I wrote this article quite a long time ago, but with the recent announcement that IBM has ceased production of OS/2, it bears republishing... OS/2's fate was largely decided in mid 1991 when IBM made the decision that OS/2 2.0 would have the Workplace shell as well as "Seamless" windows. This decision ensured that OS/2 2.0 would not make it out by summer of 1991 or even the once definitive date of December 31, 1991. The reason this is important is because in April of 1992, Microsoft shipped W...

Most of my week on Galactic Civilizations II was spent doing game-balancing.  That meant messing with the various .XML files that determine how long technology takes to research, how much different weapons and other ship items should cost and how powerful they should be.  The result was that a ton of changes were made to the values of these things. For example, the weapons used to scale way too fast IMO.  You could quickly end up with ships doing 300 damage and that starts to b...

Guilds, as a general concept, are terrific for Massively Multiplayer games.  And nearly all regular players in WoW are in some sort of guild. The problem, in my view, with guilds is that they don't have enough tools to organize events, manage resources, and etc.  As a guild leader, I really don't have much real power. I can kick people out, promote people, and so forth.  But it's not like I have in-game power to resolve disputes over loot or try to provide "stuff" for new m...

Scientists have found a way to bring people back from the dead. Sort of.  The first successful test subjects were dogs which were drained of all their blood, replaced with saline solution that was just above freezing and then revived 3 hours later with no brain damage. This could be a boon for battlefield casualties as well as for those in accidents where a lot of blood has been lost.  There is also great potential for this to be used to put someone into hybernation for the long ter...

I read on a forum a concern from a user about Galactic Civilizations II -- that because the planets are now part of the main game map, the game was now so unrealistic as to be distracting for him.  The problem is, any space-based game is going to have to make some concessions in order to be fun. Here's the problem: Space is big.  No, I mean BIG.  It's ridiculously, mind boggling, incomprehensively big.  It's just plain enormous.  Some years ago, we released a game...

Well tomorrow is my birthday. Which means, naturally, my family has come down with a virus.  I've finished tucking them all in and can now surf the net a bit before getting some late night work done. Linda Folely demonstrates why people don't trust the media anymore even if her demonstration is unintentional. Democrats are mad at Karl Rove  for pointing out a stereo-type between the left and the right when it's come to the war on terror. The American Right: "Let's go get the g...

So now local authorities can unilaterally confiscate private property from one citizen to give to another citizen.  That's according to the US Supreme court in a narrow 5 to 4 ruling.  Not surprising, the 5 votes in favor of the ruling come from the left.  After all, the best run country is the one in which the central government assigns each of us to our allotted duties. A central government that decides where we live, how we work, how we live, and where we can go. Okay, ma...

From my work I come into contact with all kinds of people.  I've been traveling a lot and have had the opportunity to talk to people who work at other compainies. And one of the types of people that I occasionally run into could be labeled as "frustrated talented guy".  They are often frustrated because they feel they should be promoted, make more money, given more authority, etc. based strictly on their inate talent. But talent really isn't enough, not usually and certainly no...

For those of you interested in what the new office looks like here's a video I took (in .WMV format) with my digital camera.  The first part is muted (too windy) but I narrate a bit once inside.

Blizzard has released the official World of Warcraft Desktop. The suite, created for Stardock Media by Apocalypse_67 and Adam  Najmanowicz (lead developer of Stardock SkinStudio) combines both original artwork and in-game interface graphics from Blizzard's popular massively multiplayer game. The suite incorporates technology from Stardock's Object Desktop in the form of Theme Manager OEM which has been previously licensed by companies such as Microsoft, Alienware, ATI, nVidia,...

And so beta 2 of Galactic Civilizations II has arrived.  We still have a lot of work ahead of us.  But I can tell you from even these early betas that we're very excited about the direction the game is heading.  Some of the new game mechanics over the first one have created all kinds of new strategic opportunities that simply didn't exist in the first one.  But before I start giving examples of that, let me talk about beta 2. First off, the beta still does not have the fi...

It has pained my wife and I to see the Discovery Channel's 100 Greatest Americans list with people like Oprah and such on there.  Kindred spirit John Hawkins has put up a list of his own that I largely agree with.  Here's my list: Top 25: 1) George Washington 2) Thomas Edison 3) John Adams 4) Alexander Hamilton 5) Abraham Lincoln 6) Theodore Roosevelt 7) Andrew Jackson 8) Thomas Jefferson 9) Henry Ford 10) Benjamin Franklin 11) The Wright Brothers 12) Albert Einstein...

I founded my company back in 1991 technically.  I was a "DBA" (Doing business as") from my college dorm room. In 1993, I incorporated the company (or technically, my mom actually did the incorporation).  I was still about a year from graduation at that point. It was just me still. It wasn't until 1995 that I got an office and started hiring people to work with.  And I can tell you, my training in Electrical Engineering did not prepare me for being an employer. Based on so...

Dennis Miller put it best when (paraphrasing) he said: "Why it is liberals will compare everyone to Hitler except the little mustached guy gassing people over in Iraq?"  Once again, Democrats manage to trivialize historical catastrophes. In this case, the holocaust as Democrat Charles Rangel said: The Iraq war "is the biggest fraud ever committed on the people of this country. . . . This is just as bad as the 6 million Jews being killed," the 74-year-old Harlem Democrat insisted...

Kerry has finally started releasing some of his files that he had promised to during the campaign.  For all the left-wing attacks on Bush's intelligence it seems rather ironic that Bush did better at Yale than Kerry did (even if barely).  The good news is that Kerry did do well in one subject - French. This isn't to say Kerry is dumb. But for some bizarre reason, left-wingers tend to believe that they are intellectually superior to conservatives and paint Bush out to be a "moron" de...