scottsimpson.net

“[a consumer] … recently purchased SimCity 4 thinking that his Athlon 1900 with 1.5 GB of memory and an Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti4600 graphics card would be more than adequate. Instead, he found that after playing for a while, the game ran so sluggishly he could no longer enjoy it.” -wired.com

…anyone care to explain to me why software has such ridiculous requirements these days? Whatever happened to the KISS mantra? (Keep It Simple, Stupid… not something chanted by painted-faced lunatics)

Alright, I’ll give you the latest three-dimensional ray-traced 1280×1024 first-person shooters. But Sim-City? The first SimCity fit on a floppy disc and, aside from a tacky-looking newspaper, was just fine for me. Who has a use for gigatexel buildings? Alpha-transparency strip malls? If the people who sit for hours in front of a screen looking at a city want so much to have the ‘real-world’ experience, perhaps they should consider the notion of visiting a real city. Computers weren’t meant to play games on. They were intended as business machines, machines to automate the redundant parts of life, machines that facilitate communication over a vast global internetwork. It never ceases to annoy me that some of the most powerful computers on the consumer market sit idle or barely scratch the surface of their power as their users play inane games on them. This danger is twofold: First, it promotes an antisocial element (why experience the real world, when I can play God in an irrelevant fake world?) and Secondly, any hacker worth his salt, upon accessing the untold thousands of idle 2GHz+ CPU’s (many on broadband-plus connections) would have, at his command, a formidable army with which he could attack networks, computers, or individuals. Not so long ago, in the days of the nascent 300MHz processor, a security consultant noted that it would take millions of years of computing time to crack the basic 128-bit encryption protecting the vast majority of online transactions. Since computer power is exponential, it’s only a matter of time before computers (en masse… we still have a ways to go before one computer is powerful enough) become powerful enough to lay open the encrypted arteries of the internet. 128-bit security is already shady, and so far there have been no major attempts to up the ante. And the millions-of-years figure is only valid if the passcode to the encrypted target is the absolute last combination that an attacking computer tries. Statistically, this would not be the case. How many important files are protected by inane passwords like ‘password’ or ‘iamcool’?

When selecting a password, it is important to keep security, not convenience, at the forefront. Some tips:

As life goes on, I find myself looking at the world with an increasingly skeptical bent. One of the most notable aspects of this skepticism is the troubling reality that we, as a species, really haven’t figured things out. Almost daily, I hear of some discovery or revelation that sort of makes me think, “why hasn’t someone thought of that before?”. Not in a “wow, that’s neat” kind of way, but in a deeper, more troubling way. Chief among these is the fact that apparently no one had ever thought to compare certain modern ethical theories with the beliefs of Socrates. SOCRATES! Argh. In a lighter facet of the same:

IKEA fails to check the meaning of a product name… or maybe they figured the name would sell more products. It kinda fits.
Whoever designed the webpage for the Italian subsidary of PowerGen should have checked around a little bit… [www.powergenitalia.com]

Iiiiiiin other news…
The US released photos of the Brothers Grim (Uday and Qusay, for those of you that haven’t had your coffee). While this action may do wonders for convincind the people of Iraq that their tormentors are indeed dead, I have a feeling there will be some sort of backlash from the hardcore Muslim (and possibly other religious) communities (for showing the dead on .. um .. NATIONAL TELEVISION), as well as from the various respectable news media (not actually an oxymoron, though the NY Times is getting close to falling off the list…’All the news that fits in print’). However you look at it, it’s rather unethical to broadcast macabre photos of the dead on any medium, though I suppose in some sort of extended utilitarian sense, the good of convincing people that the Brothers Grim are dead outweighs silly notions like privacy, respect, and integrity. Just look at ‘reality television’. But I digress.

It seems rather shady to me that the photos (at least the ones on CNN.com) are very dark and grainy. Can the military not afford a decent digital camera? I’m not familiar with the faces of the Brothers, so it was sort of a stretch to me comparing the photos. I suppose the citizens of Iraq do know better than I what they look like in real life, etc. I sincerely hope the armed forces aren’t trying to dupe anyone; the US can’t afford any more gaffes.

Song of the day: Dave Matthews Band - The Dreaming Tree

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