I HATE Microsoft

Windows Vista is the most unintuitive and nonsensical operating system I have ever been forced to rely on. I'm sick of having to look up instructions for everything I could ever want to do, only to find that what XP managed in a single buttonpress has become a convoluted adventure for no obvious reason. For instance, I'm a gamer. I like taking screenshots on the fly in some very fast-paced games. Doing so used to be easy: just press Home (prntscrn). But now my Vista laptop needs me to first press and hold the FN Key on the opposite end of the keyboard while simultaneously pressing Prntscrn. It's not that much slower, but those are still crucial seconds wasted in a rapidly changing game environment, and god forbid I actually need a few fingers on the actual controls meantime. Why, Microsoft? Why not just prntscrn? Did you change things around for the hell of it? It wouldn't be the only thing you arbitrarily fiddled with.

Take the layout. Now it only took me a few weeks to basically figure it out, and lot of what still buggers me is mostly phantom XP syndrome sending me every which way, but even when I'm on the ball it STILL feels like it's taking me longer to navigate to a place than I did in XP. But what was WRONG with XP's layout anyway that merited this drastic redesign? XP felt "causal", one thing led to another in a neat, intuitive progression. Navigating Vista feels a bit like hopscotch, if not teleportation. Relative to XP, nothing feels like it's really where it should be, and duplicate folders far apart from each other can cause great confusion. There are, for example, three folders called "Download" spread about, all of which are systemic. They handle different types of downloads, in a way Vista is happy to let you figure out on your own.

And I AM the administrator! I AM! I AM! I AM! There is NOBODY else using this computer. Nobody but me is registered to it! You don't need my PERMISSION to run a program, Vista! I am your master; I am ODERING you to run it; that's why I double-clicked! I know there are ways to make just about anything work on Vista the way you want; I've had to look up quite a few. But I hate people who say "Vista's great! You just need to know how to configure it/how to use it!" Screw... you... and I mean all of you, hard. You are the people who perpetuate the divide between nerds and normal people by making it necessary. The vast majority of people who use computers are NOT programmers or obsessive-compulsive freaks irresistibly drawn to research everything there is to know about anything we've ever heard of. I did NOT have to be taught how to use XP. I did NOT have to reconfigure XP. All I ever had to do was keep the viruses off, a task windows live performed admirably. What I want a nice fanboy or girl to tell me is whether theres' a make Vista good exe hidden somewhere that will reconfigure everything at once. Heck, I'd settle for a pretend to be XP button.

And there's the performance. Vista freezes more often than some clever ice metaphor. To it's credit it often recovers from its seizures, and quickly, which XP typically did not. But XP didn't typically freeze if it was taken care of. Vista freezes for a lot of things. If, for example I attempt to change the volume with the neat little touchpad adjuster while a program is running, that's almost sure to cause it to freeze. Running a program while several windows are open is very likely to cause a freeze, even if it's just windows media player. An important thing to remember when dealing with Vista freezes is that Vista has to be the one to fix them, or else. Do I ever miss the days when cntrl + alt + dlt could actually accomplish something. Now a days it feels like the operating system is fighting as much with me as it is with the paradoxes that plague it, and with its attention thus divided those errors have a much greater chance of victory. Even if you just try to exit out the frozen window (a natural user reflex) it seems like you're far more likely to worsen the problem, at least by making it last longer.

I've had two Vista laptops. One was high-end, with eight GBs of ram and the newest model GBA from ATI. I played Mirror's Edge on it, and the texturetaring was so bad that it was really bad. Conversely, my 2003 PC running XP played the game nigh perfectly, albeit with noticeably less processing power that caused it to lag a bit now and then. It took the US postal service to destroy my XP computer. My first Vista died within a week like a goldfish or something 'cause it simply couldn't handle my style. Now I've got this less-than-high-end notebook with specs that are none-the-less ABOVE that of my old PC in most respects. It can barely handle a valve title, and the texturetaring is omnipresent.

In conclusion, please developers, make games for Apple. Don't force me to try windows 7. 'Cause I will.

Playin' Silent Hill 3 again

A certain wrong "arguement"

Sometimes people who advocate for government healthcare deride private insurers and providers in like manner: "It's despicable; they're making money off sick people, you can't be allowed to make money off sick, innocent people!"

Now I know this isn't much of a post, but I just felt like pointing out that grocery stores make money off hungry people. The question then is, is feeding the hungry less important than treating the ill? You really are retarded if you say yes, but if no, and if you ever entertained the idea that profiting from treating people's ailments was immoral, then either you concede that notion was wrong, or admit you're a communist.

Celebrating two amamazering things!

Not even a week ago something phasmalogical happened, followed up yesterday by something absolutely hipsterific. The first one, almost a week ago, happened over the space of three days. On the first day I was talking with a good friend of mine, and remarked that I couldn't wait for the inevitable day when Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of The Escapist's Zero Punctuation would finally review his favorite old game and mine, Silent Hill 2. Two days later, he did. Now I'm no psychic, and this momentous day really was inevitable; I'm sure lots of people saw it coming before I did, but that's really what's so amazing. I'd never thought about it all before then, which rates it as the most astounding and incredible coincidence I have ever experienced. That his review actually touched on issues in a similar way mine did was pretty awesome too.



The second thing, the hipsterific thing from yesterday, was that I actually got Silent Hill 2 to work on this puny office laptop running godawfullVista. SH2 PC is a notoriously glitchy game, but the internet is sprinkled with wisdom, and some of it is devoted to helping people like you and me play Silent Hill 2. From what I've heard it breaks in different ways for different people, but to celebrate my good fortune I'm gonna' tell you what at least helped me. Perhaps I'll be able to make this kind of information just a little bit easier for people to find, abundant though it already is. The key for me was to get it running on only one core processor. Before I did so it would frequently crash no matter what graphics or compatibility settings I used, especially after cutscenes and when I was using the flashlight.

First, start the game. Then reduce it to an icon. Start windows taskmanager. Look at the bottom left of the window and click "Show processes from all users". Click "Applications" in the top left of the window. Right click the Silent Hill 2 application and click "Go to process". Right click the process and select "Set affinity". You will be shown a small window with the names of all your core processors and a tick mark for each. Unselect all but one of them. This won't affect the rest of your computer.

Regardless of whether this helps your specific problem you'll probably still have to do it eventually, based on what I found out. Sadly you'll have to do it every time you start the game. But it has definitely worked for me. I've even been playing at full graphics, which are very good. I should also add that you should probably run the game as administrator or it might not let you save, and a compatibility with windows 2000 may or may not help, but doesn't seem to hurt. And get both patches.





James used Canned Juice.
It's super effective.

An extra thought

Hey. Just wanted to add something for all the people who think free trade is anything that needs to be imposed on countries one to another, and is therefor immoral. In fact there is no "New World Order" required; no two or more free peoples can avoid becoming dependent on one another perfectly naturally over the longterm as each assumes its ideal economic roles and concedes to the other work its citizens are less suited to perform. Freedom does not need to be imposed on anybody. Neither does every nation need to embrace freedom for an interdpendance scenario to work. Even if only two nations allow their economies to become completely (or even just significantly) free and unregulated, those two economies will more than likely merge in short order, irrespective of the distance between them. Citizens of each will not find many other better places to do business. If they've got natural resources or else valuable, they may not find any place better at all. They will invest primarily in each other and become richer together. They will also inevitably attract investments from less free countries whose eantrepanuers feel stifled.

Subsidies and tariffs and other forms of protectionism may persist in many other countries, and these will inevitably both tempt capital away (subsidies) and make trade somewhat difficult (tariffs) for any economically free country, but only at literally everyone's expense. Subsidies and tariffs distort the entire world market and make that entire market less efficient for everybody, including the nation engaging in this protectionism. It makes no sense, therefor, to answer protectionism with more protectionism like countries presently do. It's only going to make things worse.

And of course economic freedom shouldn't be imposed by any government on its own subjects, either. I do not think property is an inalienable right, myself. I used to, but have come to respect the idea more because it works than because it is moral. Or better, it's moral because it works. If anyone thinks it doesn't, they should be able to rally votes to elect a non-capitalist economy if that's what the people want. But democracy and social/political freedom works too, and I don't believe any country is justified dispensing with them, no matter how unpopular they may be. It is not any more reightous to impose socialism than capitalism, and citizens of either must be free to speak their mind and organize peaceful counter-movements. And if these prove unsuccessful, they must be allowed to leave the country with minimal difficulty if they are physically able. I would not lightly forgive a country where these freedoms are absent. Humans seem to be instinctually afraid of economic freedom, so we can forgive its nearly universal absence if we agree it's a good thing.

A few thoughts on Outsourcing

At the bottom of this page is a banner that suggests the heart of American opposition to outsourcing is closet racism. Indeed, for many people I have spoken to this has seemed to be the case. Somehow foreigners just don't deserve the same jobs Americans work. For some reason employers are evil when they choose to fire an American and hire someone else in another country to do the exact same job, especially if it's to pay him less for it than the American would get--which seems to add insult to injury... somehow. But of course it really isn't that simple. A touch of racism or nationalism may be behind some or even most people's opposition to outsourcing, but what really drives them are a few misconceptions.

The most important thing to remember when discussing outsourcing is that the economies of the world are neither fully globalized or fully isolated. Outsourcing is not a myth that you can discredit by simply pointing out the global economy and saying: "Nobody complains when jobs go from Florida to Ohio except in Florida." There is a global economy, but there are still national economies too, and these national economies do still compete with one another for everything under the sun. When jobs go from Florida to Ohio or wherever in the United States it's not a net loss of jobs for the United States economy. When jobs go from the United States to China, or any other country, it really is a net loss for one and a net gain for the other. The reason is because those economies are separate. They do depend on one another. Each has products, resources and markets the other does not, and the resulting trade conducted between them knits them both into the global economy. But the global economy itself is just a patchwork quilt of national economies, instead of person A and B, and company A and B, trading with whomever and wherever like it's often depicted. This depiction is like saying you can get on a commercial plane and fly from any airport straight to any other airport with no detours. In reality there is a hub and spoke system in place which often requires travelers take huge detours, sometimes even passing their final destination before reaching it.

The economic version of hub and spoke results from tariffs, customs and all obstacles to free trade and free movement inter and intra the national economies. Some of these deliberately isolate the economies from one another, while most simply cause them to function differently from one another, which does the same thing. What this means is that people have a legitimate reason to fear outsourcing from their country. It doesn't just threaten your job, it threatens the economy you depend on with a net loss of jobs and capital. So what should we do about it? Do we wall our business in? Do we outlaw banks from investing abroad? Maybe we should first ask the folks who applied this philosophy to its extreme to fight a different kind of outsourcing. At times during the history of the Soviet bloc, citizens of the Soviet Union and her satellites fleeing life under Communism represented a huge net loss of productivity in the Soviet economy and may have contributed to their low standard of living. Yet history doesn't look back on these refugees with malice, because history remembers the Soviet standard of living was pretty low to begin with. The Soviets and allies were a technocracy who depended on specialists and educated people to plan and manage their huge economy. Yet despite how important these people were, and despite how much honors and favors they were given, and despite how much of a blow it was for the economy to lose even one of them, these were the people most eager to flee and seek their fortunes in the West. No matter how better off they were than most other people in their country, they were still worse off than they knew they could be in many other countries with freer markets, where they could sell their knowledge and skill for a profit. And they risked torture, barricades and death to do it.

Nobody would have ever fled the Soviet bloc if they didn't think life would be better on the other side of the iron curtain, and we don't think ill of them for it because we know it is not immoral to seek a better life. Maybe it was at the expense of others, but those others were not innocent. So now do you see? It's not that every economy suffering from outsourcing is trying to emulate the Soviet Union, but that for one reason or another people are being chased out or lured away. It might have nothing to do with policy, but could simply be an unfortunate reality like a plant resource running dry or becoming obsolete. More often than not however, it is policy, just like in the Soviet Union. And just like in the Soviet Union, the policy usually involves limitations on economic freedom. Even if less severe, nobody in their right mind wants a small injury any more than a big one. They'd rather not be injured at all, and if they have the option of avoiding injury they will probably take it. It is not just to demand anyone hold still and take one for the team, at least not under any normal human circumstance.

Well now I've rambled for a bit too long. Gotta' conclude. Abolish the national economies. Not the nations themselves, oh no; those haven't failed us yet. But the national economies are now effectively obsolete. The only reason they're even still around is because we still want them; because we're afraid of life without them; because we still entertain the idea of a self-sufficient country that produces as much of what it needs and wants as it can. We're afraid to fully merge with the global economy because we believe this would threaten our autonomy and sovereignty. We want them in case of war, to be able to provide for ourselves in wartime, but in reality the national economy is what makes war possible, and the global economy what could make it almost impossible to be an aggressor. Even when the global economy was much less stronger than it is today powerful aggressor nations were defeated after being cut off from it long enough. Imagine if every nation was absolutely dependent on every other? It Is kind of scary when you think about it, but in reality we all, and have always, "depended on the cooperation of strangers".

Not only would a truly global economy abolish outsourcing, at the same time it would abolish every economic incentive to make war, and create many incentives to preserve peace and order. When investments and people can freely and easily go wherever they like with minimal obstacles and risks, then they will go wherever and do whatever they can to be the most useful. A whole nation may find it largely produces grains, while another fruits, and another industrial appliances; none of which either could survive on if denied the others. Many might do it all and then some, but not in sufficient quantity to provide for their entire population; a little bit of each, but not enough of any except for a few. Still others might produce virtually nothing, but maintain safe ports to shelter and organize trade. The possibilities are endless, and the planet Earth is so rich in geographic, demographic, and resource diversity as to make autarchy impossible without conquering the whole globe. And why steal resources or labor when they can be so much more easily bought?

Of course outsourcing would be gone for the same reason it isn't there in a national economy. Jobs might go from Hong Kong to Mexico city, but this is not a net loss of jobs for planet Earth. And even Hong Kong isn't worse off for it; their labor and resources would be freed up to do something the global consumer deems more important; something more fit for Hong Kongians to do. If it wasn't otherwise, they simply wouldn't have lost the work.