TEXT]



> I am really not sure what kind of drugs critics are

> smoking, or what kind of payola may be involved. But

> regardless of what Entertainment Weekly says, whatever

> this newspaper or that magazine says, you shouldn’t

> waste your money. Download it for free from Corey’s

> (sic) site, read the first page, and look away in

> disgust — this book is for people who think Dan

> Brown’s Da Vinci Code is great writing.



Back in the old days, this kind of thing would have really pissed me off. Axe-grinding, mouth-breathing yahoos, defaming my good name! My stars and mittens! But take a closer look at that damning passage:



[PULL-QUOTE]



> Download it for free from Corey’s site, read the first

> page



You see that? Hell, this guy is *working for me*! [ADDITIONAL PULL QUOTES] Someone accuses a writer I’m thinking of reading of paying off Entertainment Weekly to say nice things about his novel, “a surprisingly bad writer,” no less, whose writing is “stiff, amateurish, and uninspired!” I wanna check that writer out. And I can. In one click. And then I can make up my own mind.

Ironically it was the bad review he quoted from Amazon that made me want to read it. I do think “Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code is great writing.” That and “Axe-grinding, mouth-breathing yahoos, defaming my good name!” was an amusing response. Mouth-breather … ewww. So I’ve gone and read the first page, as the mouth-breather asked. It’s good. A little confusing but as you progress it becomes less so. I particularly liked this part:

Keep A-Movin’ Dan snorted. “You think a junkie misses sobriety?”

I knocked on the bar. “Hello! There aren’t any junkies anymore!”

He struck another cig. “But you know what a junkie is, right? Junkies don’t miss sobriety, because they don’t remember how sharp everything was, how the pain made the joy sweeter. We can’t remember what it was like to work to earn our keep; to worry that there might not be enough, that we might get sick or get hit by a bus. We don’t remember what it was like to take chances, and we sure as shit don’t remember what it felt like to have them pay off.”

From the C|NET News.com:

Since the launch of Office 2003 last year, Microsoft has given out tens of thousands of free copies of its flagship software, which retails for about $500, to workers at its biggest customers. The giveaway was expanded to government workers this year, but ethics offices at the Department of the Interior and Department of Defense have said the offers constitute unauthorized gifts and must be returned. The Department of the Army went a step further, calling on Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates to stop sending the software to Army personnel.

“We ask that you cease immediately the mailing of free software, and other types of gifts, to the Department of the Army personnel,” Deputy General Counsel Matt Reres said in a Feb. 19 letter seen by C|NET News.com. “Your offer of free software places our employees and soldiers in jeopardy of unknowingly committing a violation of the ethics rules and regulations to which they have taken an oath to uphold.”

I was actually hoping for something like “Or we’ll conduct a WMD investigate on your corporate headquarters” or the like. If I don’t see tanks rolling up 1 Microsoft Way and bayonet-bearing boys in uniform taking pot shots at random Microsoft geeks … This is what Microsoft thought of to combat Open Source Software in Government, give the employees free software? ROTFLMFAO.