Archive for April, 2008
Apr
24
Posted in Business, Real World
Cash money is good. Why? Because it’s tangible. You know exactly how much you’ve got to spend, and you know exactly how much money you don’t have to spend (the latter being much more salient). Cash lets you better appreciate and, likewise, better appropriate your money: when your money consists of a bunch of numbers and dollar signs printed on a small 8″x3″ piece of paper (ala bank statement), you don’t really appreciate what you’ve got.
$50,000 on paper doesn’t look like much. But a stack of $100 bills adding up to $50,000 looks like a hell of a lot. A stack of $1 bills adding up to $50,000 looks like even more. The more your money is divided up in cash, the better you will budget your money. Which is precisely the reason why I keep a fat stack of $1 bills in my wallet at all times. People think I’m cheap, but heck, saving money makes money!
This is not to say that you should always pay in cash. You should try to establish your credit as soon as possible, especially if you’re still a young adult. There are a lot of times in life when you’re going to need some money fronted in order to buy something big (unless, of course, you’ve won the lotto). Buying a house is one such example. You’re going to need good credit to get a good loan. Buying a house is the number one easiest way to make cash, especially right now, at a time when the US housing market is at a low point. As the value of your property increases, you make money. Easy money. I don’t know many people who go around and buy houses (at least in this northern VA, where home prices are at least $1 million) with cash (in the form of a personal check). Establishing good credit will aid you in any situation where you need to take out a loan of any sort.
I do, however, suggest against excessive use of the credit card. The credit card is a weapon of mass fiscal destruction, especially for young adults. When I first got my credit card, I was extremely excited that I could finally go around spending money without having to run to mom/dad for a few more bills. I eventually got slapped in the face with credit card statements in the thousands per month, and have never spent a dime more than necessary since. I only use the AMEX for two main things now: gas and any large expense (needs, not wants). You’d be surprised how much money you’ll end up spending at 7-11 buying misc. things if you pay by credit card, just take a written log for one week (I’m sure this is cliche and has been suggested by hundreds of other people before me, but it really works).
My point is, avoid over-indulgence. Unfortunately, I hang out with friends who lack any sense of reality, fiscally speaking, due to the nature of the area I currently live in. Even over the age of 18, their parents continue to supply them with an unlimited supply of money to be spent however they wish. This is wrong. I am still a few months away from 18, yet I manage every dime I spend. Of course, that’s because I’ve worked hard enough to own and manage my own company, and have my own money to spend, but still, I have self-control and I rarely spend waste my money. I have friends driving around town with 2008 Audi RS4s, MB C63 AMGs, and even a few with Ferraris and various Lamborghinis. But I refuse to evaporate my hard-earned money in such a manner. And that is why I am successful. Not because I make a lot of money, no, I really don’t make that much compared to most entrepreneurs. But I save every penny. I refuse to live like a celebrity, for now. Remember, it’s better to make $100K a year and save $90K of it than make $200K a year and waste $190K of it.
Which is why my wad of fifty $1 bills comes in handy. I still reap the benefits of having a fat wallet, but I don’t suffer the consequences of reckless spending.
Read more...
Apr
16
Posted in Games, Technology
The technology that powers computers, such as PCs and consoles (they’re basically computers), has skyrocketed in power in the past few decades. We went from Pong to Crysis in just 35 years, while it took thousands of years of human ingenuity to get the ball rolling.
Just 35 years, from this:
To this:
I don’t know about you, but I think that’s incredible.
But that brings me onto the question - when will it end? All the game consoles released - ever - seem to have the sole goal of improving on graphics, with the exception of the Wii. The N64 existed to improve on the SNES’s graphics, which in turn existed to improve on the NES’s graphics. We’re constantly working towards one thing, though we maybe didn’t know it at first - realism. Some games are pretty close, like the aforementioned Crysis, but they are missing a few things - try pumping it out onto a 150″ screen, and it won’t look so awesome. Plus, the image is completely flat on the monitor or TV, which is not realistic.
Even games that are not meant to be realistic, like ones based on cartoons and anime, are trying to be realistic to the cartoon or anime show they’re based off. And cartoon-ish games that aren’t really based off anything cartoon-ish (like Zelda: The Wind Waker) are still trying to be realistic to the artist’s original ideas.
And it’s not just graphics realism we’re trying to achieve. The Wii, which I said before was not trying to achieve realism, actually is. The Wiimote is a controller designed to improve on realism - compare Virtua Tennis 3 to Wii Sports and tell me - which one is most like real tennis to play?
Obviously, the plateau we’re trying to reach is utter realism. It took us just 35 years to go from a dumbed-down, monochrome, blocky version of table tennis (or something) to a war simulator with near photo-realistic graphics, computer controlled enemies, and graphics rendering on-the-fly. Many of the boundaries have not just been crossed, but trampled - the leap from 2D to 3D, for example.
So all that’s left is holographic graphics (or pseudo-holographic, which has already been achieved - see here), realistic control methods and completely realistic graphics, and then we’ve reached the plateau. Considering what’s already been done, all that should take 15-20 years, at most, then another 5 for portable consoles to catch up. Once it’s indistinguishable from reality, what comes next? All similar games will look the same. Nobody will complain about games having blocky graphics, or praise games for near-photorealism.
Consoles and gaming PCs alike will come to a standstill.
Then, game makers will forget about graphics. They’ll forget about control methods. They’ll concentrate on what was most important all along - ideas and gameplay. That will mark the true beginning of the golden age of video games. Forget about the 16-bit battle between Sega and Nintendo, forget about Shigeru Miyamoto - the only way for a company to survive in this era will be to provide things that are more fun than anything before.
But what will happen, in a few hundred years, when all the ideas we humans can think of have been used? When all storylines are somehow similar to that ancient game released in the 2100s?
What do you think?
Read more...
Apr
9
Posted in Games, Internet
I’m not one to spawn rumors around the masses of the Internet for self-glorification and e-penis enlargement. But I did come accross some interesting (yet, based) rumor the other day: that Grand Theft Auto IV (for 360 and PS3) could possibly have the infamous “Hot Coffee” mod built-into it. And might not be so hidden, per say.
“Hot Coffee”, for those who don’t know, was a mini-game built into GTA: San Andreas, by the developers themselves. Originally created as an easter egg of sorts, “Hot Coffee” was never meant to be accessible by the public. The mini-game basically consisted of you [the player] controlling CJ [main character] while performing sexual activities with various female individuals in the game. A mod was released in 2005 that enabled the mini-game for public use on the PC, and eventually, on consoles.
Rumor has it that GTA IV will have various adult-themed scenes, or missions, in which you seduce prostitutes to perform various acts of sexual nature. Yes, more of the dirty virtual big pimpin’ that we’ve all grown to love!
To the left is a scene from the GTA IV trailer. To the right is the San Andreas “Hot Coffee” mod in action.
Even if this rumor is being interpreted out of proportion, it would be interesting in and of itself to see how Rockstar Games would depict sexual conduct, as per the likes of the “Hot Coffee” mini-game. in the next-generation of consoles. With tremendously improved graphics in the 360/PS3, we’re talking about a hell of a lot of more attention to detail. Better lighting, better textures, better everything.
Which brings me to another point: ESRB ratings are completely and entirely horse-dung . I don’t understand how a game like San Andreas, with the crappy, pixelated textures of prostitutes that it has, could possibly be rated “Mature” (pre-Hot Coffee publicity) when GTA IV, with its near-perfect representation of the nude female body, could be rated “Mature” as well. The idea of ratings are to establish guidelines for parents to prevent children from getting their dirty paws on games which might influence them in a bad way: in a way which stirs poor morals upon their young, innocent minds.
But GTA IV essentially is an entire game of “Hot Coffee”. The difference in the portrayal of nudity between San Andreas and GTA IV is like night and day. I’ll be damned if a bunch of flat, pixelated textures would have an effect on any teenager’s mind. As technology continues to improve and graphics in games consistently advance in quality, our perception of right and wrong continues to become ever-skewed.
If GTA IV were released five years ago, it’d definitely be worth the notorious AO (”Adults Only”) ESRB rating. Leisure Suit Larry, with it’s sub-quality graphics, was initially awarded the AO rating for “soft-core nudity”, why is GTA IV let off so easy, when it offers a 10x more realistic experience? Then again, I’m also not a proponent of stricter ESRB ratings (ala Jack Thompson), so who am I to complain?
My coffee’s getting cold, until next time…
Digg: http://digg.com/gaming_news/GTA_IV_To_Have_Hot_Coffee
Read more...
Apr
8
Posted in Real World, Technology
In a surprising chapter of events (or not so surprising, given how perfectly working things tend to fall apart on me all the time), my main desktop’s hard drive crashed on 4/4/08. It was a three-year-old Western Digital 160 GB 8 MB cache IDE hard drive, originally purchased for well over $150. At the time of purchase, it was one of the best available. Of course, it’s obsolete by today’s technology standards, and pretty much one of the only bottlenecks of my otherwise fast system (which I’ll cover shortly). I just never got around to upgrading the drive to something faster or bigger. Too much data, too much software, too much random stuff to potentially lose. Yeah, I could’ve backed everything up on a few DVDs. I could’ve done a lot of things to ease the transition from IDE to SATA. But I don’t like change. And I definitely don’t like surprises.
Well, I came home late Friday night expecting to turn on my LCD monitor and see a flood of AIM windows all over my desktop, as common when I leave for a period of time equal to or greater than 2 hours. Instead, I was surprised to find that my desktop was shut down. Yes, the system was OFF. Now for me, that’s a kinda big deal. My uptime has been nearly six months without a single restart or shut down on this particular rig (only restarted once to apply driver updates/BIOS tweaks). I have surge protectors, backup generators, etc, which keep my system protected and running. And I don’t have any applications that auto-update-restart ala Windows Update. So…
A quick detail about the rig: it sports an Intel Pentium 4 561 3.60 GHz running at a whooping 4.65 GHz. It’s been overclocked at that speed for nearly two years non-stop, up 24/7/365. Once upon a time, when I created/owned a phase change setup utilizing R134a HVAC gas, I was capable of overclocking this beast of a CPU to 5.4 GHz STABLE (that’s right folks, Super-PI stable, not just POST). Anyways, my point is, this was a heck of a solid setup I had, and a fast one at that. Considering I haven’t upgraded to any of the Core Duo/Quad mumbo-jumbo yet, I’d say I did a damn good job of keeping up with technology without buying new crap every year. I just tack on a few more MHz and call it a day.
Back to my story. I turned on my system and, much to my dismay, I heard five loud “clunking” sounds coming from my hard drive, followed by pause, followed by another set of clunking sounds, etc. Great. Clunking sounds are the universal “you’re screwed” noise that hard drives make. All jokes aside, the clunking sound I am referring to is the sound of the platters/head hitting each other. Somehow my hard drive managed to commit-suicide, as there was definitely no physical shock to the system.
My options at this point are limited. The only way to salvage the data is to submit it to a 3rd-party hard drive recovery facility, where they charge up-the-a$$ (I’m talking thousands of USD) to retrieve maybe a single Word document. So, that’s not gonna happen. All my 10,000 important emails I had downloaded to Outlook? Gone. Contracts, proposals, hand-coded websites, and hundreds of other Word documents? Gone! Gigabytes upon gigabytes of downloaded music, movies, and games? GONE! I don’t really care for the latter, because to me, the emails and documents, not to mention the many, MANY work-in-progress website projects (which I spent hundreds of man hours on), was an extremely monumental loss.
So here I am now. I’ve learned my lesson. I bought two new 500 GB SATA II drives, which are currently running in RAID 0, but I plan to switch things up to RAID 1 when I get the chance to go into the BIOS and reformat my drives (accidentally set it up as RAID 0 since I was so frustrated). Data loss is terrible, and I hope this never happens to me again. I still have a lot to catch up on. But the blog will go on… I promise…
Image brought you in part by MS Paint. Special thanks to Western Digital for losing my copy PhotoShop CS2.
Oh, and a word of advice. Western Digital’s slogan is “PUT YOUR LIFE ON IT”. Please, don’t put your life on it. Aside from the terrible one-year warranty that came with my last drive, apparently the quality is CRAP. Never have I ever had a hard drive just die like that. Things just don’t go wrong with hard drives unless they’re built crappily in a third-world country like Malaysia. I’m definitely not putting my life on any hard drives anytime soon.
Read more...
Apr
2
Posted in Real World
First off, I apologize for disappearing without notice. Some people even thought something could have happened to me (thanks for the caring emails, but I’m A-OK). Been quite busy lately with various Internet projects and startups. School has been very time consuming as well. Nearing the end of the semester, so I’m trying to crank out the best I can to get the grade I need. Anyways, I plan to continue my regular posting schedule as of now. I got a ton of stuff I’d like to share, so sit back, sip on your Red Bull, and get ready for some more of the action-packed life of Robert Afnani (third-person for the win)!
Read more...
