timboerger.net Not afraid of a few strong opinions.

Rattling the Cage

Here I am, cruising on Slashdot and I come across this topic talking about the newly announced iPad.  Yes, it is the very latest in "new thing that they shout you must own because it will change your life" from Apple.  Only this time I can't see a single time I would actually use it.  I have looked at e-readers and it might be handy as one, but I prefer e-ink technology that you could actually read in sunlight and has better battery life than the backlit screen the iPad has.  For everything else, I already have a tool for the job.  Watch a movie?  I've got the iMac or my own PC.  Music?  iMac, PC, iPhone, Sansa player...the list goes on.  Web access?  iMac, PC, two laptops, iPhone.  Exactly why would I need this?  In the comments I pretty much said as much and watched the strange case of moderation on Slashdot, watching my posts getting modded up, then down, then back up a bit, then hovering back and forth.  Ultimately, the Mac fanboys modded me down on a few posts I thought were more relevant, but my stronger posts were modded up.  I actually savored the responses from people who wore their allegiances on their sleeve, say...actually praising mac in your username.  Folks, you have around sixteen characters to squeeze that in, so no subtlety there.  Still, there was some satisfaction on smacking down fawning users from the Apple cult about their latest, underwhelming offering.

All of this got me thinking that as far as we've gotten with the internet, we've still not worked out the obvious, fatal flaw which is that there's an enormous number of assholes on it.  Over at ThinkLynsen, they had a back and forth about the internet and whether the net result is good or bad.  I'm not ready to wade into that argument quiet yet, but I can say this; people now can say things without repercussion because it's easy to hide behind an alias online and it's surprisingly easy to find sources that support any side.  Never mind those sources themselves are compromised and reek of snake oil, now you can quote someone else whose batshit insane theories are taken as word of God proof.  Actual research is worthless because there's some guy in Utah who says that your best friends are fascists.

The most recent example I have of this is when I was playing one of my games and in the group chat window broke out a "discussion" about global warming, basically trotting out every crackpot theory against it and going on about the evil scientist cabal who are only in it for the money and those fat scientific grants.  Seems to me that nothing quite stirs up polarization like talking about global warming, so I waded into it and basically called all of those guys ignorant.  Here was my problem with their comments.  There are a lot of people who talk about global warming, anonymously of course, who claim to know all of the facts.  This is without the time or resources invested to make such a judgment.  Instead of taking ten-plus years of your life to dedicate learning the sciences, specializing in climate research, finding a field of study, working on a question of science, finding the resources to investigate the question and spending every waking moment of the next decade testing and running the numbers to see if you were right, often building on the work of others who have done the same thing, then turning your work over to the scientific community who will try their damnedest to rip your work to shreds.  If it passes the rigor of all of that work, then the research itself slips, often quietly, into the scientific body of knowledge.  That, to me, is an expert position.  For me, when nearly the entire community of scientists from all over the globe who study climate science say that CO2 is a problem and we should maybe look at fixing it, I tend to trust the people who have that expertise, not the random internet poster who doesn't find capitalization or correct punctuation necessary.

The internet has allowed people to create their own sound chambers with similar people who all spout off the same information, which in their minds somehow makes it more infallible.  Then they turn around and spew their idiot theories on the internet with no one to challenge them on their thought process or sources.  And it is because it is all done under aliases and anonymity where we can say the most crazy things without actually facing the people we're trying to convince.

I believe it's because of experiences I've had which pretty much put me in Josh's camp about whether the internet has been a positive force or not.  Take some place like the Star Tribune, a newspaper with a baffling comment policy, regularly trolled by the same people spouting off the same nonsense, day in and day out.  Comment threads were initially meant to inspire conversation, but it's just often a soap box for those least able to articulate nuanced positions to shout the item of the day presented by their corporate masters from their "rebellious" website.  Unfortunately, it puts me off the website.  I don't want to go to the website, not because of the content from the newspaper, but from the idiot commenters who will take any story no matter how benign and turn it into a political rant.  This is our internet today.  Frankly, it needs a bit of work.

Have the Geeks Really Won?

Maybe you've seen the venerable email passed around years ago which compares Michael Jordan with Bill Gates.  If you're not familiar, it breaks down Jordan's pay in increasingly smaller figures until it gets to a "by the minute" figure which by normal human terms is pretty astronomical.  Then, you get to see Gates' current worth which frankly dwarfs the income of  greatest basketball player to grace the game.  It ends with the words "nerds rule!" and we all laughed and dreamed of the day where our awkward adolescence would be redeemed.

Flash forward to today's world and a lot has changed.  Geekdom is celebrated on a regular basis and is even catered to ones own taste.  We have various geek conventions about the country celebrating geekness, for example CONvergence which we'll be attending this year.  We have things like PAX, which celebrates the video gaming community and where Wil Wheaton is king.  Add a splash of Renn Fests, which corny they may be, we still go and enjoy the same damn thing every year.  Geek culture is widely available and in some ways generally tolerated or even accepted.

But what has bothered me recently is that there's this thought amongst some geeks out there that "we've won"...and I'm not entirely sure what that means.  Won over...who exactly?  The local jocks of our high school?  The people who teased us in our formative years?  And what exactly have we won?

Maybe what we've supposedly won was mainstream acceptance.  Personally, I don't think it's true.  And I certainly hope that I'm right, that we haven't won, because I think it's important for geeks to be on the outside of mainstream culture.  Allow me to make some rather broad generalizations here to make a point.

It's true that we have business that caters to the geek crowd more than ever.  But business will go to where there is money and geeks are particularly rich targets to exploit.  When you take people who generally like being early adopters of expensive new technology and are not the best handlers or planners of money, it's a no-brainer for a businessperson to be engaged with this sector of society (Please remember, I'm using very broad stereotypes here, not specifics).   We've developed a gadget culture where all of our needs can be met by the new piece of technology, and I think it's fair to say that geeks can take some credit with ushering in this way of life.  Generally though, I don't think that our new found economic power is something we can count on as acceptance.  We're just another reliable revenue stream for a certain line of products.

Along the lines of business itself, there are a number of tech companies started by truly geeky people.  But there is a familiar pattern here.  Geeky people create something new/unique/fun that some people pick up on, it gets pretty popular and grows beyond the initial expectations.  Geeky people are thrilled by the usefulness/popularity of their work which turns into a full time job for them.  Geeky people are approached by venture capitalists who will not only monetize their product, but leave the main person/people generally in charge.  This turns into a business which now has a board and a bunch of smart business people come in to run the day to day while the geeks in charge are still in C-level capacity, but do much less grunt work and more visionary, big picture planning/execution.  I can think of a handful of companies that pretty much fit this mold off the top of my head.  My point being is that even if you have a geek start a company, if it gets really successful, the lead geek could remain CEO, but more savvy business people are brought in to navigate the business world.  Not that geeks cannot be successful businesspeople, but our challenge is not jumping off with the next new thing and staying focused.

It could be argued that Hollywood has sat up and took notice of the geek world.  By all measures, 2009 has been a good year for geeks.  Star Trek got a pretty good reboot treatment (though purists may argue some points).  Watchmen finally made it to screen and didn't entirely screw the pooch.  CBS continues to show the Big Bang Theory.  Not too bad.  But then we also got an idiotic Transformers movie and a G.I. Joe movie barely recognizable from the original cartoon.  X-Men: Wolverine?  A Dragonball movie?  The pseudo-science, pseudo-history of 2012?  A Street-Fighter movie?  Land of the Lost?  No thank you.  Not to say there weren't movies out there that were good geek films--I've heard nothing but positive word about the movies The Road, Moon and District 9.  But big Hollywood is looking for new and exciting ways to piss on our childhood--have you heard about all the favorite board games we had growing up?  Well, they're getting a movie treatment.  Good geek movies are likely going to be smaller studio or independent movies.  See what I did there?  The good geek stuff is "on the outside".

Proving to me that the entertainment world just doesn't get us is the catastrophe which is the Video Game Awards on Spike TV.  Year after year, it's an unnecessarily splashy, juvenile, insulting show that wastes everyone's time.  All of the voice acting awards are for known actors, some of which do not deserve to be there because they are not voice acting...they are essentially being themselves and getting nominated for being known.  All of the male nominations, with the exception of Samuel Jackson, are for well known actors playing familiar characters.  I will make a huge exception here for Mark Hamill as he is a fantastic voice actor.  There are also twenty eight awards with five nominees a piece.  I counted fewer than twenty original games that were not sequels.  This includes the entire independent game category for five of them.  This is a big case of same shit, different year.  This also proves to me there's a disrespect to gaming geeks with the existence of this show.

Although I could go on and on about this, the last thing I want to mention is something called the Society of Geek Advancement.  On their page, they lift from the Wikipedia entry on "geek" a couple of definitions.  Let me quote the important ones here:

"A person who has chosen concentration rather than conformity; one who passionately pursues skill (especially technical skill) and imagination, not mainstream social acceptance.

A person with a devotion to something in a way that places him or her outside the mainstream."

These are accurate definitions to me and definitions we should embrace.  But in a somewhat noble attempt to promote these types of values, they put together a video which pretty much says that being a geek pretty much means that you are social media savvy and not participating in long standing geek pastimes of RPGs, Star Trek, computer culture and a host of other things.  The video framed the typical geek as a blogger who used Digg, Twitter and Facebook.  I want to stress that this was not the intention, but that's how it turned out.  This did stir up a kind of hornet's nest and not much has been heard from them since, which is unfortunate as a lot of genuine geeks wanted it to work.

So where does this leave us?  I don't know how it is for most people, but the mainstream makes me uncomfortable...and it always has.  I like the idea of being on the outside, to be diving into something that I'm curious about and seeing how far down the well of information goes.  I love the idea that some people consider me a resource of obscure knowledge and being the guy who if he doesn't know the answer, I'll know where to look for it.

The question I ask in the title really doesn't have an answer.  We didn't need to win because we don't need or require the acceptance of mainstream culture.  It's more valuable to get the right kind of recognition from fellow geeks, a status acknowledgment, rather than the kind of welcoming you get from John and Jane Doe down the street with their 2.5 kids and ranch style house.  The challenge for us is to keep testing those boundaries outside of mainstream culture, to be the explorers.  Sure, now and then what we use or discover filters down and gets that acceptance, but by that time, we've moved on.  We're not going to win--that's because we're not playing the same game.  And honestly, that's just fine.

Something New

Ah, technology. The sometimes bane of my life, but who am I kidding...it does put food on the table. But I've often wondered what actually makes useful technology and what is just a waste of time. I had thought Twitter to be pretty useless, yet here I am, using Twitter, enjoying it and wondering why I cursed it in the first place.

Here I am on the Metro banging out a blog post on an iTouch. I have to admit that it is pretty cool, as I'm still getting used to thumb typing, which is, let's face it, pretty lame. Yet, it is useful, smart, portable technology which does a job well for me.

The very fact that I'm able to do this on the way home is nothing short of nifty. Can't wait to post this with a quick swipe of a touch screen.

Whence Linux Gaming?

I have in various points of my career, toyed with various flavors of Linux.  Starting off with Slackware, dabbling with Fedora and giving openSUSE a whirl.  I even spread my wings a bit and tried the Unix variant of FreeBSD.  I liked them all.  I'm not even including several others I've tried.

However, the one thing that was missing for me was mainstream games.  I've become more and more a social gamer.  Oh, it's nice to play a single player game now and then, but after a bit, either you beat the game or you tire of it--at least with me.  More and more games are including some sort of social element, whether that be a simple chat interface or fully formed avatars hanging out virtually.

I was excited last year when I heard my favorite game, EVE Online, came out with a Linux client.  At last, people thought, this could be an in-road to more people gaming on a Linux box.  Only not so much.

Turns out the client was based on something called Cedega, a part of Transgaming.  Cedega had gotten the old EVE client to work, the one without the premium graphics content...only not well.  In fact, it was quite buggy and at times impossible to play.  I know this because I tried to get this to work at one point and gave up on the Cedega client.  And I wasn't alone.  Most EVE players decided that the official client wasn't worth the trouble, considering that there were a number of players who were able to get the premium client working on WINE.

Here's the dilemma;  does a player try to make a buggy and at times an infuriating client running on older graphics to work or do they work with the active community within EVE to get the premium graphics client running with WINE?  It's not really much of a question really and most people went with the WINE solution.  This was coupled with the lack of developer help in getting the client to work in the first place.  Then came this post from the EVE developers, essentially ending official support for the Linux client.  Of the reasons they gave, one was the lack of growth of players using the official client.  Their numbers essentially derived from the official client reporting, not the number of players running Linux.  It puts the developers, CCP, in a bad position as they can only really address the official client rather than the number of players who might be playing under Linux.  However, I find some fault here as they didn't seem to achieve accurate numbers of Linux players, so the numbers may seem skewed.

However, using the reasoning from the developers, it's hard to blame them.  With both WINE and the EVE client itself being moving targets, it's difficult to pour more man-hours into something that could be put to use somewhere else, especially since the community seemed to be picking up the slack.  Speaking of, the Linux community within EVE has taken it well, rolled with the punch and promised to soldier on, with the exception of a few pointed, and seemingly spot on posts, about the dearth of developer support over the last several months.  The problem here is that there is no easy path for people who are not as technically inclined as many Linux users currently are.  The ease of install may still elude beginning users and that remains a problem for Linux to break out as an OS for the common person.

It comes down to this question though.  What will it take for cross-platform gaming?  Microsoft has shown no interest in providing ways that promote actual competition with other systems and seems destined to shoot itself in the foot as more and more people turn to console gaming.  However, the largest hurdle to jump over is the available APIs for game development.  I'm not a developer, but from what I've seen on various sites, it just seems that DirectX is about as robust of an API on the market today and no other API seems to come close.  Plus add in the various issues with Linux distros and in particular it's struggle with audio, it seems an uphill battle.

What seems to be the future though may lie in virtual machines being able to support gaming.  It's not a perfect solution as you can run a Linux machine but have to buy a Windows license to play games.  One has to wonder if there will ever be a groundswell of support to get quality gaming on the Linux platform.

Are we getting helpless?

I know this has been discussed before.  In fact, I know that Issac Asimov wrote a story about a society that basically forgot how to do math.  It's an interesting story and one that makes me think occasionally.  I used to be better at math, but even now challenged by basic adding of anything over two digits, I reach for the calculator.

Such is what we are brought to when we rely on technology.  When Google today started behaving badly and sent every link to a page saying the site might harm your computer, it had me worried.

I actually thought for awhile that I just wouldn't do any search this morning.  I didn't want to go to Yahoo or, God forbid, MS Live search.  I wanted Google.  This is the power they hold.  And it's a scary one really.

The thought now is that people just don't know how to do research properly because Google is the first, and usually last, place that people look.  In the course of my job, I use it nearly every day to find out the answers to my technical (and not so technical) questions.  If Google were to go down, what would fill the gap?  Would we actually try to learn to research again?

In a way, it makes me want to at least learn again how to do math.  It's not like I forgot everything, but the speed and ease of my youth have frittered away.  It can be reclaimed, but it will take work.  I hope I'm up to this, something which should be relatively easy.

Sunday Night Update

Quick update on the bathroom:  grouting is done, we sealed it today and I shaved off part of the door and we have a door again.  Put the sink back in but because of my relative inexperience with these things, nothing was sealed right and when water did fall, it went right through the floor.  This was not unexpected as I have yet to caulk around the toilet and that's where the water fell through.  The old sink now is nothing more than an inconvienent eyesore.  We're buying a new one with new fixtures and everything that goes with putting in a new sink.  Probably buy it Wednesday, put it in...who knows when...likely Saturday morning.

A little help, please!  No, no...not on the sink.  I've been bouncing things around my head for a bit lately about doing a podcast and I would appreciate some ideas.  I've got some already, but most of the good ones I currently have will only work in the context of a larger work.  If you have ideas that you would like to contribute towards a podcast, please let me know in the comments.  Most that I've heard or seen are based around something.  Tiki Bar TV obviously is based around tiki drinks and getting drunk.  Le Show from Harry Shearer is him talking about the weekly news.  The Ricky Gervais Show is about Ricky Gervais sitting around and having a laugh with his mates.

I'm thinking about various venues.  Garrick has a podcast and he often interviews people...very cool.  I've seen some that are meant to educate, some to entertain and others to just chat.  I'd like various ideas and hopefully I can come up with something that will be fun.

New Stuff

This is my first post from my brand spankin' new laptop that I bought yesterday. In something of a rebellion against my nature, I got a Compaq laptop. I have spent a good time of my technological career derailing the Compaq brand, mostly owing from my time trying to fix Compaq desktops. They were heavy, difficult and at one point, had either proprietary equipment or fused certain cards to their own motherboards making it a near impossibility to fix it yourself without a bunch of equipment. When HP absorbed Compaq, I thought it would be the end of HP. I know it didn't really help.

But when I looked at this laptop, it was so packed with intelligent features, had HP support, and other than the branding on the chassis of the system, it seems to be HP through and through. As an added bonus, it has the fairly new AMD Turion 64 bit chip (that will also run in 32 bit). This chip runs a bit hot, but it is fast and efficient. I've had nothing but good things to say about this laptop. I should wait a bit before I make a final judgement, but so far, so good. It's a clear screen, a comfortable and responsive keyboard included with a wealth of little features that I'm beginning to really love.

All of this, just in time for NaNoWriMo. YES!