The Linux Discussion: What happens to Windows

Recently i've been experiencing some customer woes of using a windows machine. I have to admit i'm growing really tired of the Windows Platform, i've been growing tired of it since windows 7 and the new Windows 8.1 really isn't helping much at all. But why am i do i have so many problems with the Windows Platform? It's their ruin everything and make people believe that what they currently have isn't good enough anymore mentality. I understand that for a company to survive it needs to sell product, don't get me wrong and i'm not slighting them for doing that, But the recent release schedule for Microsoft products is getting dangerously close to the release schedules for NFL games for most consoles. In the year 2012 it was buy NFL 2012!! now with enhanced graphics and all new players! In 2013 it was Buy NFL 2013!! Now with even enhanced-er graphics and all new players! Now you can play the water boy! and for 2014 they've got enhanced-er-er graphics and the ability to launder your uniforms or something like that. Why do people continue to buy the newest NFL Game every single year? the strategies and maneuvers in football have hardly changed since the 80's or 90's. the only thing really that's been updated are the people on the team and the uniforms. It's the same Thing with Microsoft and Windows lately. Microsoft hit a boom with Windows 98, rode that wave until they skid to a halt on the beach and then swam back out with XP and rode that wave even further (Seeing as XP isn't going to be officially de-comissioned until April 15th, 2014 which will mark the end of it's 13-year run on the market. most of that being the number one operating system even over some other Windows Platforms like the horrific mistake we call Vista). But Right around the time that XP popularity was beginning to wane Bill Gates stepped down as CEO and went into early retirement which is where Steve Ballmer stepped in and became the new CEO. And now it's all about re-releasing the same crap with a couple new features every year. The last brand new operating system to have come out of Microsoft was Vista. No really, look it up, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 are essentially to Vista what Puma, Jaguar and Panther were to OS X. Just the next three updates. the x.1, x.2, x.3 of Windows Vista. Yet what does Microsoft do? Well, much like the NFL Industry, they charge full price for the product again, and they remove all of the old stock off the shelves. Why? Because they don't want you to use the old stuff. In their mind they're completely done with that already. They want you to use the new and improved stuff so that your computers are walking billboards of product placement. So to curb this problem i've switched to linux which has raised an interesting question in my head. Because the very popular and very free operating system Ubuntu, has a graphical user interface (GUI) that could be the spiritual sister to Windows 8 if Linux liked to rip people off. Whats the only problem with Linux that i can find to date? well... software's a little bit harder to install and there's no native game support which is a massive killer for the operating system. Mainstream game companies need to make the switch over to Linux, which companies like Valve are doing (with their introduction of the Steam box which runs a completely open source completely free version of linux designed by Valve for their machines and their DDP). Once more companies follow in the footsteps that Valve are placing there for everyone to see then linux should gain traction and then Microsoft will be a thing of the past. It will just be another company like Apple: Foo-foo labels and overpriced shit. By the way? if you're not agreeing with me, i might have some bad news for you: If Valve's SteamBox hits it off well then it may come to reality. Granted Microsoft support will always be a thing with them, but if a massive player base makes a paradigm shift over to a linux based DDP console? I promise you, you'll see companies flocking to linux like flies to shit.

Enderverse and It's Movie

I've been spending an awful lot of time reading recently. For some of you, i'm sure that sentence doesn't even compute, for me an awful lot of reading is anything more than one book a year, but after finding out that there was a Movie component to Ender's Game coming out, i felt compelled to read the series. Still i didn't actually have any of the books and i wasn't about to go illegally download a book i might not enjoy. So i went talking to a few friends and finally found one that was willing to loan me their copy of Ender's Game.

Even with the book in hand and the desire to read it, it took a little building up steam for me to actually want to read it. I read the first 4 chapters in one sitting and then preoccupied myself with other matters for a few months. Finally around my 21st birthday, my father wanted to drive out to vegas which is an 8-ish hour drive for us. So i monopolized that driving time to continue reading this book that i kept telling myself i really needed to read.

Sure enough i was hooked quickly and now i can't stop reading the damned things. As the ender's series stands, in July there will officially be 14 books in the series and half as many short stories. All of them contributing weapons-grade awesome to the overall canon. As of last night i've finished my 6th book, and 3 short stories down. It's been a crazy last few months of my life but the entire collection is intensely gripping.

Being completely obsessed with the series and having read all of the 3 books that take place at the exact same time as the movie, i was of course leery about how they planned on executing the movie. I've never heard of the movie's director and i wasn't sure i could pin down who the screenwriter was, so naturally, like every other movie adaptation of a book, i was afraid they were going to butcher the book and stray away completely from the original plot. We've seen this happen with The Hunger Games series, the Lord of the Rings, and many others. Chances are, if you can name a book in which a movie has been made out of it. The book was disgraced by the movie piece.

It was only yesterday that i found out, through some very professional, P.I. grade google snooping that the author of the entire Enderverse, Orson Scott Card, is the writer of the screen play and i also discovered a quotation from him in interview about the movie adaptation where he explains the changes he made to the script and why. I don't know why this made me eccstatic, but it did. If you were to ask me now, after having read that, i would tell you that i firmly believe that all film adaptations of the movie should be prefaced with an interview from the screenplay writer. It doesn't have to be a video interview, it doesn't have to be an audio interview, it doesn't even have to be put in with the movie itself. Every movie has a fan page it seems like.It could be some terrible movie like Racist Assholes 5: The Quest for Hitler's Illegitimate Daughter. and at the end of it's terrible and terribly racist trailer there'd be a website link "www.illegitimatedaughterthemovie.com."

So back to my argument about the interviews. Just post the transcription of said interview on the movie's website, and have the screenwriter explain where he went with the script in relation to the original work, and why he went there. If we can see some form of reasoning as to why things were left out or changed up even in the slightest, then we know what to expect, we're prepared to see something that is not verbatim with the book counterpart.

Either way, that's my rant about the Enderverse and it's upcoming movie slated to be released November of this year.

How do you feel about my idea of having the screenplay author do an interview as a sort of caveats to why the movie is different from it's book counterpart? What do you feel was the absolute worst movie adaptation of a book?

The Hype Complex

We've all been victims of the excitement and hype that surrounds something that is highly anticipated. Sometimes it's a good thing, sometimes it's a bad thing. I went and saw John Carter the other day, i was rather looking forward to it being a Edgar Rice Burroughs fan myself. I had spent a great deal of time reading the Barsoome Chronicles before the movies had come out so i was prepared for the movie when it did. I thought the writing style of Burroughs was fantastic, i deeply enjoyed his works and i'll undoubtedly be reading the rest of his works with the exception of the Tarzan series as i was never really a fan of Tarzan.

However i found that the movie was somewhat of a disappointment. I understand that they're trying to make a movie series to bring them steady income over the next couple years, however the issue with making a modern movie out of a hundred year old short story is that you need to take a lot of artistic liberties, and i do mean a lot. All of the hype surrounding the movie and it ended up being a surprising let down to critic.

Another shining instance of hype making a product so much more than it is, is the highly acclaimed Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. There is no doubt about the fact that it is indeed a fantastic game filled with hours upon hours of adventures for you to explore with it's two square kilometer world. However, is it really the god send that the public has made it out to be? Probably not. Underneath the sheen of new, shiney and over-hyped, there are the same old bugs and glitches that have been notorious in every Bethesda game since they opened their doors. Most of the bugs get passed of as over-beaten meme's (the much abused "arrow to the knee" jokes) however this oversight is a little disappointing. Bethesda is now on it's fifth iteration of the Elder Scrolls series and they've still yet to fix a few core problems with the video games.

However, all bugs aside all me to posit my theory as to why these bugs were easily overlooked by the majority of the community.

When Skyrim was announced the first people to find out about it was the press of course. The second people were the die-hard TES fans and then the time between discovery was proportionate to how much you knew about the series and how much you enjoyed it's previous installments. However, the community for his video game is so large and so passionate about the video game that the news spread like wildfire as soon as the core community found out. A combination of mystery surrounding the game and everyone screaming with excitement made the game catch a lot of attention. This attracted video gamers from ALL video gaming facets, not just your run of the mill RPG players.

This caused an influx of FPS players from various run-and-gun type FPS games such as COD and Halo. These players are used to massively buggy video games as the same issues hold true with their developers. COD's notorious quick scope bug was accidentally added in COD2 and people have been complaining about it since then. They still haven't fixed it after 6 or 7 iterations (lost the care to count after COD4). As these players are pretty much used to bugs to the extent where they have no issues with exploiting them or playing until they're red in the face from frustration, they tended to look over the bugs.

This combined with the fact that a hefty percentage of the Skyrim players have never even so much as looked at another installment of TES which means they're oblivious to the fact that these bugs have been around since installment one. Thus, their tolerance levels for these errors are significantly larger than the players from day one, installment one.

Never the less, Hype can be beneficial or deadly depending on how it's utilized and whether it's actually deserved. Frankly i would much rather do without the entire advertizing strategy, which is why i wait several months for video games after they're released so i can read reviews after the hype has worn off. What do you think about how developers of all medias use hype to their advantage? Whether it's deserved or not.