Seriously, I learned this a while back with the first 'Black and White' game. EA pushed the developer to release early. The game was simply unfinished. You literally could not finish it.

The 'patch' to fix that gawdawful mess broke gameplay so badly, I said 'Fuck it. This was wasted money. Fool me once, shame on you. No more money for you, EA!"

Mrs. Bonker came to the same decision some time later, after endless frustrations with the 'Sims 3'. She realized that a) she was essentially re-buying all the expansions for the 'Sims 2' one at a time and b) none of them worked. They were all so horrendously buggy that the game could quite seriously corrupt a filesystem.

It was painful for her since she really enjoys The Sims gameplay, but she's stuck playing 'The Sims 2' because she realized she was literally throwing her money away every time she purchased something for the 'The Sims 3'

As much as I'd like to see movie versions of Mr. Zahn's 'Thrawn' Triology, a line in 'Return of the Jedi' stands out to me, when Mon Mothma and Admiral Ackbar are discussing the assault on the Forest Moon of Endor.

I think it's Ackbar who addresses Han as 'General Solo' for the first time and Luke is rather surprised that his friend got promoted while he was busy back on Degobah.

Imagine, if you will, Ford as the aged, weathered space admiral who's seen it all, from Imperial recruit, to smuggler, to rebel pilot, to assault leader, to General and eventually a great leader of men...

We KNOW Ford is capable of the acting. What we don't know is 'Will Disney let it happen'?

I don't stay logged in and can't be assed to add an exception to my cookies whitelist for /.

One of the things I've noticed in the 'professional developer' community is that there is a bit of Jock Culture going on.

First of all, you have a business environment that tends to favor younger, fresher talent and puts a LOT of pressure on aging developers to keep up with their younger peers, many of whom are capable of (in the very, very short run) unhealthy work practices. 80 hour work weeks and back-to-back all-nighters are doable when you're 22 years old. They're fucking painful at 30, and ruinous by 35.

And it's hard to say 'No' to them because we've just come out of a nasty recession when upper management is all too eager to lay you off in favor of younger developers eager to prove themselves.

That shit WILL give you depression, anxiety, and insomnia, and all of those kill.

Second, again with the Jock Culture, developer culture tends to be dominated by hot-headed males, many of whom are eager to replicate locker-room style pecking orders in the cube farms... and that crap just doesn't work when you're developing software.

(Ex-military guys? I'm looking at you here. I've seen you do this shit. Stop it.)

Sadly, those pecking orders are often directly related to pay. The guy who manages to wedge his way into the 'Project Lead' or 'Senior Developer' slot tends to have a few more dollars attached to them. Again, the pressure results in depression, anxiety, and insomnia which are proven killers.

Shirkey's piece spends a lot of time talking about Aaron Swartz, but Aaron was a unique case of being uniquely and unfairly persecuted by multiple 800 pound gorillas. His depression and suicide *should* have been as fucking obvious to anyone who knew him as an 18 wheeler rolling the wrong way down the freeway.

The answer to these issues is, perhaps a shade ironically, the same answer we should be looking at in regards to our sudden flareup of chronic school shooting disease:

Mental Healthcare needs to be made a priority in this nation. We need to destigmatize ADMITTING mental health issues and seeking treatment for them. Also, we need to completely ditch the notion that drugs used for treatment of mental health problems cause more harm that good.

Seriously, guys, when you're having daily panic attacks, when sleep won't come for days at a time, when the world starts showing up in black and white and more black than white... it's time to talk to a doctor. And if your doctor won't help, ditch him and find a doctor who will.

Apropos captcha: Biopsy

Linux and the software available for it has finally reached the point for me that I can use it on my daily-use hardware. There is nothing I want to do that cannot be done under Linux now, GIMP be damned.

Mint with Cinnamon is a damn fine usable OS.

Windows 8 and it's tablet-wannabe interface will forever remain a distant nightmare of 'What might have been'.

I guess my warped way of thinking just can't embrace the notion of supporting a political party. I understand the need for governance of some kind to maintain social order, I understand being conservative in your views, or liberal, but I question the whole concept of being part of a political organization when so many members of that party are so manifestly corrupt, morally subversive or just plain vile. Why would you want to be part of anything that has even a little bit of rot in it?

from James Killough's excellent article 'Do Republicans Dream of Electric Elephants':

http://purefilmcreative.com/killough-chronicles/do-republicans-dream-of-electric-sheep.html

My cats have great skill at destroying keyboards. Whether it's lodging just the right amount of fur under the right Shift key, standing in just the right spot to crack the PCB under the membrane, or nudging the cup I'm drinking out of until it spills right onto the all-important WASD keys, they manage it about once every 6-7 months.

I'd love to get one of those mechanical switch jobbies for the nice tactile clickie feel, since I'm a fast touch-typist, but I can't help but think that they'd be even more cat-prone than membrane keyboards.

For the time being, Logitech makes a nice basic membrane-style keyboard, the k120 that retails for around $15. It's fairly spill resistant, can keep up with my typing, and is fairly easy to clean. Then, when it meets its end in the cruel feline paws of fate several months down the road, I don't feel so bad dropping another $15.

So back during the SOPA thing, I had a lot of real life matters going on that were somewhat more important than taking time to look for a new DNS and webhost. I contented myself with taking the ten minutes necessary for writing a nasty letter, got on with my pressing business, and SOPA died... for the time being.

Now, I happen to have a few spare moments to dedicate to looking for a new webhost, and Anonymous or AnonymousOwner or whoever has done me a favor by reminding me that Godaddy is not necessarily my friend.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I'd prefer somewhere that supports, or would let me install Ruby and Rails 3. Heroku seems to be the default Rails hangout, but frankly their pricing confuses the hell out of me.

My understanding is that, propagandist or no, Rasmussen leans heavily republican simply by their methodology.. ie, the way they do their polling means they skew their samples.

Electoral-Vote.com has a model that shows projection data with or without Rasmussen data included. According to their model, Obama will win in November either way, but a few more senate races will go Democrat rather than Republican if you exclude Rasmussen polling data.

http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2012/Pres/Maps/Sep08-noras.html

Ironic captcha: Freeing. *sigh*. If only there was a candidate I could vote for who would really do that.

When I saw the question, my first thought was 'Back from the Dead machine! If I could bring back anyone...' which was immediately countered by 'No, no, no... A CLONING machine, moron.' Any clone I made would biologically be the identical twin of the person or animal I chose to clone, but would not be that same person. Their experiences and environmental factors would be wildly different.

Now, with that in mind, I began thinking about 'Well, who would I like to spend time with that I can't?'

I thought of my beloved tabby cat, who lived to be 15. I would enjoy spending another 15 years with an almost identical kitty, but I already have two younger cats I love dearly. I'd get more out of my time spending time with those guys.

My spouse? Why on earth would I want more than one? She's the jealous type and I'm not interested in any kind of polygamy or polyamory.

But we are childless. The opportunity to raise my spouse's identical twin as our child is actually quite attractive. I know that I'm compatible emotionally with my spouse, so the idea of raising a child guaranteed to be very similar to her is very interesting. If I had to chose, I think I'd go that route.

But, of course there *are* serious ethical issues. It's fun to think about, though.

you had me until you used the words "paradigm shift". ugh.

And it felt bad typing them. I asked myself, 'really, self? 'Paradigm shift?' WTF?'

But the words are used correctly in the sense that the paradigm of personal computing is shifting away from natively compiled applications running on desktop and laptop appliances to scripted applications running on handheld devices.

So I kept it.

Another strangely apropos paradigm shift... er... captcha: horrify

Of course there are many, many factors leading to the downfall of Microsoft. We've been reading about them for years as the 800 Pound Gorilla from Redmond has been slowly breaking its bones under its own weight.

Most people will point to the fact that Microsoft's failures have ensured that more people are using Linux worldwide than ever before... in the form of Android smartphones. MS *could* have had that market, but they continued to present shit products in the face of (at least perceived) quality goods from Apple and Google.

We've also heard in the last few days and weeks about how serious Valve is about getting their products to be 'Native' for Linux. We're going to see more of that, especially as more and more game designers want to develop for smart-phones.

Going forward, Microsoft's plans for smartphone development look pretty dismal. They're not even supporting their own technologies or frameworks, like Silverlight.

Ultimately, however, I think that shipping an WindowsME-bad desktop OS while this massive paradigm shift is happening is going to have long-reaching and long-lasting effects. Unlike when WinME shipped, there are some pretty darn good alternatives for development on both phones and PCs right now. When Win8 starts flopping around like a hooked carp, it's not going to be just the developers looking for an exit. It's going to be gamers and home-users as well. This time that exit is pretty darn visible.

And today is the day that flopping carp was hooked.

Captcha: resisted. How oddly apropos...

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. The 'pay as you go' is the important part.

Virgin Mobile is actually what I use for cell service, simply because Pay-as-you-go service nicely prevents any overcharge hijinks.

Choosing between Verizon, Sprint, and ATT is like choosing between Joe Jackson, Ike Turner, and O.J. Simpson.

Virgin Mobile is like Bobby Brown, holding to the terribly flawed analogy. You're gonna regret hooking up, but at least you can get away from it if you're not on crack.

Wait... You're leaving Verizon because they've treated you like complete crap and are going to either Sprint or ATT?

I mean, let's completely ignore for the moment how Apple treats their customers. Sprint or ATT? You SERIOUSLY think either of these guys will treat you better than Verizon?