Linden Shell Saved My Bacon
Today diverged from the plan. I was supposed to tour 4 apartments — I only made it to three of them. This is a result of my car breaking down just off the highway. Ironically, I had missed the exit I needed to get on highway 95 for the city, and wound up on an exit for suburban catonsville, intending to make a turnaround, when the breakdown occurred.
The shifter stopped shifting, something was making horrible scratching noises… yuck. Over the course of many phone calls and a visit from my unreasonably prepared dad, the problem was determined to be the shifter dampening rod, which had come loose from the transmission. The bolt which was supposed to hold in place was awol.
Not a good place to be, but a creative application of clothes hangers was able to secure it, albeit tendentiously. That proved sufficient in the final analysis, because I was right down the street from Linden Shell gas station in Halethorpe. I was able to get it there, and the mechanic, Jason, had the problem solved in a matter of minutes.
I just want to give a shout out here. This guy previously replaced a wheel bearing for me, and a muffler for my ex. They do good work, and in this case, the fact that he took a look at it on such short notice made it possible for me to get back on the road and visit most of the apartments I had planned on.
So here’s to you, Jason of Linden Shell — a Real American Hero.
Dividendos de Felicidad
Nunca puedo decidir si amo u odio los autos. Pues actualmente, estoy seguro que ni los amo ni los odio, pero no puedo ver hacia cual polo gravito.
Los autos prometen mucho, pero la realidad influye mucho en mi habilidad para creer dicha promesa. Conducirlos es divertido — negociar con el tráfico, no lo es. Trabajar en ellos es agradable — eludir la variedad de fallos que pueden tener es odioso.
Hoy tuve que cambiar la bateria del auto de mi novia. Esta operación simple se complicó por que el terminal de la bateria estaba sujetado por un perno completamente inaccesible — posiblemente el obstáculo más frustrante que uno puede enfrontar en la reparación de autos. Aunque esto trabajo estaba lejano de ser el peor que se me ha dado (nunca volveré, por ejemplo, recambiar un núcleo de calefacción), estaba ejemplar en su frustración simple.
A pesar de la agravación, el trabajo listo es satisfactorio. A precio de una poca frustración, mi novia no habrá sufrir los autobuses de aquí para la universidad, y me gratifica saberlo. De hecho, eso es la plantilla basica de la mayoría de las cosas que valen la pena. Gusto instantáneo es tan barato como es efímero — satisfacción duradero tiene un poco de trabajar.
Es posible que sea la diferencia entre el satisfacción y el gusto. El satisfacción está en el tarea completada bien, mientras el gusto está en como que comer helado. Aquél puede hacerte feliz despues de está lista, mientras que éste no te agrada nada más tan pronto como está ido. Si reparás un auto, te agradará el resultado por mucho tiempo. Pero si te hacés entregado, necesitarás volver a hacerte entregado si querés volver a estar feliz — de ahí los drogadictos, los que son tanto usualmente como ironicamente no muy feliz (y vividos cortos).
Este explicaría por qué los padres afirman amar a sus hijos, queriendo sólo que son feliz, aunque limitan la cantidad de helado y marijuana que pueden consumir, y animarlos a tomar trabajos. Queren que sus hijos están feliz no sólo hoy, pero mañana tambien — y queren que tienen muchos mañanas. Estan haciendo una inversión que esperan reportará dividendos de felicidad.
O Dios, nos das todo al precio de un esfuerzo.
Leonardo Da Vinci
Dividends of Happiness
I can never decide whether I love or hate cars. Well, actually, I’m sure I neither love nor hate them, but I can’t tell which pole I gravitate towards.
Cars promise a lot, but reality impinges greatly on my ability to realize said promise. Driving is fun — dealing with traffic is not. Working on cars is enjoyable — circumventing the endless variety of things that inevitably go wrong is odious.
Today I had to change the battery in my girlfriend’s car. This simple operation was complicated by the fact that the positive cable terminal was fastened by a bolt that was almost completely inaccessible — perhaps the most frustrating obstacle you can face in car repair. While this was very far from the worst car repair job I’ve ever been tasked with (I will never again, for instance, replace a heater core), it was exemplary in its simple frustration.
In spite of the aggravation, the completed job is satisfying. At the price of a little frustration, my girlfriend won’t have to suffer the shuttles back and forth to the University, and that’s rewarding. Which is the basic template for most of the worthwhile stuff of life. Instant pleasure is as cheap as it is ephemeral — lasting satisfaction takes a bit of work.
Perhaps that’s the difference between satisfaction and pleasure. Satisfaction lies in a job well done, whereas pleasure lies in, say, eating ice cream. The former can make you happy after it’s over, whereas the latter stops making you happy as soon as its gone. If you fix your car, you’re going to be happy with the result for a long time. But if you get high, you’re going to need to get high again if you want to be happy again — hence drug addicts, who are, ironically, usually not terribly happy (and rather short lived).
This would explain why parents can claim to love their kids, wanting only for them to be happy, yet restrict their intake of ice cream and marijuana, and encourage them to get jobs. They want their kids to be happy not only today, but tomorrow as well — and they want them to have a lot of tomorrows. They are making an investment that they hope will yield dividends of happiness.
Oh Lord, thou givest us everything at the price of an effort.
Leonardo Da Vinci
Welcome to 2009!
Happy New Years everybody! And now, for some resolutions:
- Relax. I’ve been taking everything too seriously for too long. Discipline: good. Austerity: bad. A little (well, a lot) of lightening up is in order.
- Listen to that little voice in the back of my head. 98% of the time it’s right — but I have an uncanny ability to rationalize ignoring it.
- Keep in touch. I mean, I’ve got unlimited nights and weekends, right? Might as well burn ‘em up working on my weakest social skill.
- Write. Language is the only thing that ever came naturally to me. It’s pretty ridiculous that I haven’t gone anywhere with that. So I’m going to write at least one 300 word essay each week, and provide a Spanish translation. Let the embarrassment begin!
- Get in shape. Being flabby isn’t fun. I’m shooting for 85 kilos at 8% bodyfat. I’ll take it cyclically, 10 weeks on and 2 weeks off per regimen (training and nutrition).
I Lost My Keys, And It Wasn’t Fun
Over the weekend I lost all of my keys. I have no clue how. The worst part is that I’m pretty sure, after countless hours of pondering, that they are actually somewhere in my house — I just have no earthly idea where. They’re mocking me from the shadows, no doubt.
Along with my keys, I lost the remote for my car’s after-market alarm system, which won’t allow the engine to start until it has been remotely disarmed. So even after I borrowed my girlfriend’s car to get new keys cut for mine, my car was still unusable. What’s more, the particular alarm that the previous owner installed had been discontinued, the company went bankrupt, and nobody within 50 miles of myself had a replacement remote.
Solution?
- Crawl under dashboard.
- Find black box.
- Pull. Hard.
Problem solved, in a manner of speaking.
From Console Wars to Open Source: A Drunk Rant on the Relative Irrelevance of Platforms
The following began life as a comment on Eric Raymond’s weblog back in 2006. It’s since been, with my permission, republished on the Linux Hater’s Redux blog. This got me to thinking that I might as well reproduce it here for posterity. Although I was younger, dumber, and quite drunk when I wrote it, the message is mostly correct, and it’s altogether an interesting read, if somewhat bloviating.
It doesn’t matter. None of this matters. Platforms don’t matter. It’s what’s on the platforms that matter.
This is a lesson which I forgot when I went on a gaming sabbatical (coinciding with my exploration of Linux and OSS), but since I got back into the ol’ past-time it leapt back into my brain with the force of an epiphany. In fact, this is something which any gamer knows, though perhaps just implicitly. And any Sega fan, such as myself, has had their face rubbed in the fact to an extent which is painful. The story goes something like this:
A Prelude to War
When the Sega Genesis first came out in 1988, it faced quite an uphill battle against the entrenched NES, which had managed to become practically synonymous with the word “videogame” after it’s 1985 release. Indeed, to this day, many people say “nintendo” when they mean “videogame,” just as many people say “xerox” when they mean “photocopy.” The Genesis was certainly more powerful — it’s primary processor was 7 times as powerful as the NES’ — but power does not conjure good games out of thin air. And without good games, a console is no more than a paperweight. Sega’s previous console, the Master System, was 3 times as powerful as the NES, but since it’s 1986 release, it only sold 13 million units to Nintendo’s 60 million, simply because it didn’t offer a compelling library of games. Sega learned from this mistake, if only once.
When they launched the Genesis, courtship of third parties was intense. They were willing to offer developers better licensing terms than Nintendo, who was enjoying monopoly status at the time, and managed to do what, at the time, was the unthinkable: they fought Nintendo, and in the US market at least, they won. In large part, this was due to Sega taking a chance on an unknown startup that was desperate for a platform for their football game. Nintendo simply wouldn’t offer the little corporation terms it could survive on, and besides, the NES was ill suited to doing sports games justice. That little company was EA, and the game was Madden. Both became smashing successes.
With the help of this and other games, including some in-house smash titles such as the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, Sega exploding onto the scene to history altering effect. To put it into perspective, the success Sega experienced would be like Apple gaining 50% marketshare upon the release of OSX. Even more mindblowing, this growth was coming at the *expense* of Nintendo’s installed base. By this I mean that old Nintendo users were abandoning the NES platform and buying Sega systems in droves. Though Sega’s hyper-clever marketing probably didn’t hurt (slogans such as “Sega does what Nintendon’t” still make the ears of any elder gamer perk up), it was the plethora of games that were only playable on the Genesis which produced this success.
It’s On like Donkey Kong
After three years of hemorrhaging market share, Nintendo fought back with the technically superior (save for processing speed) SNES in 1991. And while the SNES did absolutely everything correctly, and has rightfully earned it’s place of high regard in the annals of gaming, it completely and utterly failed to unseat the Genesis. In Japan it’s marketshare ended up exceeding Sega’s, but in the US it lagged, and Sega enjoyed reigning champion status in other parts of the world.
This was the dawn of the “console wars” as we know them today, and the 16-bit era is still regarded by some (likely through nostalgia tinted glasses, but hey, we’re only human) as the halcyon era of gaming. For every top-notch exclusive game that the SNES had, the Genesis had one as well. And so long as the game libraries of both platforms looked equally compelling in the eyes of the consumer, the entities were mostly locked in a dead heat. But time always marches on.
A Taste of Things to Come
It had been half a decade since a new system was released, and consumers were ready for the next generation. The arcades were taking business from the console market, offering an innovative and immersive gaming experience that the now underpowered 16-bit consoles couldn’t match. (Incidentally, Sega has been and still is a leader in the Arcade market.) The time was ripe for Something New — sadly, both Sega and Nintendo seemed to have forgotten the lessons they had learned from their battles with each other, a mistake which ultimately proved fatal to the former.
It all started in 1988, the year of the Genesis’ release. At that time, games were provided on a solid state medium known as a cartridge, which offered fast access as a benefit, but provided very limited capacity, and cost quite a bit to manufacture. Nintendo had been looking at a way to address these shortcomings by moving to a cheap, high-capacity disk-based medium. However, Nintendo was not able to satisfactorily surmount the stability problem of magnetic media, nor the concomitant ease of piracy. But Sony had just the ticket, since they were working on a
then-revolutionary technology which would allow them to store data on CDs, which were currently restricted to just audio.
So it was that Nintendo contracted Sony to develop a CD based add-on system for them. And in 1991, they were expected to announce the new designs at the yearly CES expo — but when Nintendo president Yamauchi discovered that the contact with Sony would give the latter 25% of all profits off the system, he broke arrangements with them
in a fury. Instead, Nintendo contracted with Philips to perform the same task, but with a contract that gave Nintendo full control of the system. It was this partnership that was announced at CES, much to Sony’s chagrin.
Ultimately, the Philips peripheral never materialized. But Sony refused to throw out their work. They spent years retooling the foundation into a 32bit console called the Playstation, and, determined to swallow Nintendo’s marketshare whole (hell hath no fury like a multi-billion dollar Japanese corporation spurned), they aggresively pursued third party developers, and launched an ad campaign that was arguably more Sega than Sega in its edginess.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
No Cigar, Not Even Close
Back in 1991, Sega was releasing it’s own CD based add-on to the Genesis, aptly named the Sega CD. It was quite the technological breakthrough, but it didn’t come cheap. And as has been established previously, a platform is only as good as the games on it: in the case of the Sega CD, this amounted to a big pile of suck. They even managed to create a Sonic game for the console that was, in effect if not intent, a turd with peanuts. Only 17% of Genesis owners ever bought a Sega CD — not a one of them doesn’t regret it.
Then, in 1994, Sega blundered again with the release of the 32x — a $170 add on which would turn the Genesis into a fully fledged 32 bit system. With the 32bit era imminent, the idea of gaining access to the future on the (relative) cheap was immensely appealing to many gamers. The console was pre-ordered on a scale of millions, but Sega completely dropped the ball. In a dash to make it to the holiday season, games developed for the platform were rushed, and many of them curtailed (the version of Doom found on the 32x has half of the levels of its PC version). The system was one of the biggest letdowns in gaming history (next to the completely unremarkable Nintendo Virtual Boy — a portable gaming system which failed to be either portable or provide entertaining games). This was the beginning of what would become an insurmountably bad rep for Sega hardware.
Don’t Tell me You’re Pissed, Man
In 1995, Sega then released it’s true 32bit console, the Saturn. They released it a few months ahead of Sony’s Playstation, and actually enjoyed an upper hand in the marketplace at first. Sony did not fight against Sega the way they did against Nintendo, having no vendetta to settle. But unfortunately, Sega begat its own undoing. For the release of the Saturn, with its quality games and good 3rd party support, was seen as a sign of abandonment of the 32x — largely because it was, in fact, an abandonment of the 32x. Almost over night, legions of Sega fans became distrustful of the company.
Completely unwittingly, Sony managed to swallow up Sega’s marketshare simply by not being Sega — and, therefore, appearing less likely to screw the gamer. The Playstation pulled far ahead of the Saturn, and Sega never made any real effort to combat this very real threat to their dominance — the hubristic assumption was that Sony was not a gaming company, and therefore couldn’t win. However, the larger market share made the Playstation (or PSX) more appealing to third party developers. And although the Saturn was a little bit more powerful, the Playstation was vastly easier to develop for.
The result was that third party support for the PSX outstripped that of the Saturn by an order of magnitude. A lack of quality games results in a dead system, and in practice, a lack of third party developers is the same thing. The death blow for the Saturn came when EA, a monolith in the world of gaming which owed its existence to Sega (and vice versa), jumped ship and declared the PSX as its primary platform. Quite ironically, the Saturn was now doomed. And although Sega’s next console, the Dreamcast, was perfection in nearly every sense of the word, and the first console to provide online gaming, Sega never effectively garnered the third party support necessary to survive. In march of 2001, Sega exited the console market.
I See you Baby
Flashback to 1996, and Nintendo is bypassing the 32bit generation entirely to release it’s N64, technically superior to anything at it’s time (although some people were and are turned off by its distinctively aggressive hardware anti-aliasing). Coming out behind the PSX, and still being cartridge based, it couldn’t quite capture third party support the way the PSX did, but it managed to snag a marketshare equivalent to 1/3 that of Sony’s.
While Sony failed to slay Nintendo, the combined blows dealt to it by Sega and Sony demolished its monopoly position. There’s a lesson here that anti-capitalists could learn about the nature of free markets, if they happened to actually be interested in the truth — but that is neither here nor there.
What kept Nintendo alive was it’s stable of quality in-house games. Super Mario 64 is still regarded by many as the best 3D platforming game of all time, and Goldeneye stands unrivaled as the most playable and enjoyable adaptation of a movie ever. By contrast, Sega never had a proper Sonic game for the Saturn (apart from the lame isometric platformer Sonic 3D Blast, and the sucky racer Sonic R). Once again, the lesson is that quality games are the secret to a gaming platform’s success.
And so it is with the modern era. The Playstation 2 (PS2), Sony’s successor to the immensely successful PSX, rode the coattails of its predecessor to it’s currently unrivaled installed base of more than 100 million systems, giving it around 60% market share. The remaining 40% is split between Microsoft’s XBOX console (surviving because of exclusive titles such as the Halo franchise) and Nintendo’s Gamecube (once again surviving off of excellent in-house games, although now at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of market share).
So has it always been. And so shall it always be.
They’re Like Mopeds…
A lot of you have probably read this paper, called Worse is Better:
http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
(If you haven’t, considering doing so.) Equally likely, you’re seeing a connection. Indeed, it would seem the ramifications of Worse is Better are incredibly far reaching, although I think the more general and correct statement is the following:
Technical merits are usually a lot less important than you might think.
Or, as I’ve said previously, a platform is only as good as what’s on it. A console is only as good as its games, just as a data medium is only as good as its ubiquity, just as an operating system is only as good as its applications. Empirically speaking, the technical merits of a platform seem to be a marginal factor (at best) in determining how it gets to a position of application dominance.
What this means is that when debating the merits and demerits of OSS vis-a-vis closed source in terms of potential for success, where success is defined as market share, it is generally pointless to bring up technical points. Windows is not popular because of Windows, it is popular because of everything that runs on Windows. Contrary to the original article’s opinion, Microsoft is absolutely correct to maintain backwards compatibility, because the totality of what runs on Windows is the “secret” to it’s success. Apple’s policy may be technically superior, but it hasn’t helped it get anywhere near posing a challenge to MS.
So Linux and Apple have faster releases than Microsoft? Big whompin’ deal. The debate over which system is better, or progressing more rapidly, simply does not matter. What matters is what people can do with the system, and for the desktop things most people want to do, Windows crushes all. In fact, if you look at OSS itself as a platform, than it’s an objective failure in the desktop market if the goal is replacing proprietary software. How good OSS is at producing quality software matters a lot less than how good it is at attracting software producers, and in that regard, it would seem to suck. There is a large range of computer oriented tasks that you simply *cannot* perform on Linux. And until OSS produces a game better than BZflag, it should be a self-evident fact that not only is not a silver bullet, it might barely be an arrow.
I Don’t Have the Answer, but I Know who Doesn’t
I use Windows, Linux, and Mac on a regular basis — I like Linux the system the most, followed by Windows, followed by the Mac (sorry, but I think the GUI is a weapon of mass gayness). But I actually spend most of my time in Windows simply because of the things I can do in it that I can’t do with the alternatives, or that I can’t do as cheaply, or that I can’t do as well, or some combination of all three. Microsoft has done an extremely good job of attracting the people who actually make a system worth using to their platform, and as a result, it fits practically every users needs. Hence its market share.
Of course, things change when you go to the backend, and sure, that’s partly because the requirements are different. But regardless, people don’t just put Linux on the web — they put Apache on the web. Or vsftpd. Or whatever. The fact that Linux has these highly sought things is what really makes it a success. The fact that these things offer the most generally popular price/performance ratio is why they are highly sought. The fact that OSS seems to be good at attracting developers of such things is why they are OSS. But it *doesn’t* mean that, even
if OSS is an inherently technically superior development model (and in the future I’ll make the case that that’s bullshit), it is destined to dominance. Reality is much, much, much more complicated than that.
Postscript
On an unrelated note, the GNU people can suck my cock. I don’t even want to think about the time I wasted drinking your koolaid. I hope Emacs becomes a sentient entity and bites every single one of you on your GNU/scrotum. And fuck VI too.
Don’t Start Over
This has been a very long time coming: I have a new website. If you know me as well as Chris Shafer, then you’re rolling your eyes at this. My other website, gazuga.net, has been reinvented at least a dozen times by now.
I have mixed emotions about this. On the one hand, my considerable output over the years has been mostly lost. On the other hand, said output was largely bunk, although there were a few gems which, in retrospect, would have been worth preserving.
This reflects a congenital character flaw on my part. As a child, I struggled to comprehend the meaning of the saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” The logic seemed so blindingly obvious that I was sure I was missing the point. The reality was that I wasn’t missing the point — I was missing the applicability.
I used to draw quite a bit back then, and I wasn’t half bad. I compensated for my lack of talent through lots of practice, making it a point to finish whatever I started — sacrificing an entire drawing because of a few mistakes struck me as a waste. And I reasoned that, since I was doomed to make mistakes, if I didn’t learn to work around them, I was never actually going to develop artistically. I assumed this was all rather obvious — so why did we need to warn people not to throw the baby out with the bathwater? Didn’t everyone know this instinctively?
In reality, the joke was on me. For a month or so, I would draw with an unmatched fervor, spending every free moment on my art, and every cent I had on supplies. It wasn’t uncommon for me to produce a couple hundred compositions in a month, but at some point, I’d get burned out, and condemn everything I created to the dustbin. A few months later, with my skills considerably depreciated, I’d try again. And in that way, I threw the baby out with the bathwater. It was always three steps forward, two steps back. What I had in zeal, I lacked in patience, and eventually, I quit in frustration.
Patience is the great multiplier. Obviously, had I simply been patient, I would have eventually reached my goals (or at least the ceiling of my genetic ability). In fact, I would have been better off working slower and steadier, because patience can partially replace hard work — the amount of daily exertion required for progress is usually well beneath your peak-output capacity. On the flipside, hard work is a poor substitute for patience — you can only do so much in a single day, and the quality of work you do after 20 straight hours is usually much less than what you produce in the first hour. For non-trivial endeavors in particular, an attempt to replace patience with hard work will inevitably result in burnout and failure.
Hard work can be a vice. If you’re good at working hard, you’ll be tempted to try and trade patience for hard work. This might work in high school, but at some point, if you continue tackling progressively greater challenges, you will hit a brick wall. I became painfully aware of this during my sophomore year of college, when my programming assignments suddenly couldn’t be completed in a marathon session starting the night before they were due.
If you’re looking for a showcase of impatience and burnout, look no further than your local gym. Few people have the patience needed to stay in shape their whole life. Of those with the potential, many work too hard in an attempt to get faster results, ultimately giving up in exhaustion, frustration, and/or injury.
People who fail a fitness program usually don’t plan to quit forever. Rather, they plan to start again at some point in the future. But if you quit now, you throw away whatever progress you made. It would be far better to lower your goals (If you really wanted to be an Olympic athlete, you wouldn’t be thinking about quitting, so why not strive to simply be fit?), adjust your program, and then trudge along. But this stings the pride, and trudging really isn’t all that attractive.
In contrast, a clean slate is very tempting. You get to wipe away your mistakes, ignore the fact that your goals might be too lofty — and this time, you’re really going to kick ass. I’ve been there, done that. It’s much more appealing than injecting modesty and patience into your current routine, but the problem is that it does not work. Throwing away bad drawings doesn’t make you a better artist, just as quitting a fitness regimen won’t make you a better athlete.
The enticement of a fresh start is nearly always a Sirens’ Song, distracting you from the real problem: impatience. Although patience by itself won’t get you anywhere, it’s usually the limiting factor; and wiping away your mistakes, all the while vowing to work harder “next time,” will not compensate for a lack of patience. Starting over is rarely anything more than the stuff of failed New Years resolutions.
Is there a time and place for starting over? Probably. But personally, the next time I feel the urge to start from scratch, I’m going to ask myself if it’s really the best choice, or if it’s simply more appealing than confronting my impatience.
