Revised post.

The official logos for the “ice-lizard” apps (ie, faceforked mozilla) are by Ricardo Fernandez.

A quick note on why and what: due to the nature of existing intellectual property controls and the resulting need for certain protections to be in place (and the resulting lack of protections in place for OSS) there is a ‘facefork’ of the mozilla suite (that’s mozilla browser, firefox browser, thunderbird e-mail client, etc.) into a series of virtually identical builds with only branding changes (hence “face” fork).

The internals are the same and aside from minor patching will remain the same. The impetus is simply removing restricted IP to allow timely patching. In order to protect the mozilla name they wanted controls in place on patching and needed to have some restrictions on logo/name use. Therefore those that want freedom have to have a layer of isolation. Nothing to be ashamed of and no hard feelings. Software marches on.

More and more we are finding the inadequacies of our government. From active censorship and misinformation campaigns at home and abroad to horrendous mishandling of war and disaster (and disaster), our government is showing itself to have no real operating methods.

About all it is good for these days is spending money, putting people in prison, acting like children, covering up their own misconduct, making things worse, and worse.

They’re finally making some efforts to solve things (but only after everyone and their mother thought of it first). They’re trying to give the world a better impression of us.

But are they really? Even the “steps forward” have come far later than they should have, and only when the government was shown to have exhausted all other options. And when that happens they take their weakest possible form, showing a lack of resolve to do the right thing.

As a nation we are lagging behind in education, in industry and commerce, in quality of life as not measured by arcane fiscal means but as a measure of how much we have to offer one another. We are failing to rekindle the flame that brought this country into being because we are too focused on our miniscule goals of commerce and pride. That is not what we are here for in this Republic or on this planet. We are here to mark the world with our sacrosanct spirit of cooperation, brotherhood, and intellect.

We have lost our way and yet we have not found a voice to lead us, or even recognized the necessity of such a voice. We have not sought some major collective challenge since at the latest the 1960s when we decided to go to the moon, but more precisely since WWII when we made the collective effort to put an end to an unjust war the best way we could manage. In peace we are not lost, but in peace there is less scrutiny of our leaders to provide a path of progress. They are allowed to meander and squander for we feel no urgent burdens to overcome.

Believe me when I say we are at war with our own government and ourselves. We must fight until our deaths to find a truer course of action and a better use of resources. We must reach our hands to our brothers in Iraq and Iran and Argentina and Venezuela and North Korea and we must somehow grow a bunch of arms to have the hands to do this. Err, wait. No. We must rekindle the human flame that has brought mankind from the darkness into the twilight. We must march forth into the light of day and see for ourselves the world that has given us home.

Heavy rhetoric, for sure. God knows I don’t like writing this sort of thing, but for lack of some true leader to do it I’d rather it attempt to be said.

Nice video.

Exploitative?

Nah. Just tasteful and pertinent.

O’Reilly only took issue because it’s true.

Watch the video

As much as I hate Windows, that’s where the gaming is. Obviously there’s no innate reason why gaming and Windows are so closely tied. It’s just the way things are right now: approximately ten years ago when early 3D games like Quake were coming out Windows was the platform. Then, when gamers demanded higher quality graphics and started buying video cards, the platform was Windows.

Now we’re stuck in something of a feedback loop: people will tend toward Windows for games, game makers will tend toward Windows for a platform. The graphics cards and drivers are made with Windows and DirectX in mind. The opportunities for non-Windows games are great, but the risks are too. This is always the case with an unproven market.

So I keep Windows around to play the occasional game. I’d prefer to play in my native environment, but if a movie comes out in Spanish that I want to see, I’ll see it. One such game I look forward to is Valve’s Portal. It’s a mindbender that involves some nasty physics tricks. Basically, what would happen if you transformed momentum along a two-dimensional axis into momentum along a three-dimensional axis, vice versa, and all sorts of combinations.

The player has a gun that targets flat surfaces. One firing mode creates an entrance portal, the other an exit portal. You shoot a wall and you can now walk through the wall. If the entrance portal is on a ceiling you’ll be moving at the speed you walked through the portal plus gravity. If you place the entrance on the ground ten feet down and the other next to you then you’ll pop out of the one next to you at the speed of your fall. Etc.

It’s a really interesting and complex concept that sells itself. But I was very happy to happen along its prequel: Narbacular Drop. It’s basically the same thing, except Narbacular Drop uses a less complex engine and was built by a team of then-students. You can download it (win32) here.

The greatest thing about games like this is it really showcases the way that computers become so crucial to entertainment in the future. With a computer-based system you can do things you could never do on a movie set or television show. The possibilities are endless.

I just wish that they would make the buggers gnu/linux compatible.