Hamas and terrorism

So this latest attack by Hamas was entirely predictable. So is the next one. Hamas's legitimacy and public approval had dimished quite a bit in recent months, so they allowed the cease-fire to expire, and starting shooting rockets again. The Israelis did the predictable thing and fired back, quite a bit stronger, and now Hamas gets the benefit of sympathy for dead civilians. The locals is Gaza will have to stand behind their "elected government". Hamas is only legitimized by opposing/attacking Israel, so it had to do it. And it will do it again.

Make no mistake about this: Hamas has no intention of EVER concluding any peace deal with Israel. Not going to happen, any more than Arafat was going to. It's not what they want. Arafat's existence and continuation as PLO leader was permanently predicated on the ongoing suffering and victimization of the Palestinians.

Granted, Israel is being very heavy-handed about some things, like the blockade Hamas wants halted. That could be done differently--of course Israel is worried about the importation of weapons, which would inevitably happen, but then again it's already happening, isn't it?

By the endless self-victimization practiced by Hamas and the PLO, the Palestinians manage to be permanently the target of sympathy by the rest of the Arab world, and Israel continues to be hated. This is their goal.

But of course the rest of the Arab world is equally vested in this arrangement; witness the land blockade of Gaza by Egypt--that border is closed--if the Egyptians wanted to actually *help* the people of Gaza, it'd be trivial to do so. In some larger political sense, that's not in Egypt's interest, it'd look too much like peace with Israel, assimilation of Gaza, and the permanent existence of Gaza as separate from a Palestinian return--i.e., a separate nation-state--and the end of a good reason to continually harangue Israel about Gaza.

So the person quoted in the Wash Post yesterday: "why were my children killed? did they have AK-47s?" No, they were killed because the adults failed to report the presence of terrorists among them, and when those terrorists attacked Israel, Israel hit back. So I say to the people of Gaza: you want peace, stop shooting rockets at Israel. Report to appropriate authorities (by which I mean not Hamas) others in the population who would undermine or prevent that peace.

And be glad that it's not me in charge of the Israeli army--I would have been on tv saying "for every rocket launched at Israel, we will immediately flatten 3 buildings in Gaza. And the bulldozing of the rest will start after one week." I would raze Gaza to the ground, leaving nothing larger than a basketball standing. Push everyone out, into Egypt. Once Gaza is cleared, shoot at anything that moves. Turn Gaza into a live-fire bombing target practice zone, permanently.

another computer fix story...

A longish one again.

A few days ago the machine starting making the clicking noise that disks make when they are about to go bad. This noise indicates that the moving head spindle stepper motor is having problems engaging for some reason. O/S blocks while waiting for the disk to engage, position, and read. It had been happening every couple of weeks, in particular when the disks had been idle for some hours, for months.

Then all of a sudden it was ever minute, or every few seconds...pending disaster. Worst thing--it was the boot disk doing it, although I didn't know that right away.

So I went looking for a NAS unit that I could configure as RAID 1 (the mirroring approach, for fault tolerance). Figured I'd just start moving all the files that aren't part of booting onto the NAS. Cost of a RAID 1 NAS unit looked like it would be$300-$350, incl a pair of 500GB drives.

Best to get one with hardware RAID, if possible, and that has passworded control over access. Otherwise it's going to be open on my wireless net (well, not completely open, of course, I do have acess control set, and MAC-address limiting, but that stuff is spoofable/crackable).

So I evolved a plan whereby I would start with a 1 TB drive, use that as part of the copying shuffle, and order a RAID NAS. Then I discovered it was the boot drive that was failing.

This is a far harder problem--you can't just drag files around to make a copy of a boot disk. You also need the deep hidden things like the Master Boot Record, and some other low-level stuff that Windows Explorer can't get at. In addition, Windows Explorer can't copy files that are somehow in use (there are several things in your home-dir that are un-copyable that way).

So I used the new 1TB drive as a holder for data needing to be copied. At first I thought I'd just move drive E: content onto the 1 TB disk (ultimately this was right), and then clone C: onto E:.

I had plenty of space to shuffle things around...the real issue, and the centerpiece of this blog, is how do you clone a disk? What I want is to essentially make a new/different disk look exactly like the boot disk, then remove the boot disk and be back to where I was.

Earlier in the year I did it several times on my Mac G5. There's a nice convenient, easy to use tool for OSX that does this one thing: Carbon Copy Cloner. That's what it does. I did several disks this way, because I wanted to migrate from the original 160 GB disks (which were nearly full, because of MP3s and DVR) to 500 GBs, AND I wanted to install Leopard as well. So I figured I'd clone the boot disk, then install Leopard on the boot disk, and if I had to go backwards, that'd be easy. This whole process went just fine. Have had zero trouble with it, the clone was bootable, etc.

Windows is not so simple about this.

Well, ultimately, it kinda is, although not trivial. There appear to be two competing products for this, and some also-rans. And some freebies.

The big two are Acronis True Image Echo Workstation, and Norton Ghost. I also came across Paragon Disk Copy, which appears to be third.

What'd be ideal is if I could take the 1 TB disk, partition in two, with a smaller partition matching the boot disk, and have that regularly re-image the boot disk, and my old drive E: stuff on the bigger partition. That way I'd always have a safe partition I could use as emergency boot.

That doesn't seem to be one of the possibilities.

I downloaded the Paragon demo, but it doesn't actually work. Well, it does, sort of. You can walk through the mouse-clicks, see the dialogs, etc, but then it doesn't complete the task. You have to buy the thing to find out if it's going to work for you. So I uninstalled that immediately.

This is an odd issue here...online reading suggests that not all tools work for all people.

This URL provides a decent list of the available tools, but it's not complete (altho it did list things I didn't find earlier).

I did the acronis download, and knowing that Ghost was in use at the corporate office, I blasted an email there to see who used what, and how well it had worked. Responses mentioned Ghost and Acronis.

Acronis is a 15-day trial period...more than adequate for me to test-drive and see if it does what I need.

Answer is: yes, it did what I wanted, it went pretty fast...with one weird glitch that I didn't understand at first. My machine has motherboard onboard video, which it turns out is display 0, i.e., first in line for video, like the power-on self-test startup stuff you see. Acronis images your drive by a special reboot that then does the copying...which you can only see on display 0. Which meant that I was seeing nothing, because I didn't have the 2nd monitor plugged in. I could hear the disk activity (and the undesirable clicking), but I didn't know about progress. Or when it was done. This was getting alarming after a while.

Then during a phone call to a coworker who'd recommended Acronis, after he did his own separate test run and saw the right stuff, I realized that I would have too if I'd had the other monitor plugged in...too late at that point, I was already rebooting.

Anyway, it all went well, although it did take me nearly five days to get it resolved.

So: recommended tool: Acronis True Image Echo Workstation. Did the job for me.


I maybe still ought to do the RAID NAS thing...

great quote

it's political...from Talking Points Memo, referring to the Blagojevich issue this week.

"What could be more patriotic than to distract a presidency from its first attempts at fixing a damaged nation?"

What do you bet there will be no Republicans who come out saying it is not ok to criticize the [new] President on a wartime footing. They certainly said it about Bush--will they say it about Obama?

It's ok to criticize the President anytime. Has to be.

That said...it needs to be a valid criticism. Distractions are dangerous time-wasters. This attempt to smear Obama with some of the Blagojevich crap is just that. I'd be willing to bet that the guy doing it, apparently Mike Duncan, head of the RNC, would be unable to be so obnoxious and strident if he actually had to say the words to Obama's face.

Economics

I had a shitty economics class in college. Engineering econ, it was called. Textbook written by the prof; class was Sept 27 to Dec 17 or some such, book did not actually get printed and to the Univ until Thanksgiving.

and on top of that, what it covered was essentially useless. Only thing I got out of that class was the trivial knowledge of how to calculate compound interest. We're talking 1978 (or was it 79?), so this was before advanced math calculators could to that, and before Excel or 1-2-3.

Class *could* have covered real valuable content, like how to cost and budget a engineering proposal, estimate manpower needs for a project, how to manage costs over time. But no.

and now it's 2008. Dec 2008. The economy is in a slump. Big time. Well, the economy was in a slump when I graduated from college. So it will come back.

But what's the deal? There's a really simple explanation you won't ever hear.

Economics, the world economy, our capitalist model, is basically a pyramid scheme. It requires that there be new products and new customers ALL THE TIME.

ok, so as long as the population is growing, there are new customers. But businesses have to keep growing lest the competition take their customers away. Which leads to the need to borrow money--and if there's a hiccup in that, the pyramid turns out to be a house of cards, and starts to collapse.

In addition to the greed. This is the essential flaw in Greenspan's thinking: it doesn't account for criminal behavior by the participants. Like this: when someone thinks up the "derivative" idea of bundling mortgages into a package that can then be "securitized" and resold to investors, the thing you most want to do is resell quickly--i.e., fast turnaround, with a sliver of profit in the sale. You can claim that the risk is low, because the securities are backed by real estate, which always has solid value. But there isn't anyone in the chain, other than the homeowner, who actually *wants* to own the property. The problem there is that once you put enough distance between the homeowner and the ultimate holder of the securitized loan bundle, the investor doesn't know whether the homeowners can actually pay the loans. What's worst is that the mortgage maker who originated the loan doesn't care, ultimately. Said maker wants to make loans, and resell bundles of loans, the fast the better. So you make it as easy as possible to get a mortgage loan, which leads to more people bidding on houses, prices going up, and eventually people being unable to really afford their houses, but have them anyway. The mortgage maker makes a little money from originating the loan, and more when it is resold. The faster that can be done, the better--and they can make new loans as soon as previous ones have been sold. So much for needing due diligence on the buyer's being able to afford the thing, why do you care? You're going to pass the risk on to someone else, that someone isn't likely to investigate the buyer.

But there is going to be a sort of ceiling in prices on houses. They can only go so far upwards before people just can't buy.

As soon as there's a hiccup...those loans turn out to be non-performing. Then you have to wonder about the value of the thing. Housing prices being cyclic, at some point they will be going back down, and maybe then you have the value inversion.

Which is why the screwup in how Treasury and Congress are handling this is happening. They aren't dealing with the loans issue. Banks have asked for money, but are paying operating expenses with it.

And this happens this way because it's a pyramid scheme. As soon as there stop being new customers (or customers able to pay), things start back downward.

A way to solve this for the future: require that mortgage originators hold the loan for a minimum of three years before they can sell it. You know that if the originator knows it has to hold the loan, it is going to be very careful about knowing the buyer can pay. As opposed to recent years, where that absolutely did not matter.

Spellforce update

started a round of this again...was suddenly feeling curious about whether playing the game from the beginning without making bases and armies was a winning strategy...

Yes.

In fact, on several of the maps ("islands"), you can run the table without ever activating one of the elf/human/dwarf monuments. You probably always want to do your heroes, but they don't attract attention, unlike the other monuments.

In fact, there was one map where I had a really hard time because I started building an army immediately, last time, that turned out to be pretty simple if I ran it by myself. You have to destroy five commanders, which opens the gate into the big enemy base; there's already an army in there, which you cannot take on, and there's no need to try. That army goes hunting around for you, but the cool thing is that as soon as that army leaves the base, you can stroll in behind it, and destroy the entire place. Solo.

The other thing I decided to do this time is play it from first-person view the whole time. Well, almost the whole time. Turns out that's not effective for certain things, like placing your base buildings, or click-n-drag-select an army team; yeah, you do have to have them sometimes, but generally you can do all the hard work yourself, making it a lot simpler to build an army without being continuously attacked along the way.

Science Fiction novels

I encountered this again this past week...having begun reading David Weber's "Off Armageddon Reef" -- it's clear where an author's real knowledge/experience are, and usually clear where it's not. His seems to be nautical, and naval, in the time-frame of 1400-1850...that era of human naval battles and tech advances plays heavily in the middle of the book.

What's also clearly NOT his expertise is at the beginning. Book starts in roughly 2430 AD. i.e., just over 400 years from now. Tech advances between now and then are only vaguely imaginable right now. Think backwards 400 years. Jamestown has just been colonized the year before. Shakespeare is still writing. Galileo has NOT yet published his round-earth and heliocentric writings--the earth is still flat, in essence. Electronics, computing, nanotech--all inconceivable and unexplainable. What tech will exist 400 years from now?

At one point Weber says something along the lines of "they couldn't smuggle a computer out because it was too big". I'm sorry, in 400 years computers won't exist the way we think of them now, and they darned sure won't be big. My guess is that long before then computers will have evolved into nanites that essentially exist everywhere, in unimaginable quantities. They will run through your veins. They will BE your clothes, and will dynamically change color/style/shape. Your nanites will be DNA-reconfiguring, protective. The internet won't exist as this separate thing we now have, it will be ubiquitous.

But his book is predicated on things not happening like that...which leads to my central complaint. If you are an author, but not a tech expert, HIRE someone who IS a tech expert, and have that person read your book from early on, so you don't write something that is so far off-target.

Weber's book is enjoyable enough, kind of a Hornblower-on-another-planet story. and the premise is totally dependent on things being pre-steam-era low-tech. So the story is really about post-Renaissance but still feudal politics and religion. You've read THAT before...

But the main character turns out to have to be a recorded personality installed in a very strong robot...if such robots exist, why did they not fight the battle against the aliens that's in chapter one? Said robots don't need O2, don't need food, don't sleep. So they don't need spaceships anything like what people would need...so they could be fairly bizarre looking, incorporate much funkier designs, no worry about things like life support, radiation shielding, low-gravity propulsion...your largest issue would be micro-particles ripping holes in spaceships.

So if you can't get the tech details straight, LEAVE THEM OUT! and don't base the story on premises that couldn't possible be true...this one: the aliens nearly wiped out humanity, and will be around to finish the job if they detect any RF signals from far far away. So I expect that by 2432 AD, or 3200 AD, there probably won't be any more RF anyway. What would be the point? Networks will have evolved from copper to fiber to quantum long before...broadcast will have gone from RF to cable to fiber to __? Satellite comm will be burst-mode laser soon, and quantum eventually. So no RF to detect anyway. Sorry--premise doesn't hold water from the get-go.

On buying a Jaguar...

Mind you, that's a 3-syllable word. Jag-u-ar. Said with british accent.

Went and got the car last weekend, drove it home. $20k.

It is British Racing Green, of course. Not the original color, it turns out, which was a light blue. (See Jeff Dunham's comments on that color, on youtube).

I have a variety of things to do with the car, some percentage of which have to be done before I can register it for driving. Turns out, here in VA (and elsewhere, apparently), I can register a car as an antique, and it doesn't have to be safety inspected. Just by being 25 years old, it doesn't get emissions inspection. So I can work on it until it can pass safety, then I can have it be for regular driving.

So I've been making a list of what all to do. None of which is likely to be *cheap*, per se, but some things at least won't have to be TOO expensive. I hope.

something about religion...

on SEB, I found this interesting...

http://stupidevilbastard.com/index/seb/comments/why_would_god_bother_at_all/

I'd have a different/related take on the idea...I have to disagree with the notion that God knows everything past, present and future...life would be uninteresting...he'd be overmuch like Dr Bloody Bernofski.

Likelier: suppose you were God, and you *could* create the universe, why would you do it? I imagine that you'd do it because it would be an interesting experiment, and you'd do it in such a way that you *couldn't* know how it would go in advance...thus the laws of physics and chemistry that include creation-flavored processes, and entropy, and lots of randomness to prevent perfect prediction.

You'd create the universe with the explicit intention of having intelligent life evolve in it, even if that takes a while, and you'd watch what happened. You probably wouldn't take direct interest in any single individual life, you'd just watch things in general, see what they invent.

And you'd design/create the universe in such a way that life would be reasonably common. Not ridiculously so, but interestingly so. What would be the point of making a universe with a gazillion galaxies, each with a gazillion stars, if you were only going to have life on one planet?

I imagine that being the case because that's what I would do. In fact, I've thought about creating a "universe" of sorts, or rather a simulation of a tiny subset, as a computer program. It'd be some like Spore (computer game), but not identical, because I'd be in tinkering with various aspects (not being omniscient like God, I'd have to be changing the underlying "physics" of the simulation to cause more things to happen; i.e., more life, more variable life...let's face it, rocks orbiting/spinning around is not too exciting).

Life and evolution are so much more interesting than total predestination.

Health-related humor

You know the question: which is more painful, a root canal, or a trip to the DMV?

I recently had the opportunity to do both on the same day, which turned out to be a Friday.

The root canal is worse.

On a Saturday, it might be the other way around.

Time for some politics

It should be clear to anyone who thought about it hard that the North Koreans really had/have no intention of actually shutting down and dismantling/destroying the Yongbyon nuclear plant. The only reason I can think of that they would agree to allow the inspectors in etc is because they had already removed everything that they cared about that was portable...i.e., nothing to see remained behind.

And therefore bringing it all back would be relatively simple, as soon as it was appropriate to do so. Which it now seems to be...

You can figure the same will be true in Iran as well. Excepting that at the moment, they are busy bragging about all their centrifuges, when the time comes that they have to allow inspections, it will probably turn out that they tell us they were lying about how many they had...but that will be a lie too.

So don't be surprised by what's going on in North Korea. It was always going to happen this way. They have no intention of not having nuclear fuel processing capability, and will lie about it every time.

Personally, I think we should have gone with the invasion route a few years ago. You don't seriously think we couldn't invade NK and pound the crap out of them, do you? Station two carrier battle groups offshore, there's plenty of space there between NK and Japan, start the air assault, drop HARM missiles on their radar installations, continuous targeting of the DMZ, Patriot batteries to protect SK (because you know that NK's #1 target is Seoul (#2 targets are in Japan), not us, as in "if you attack us we'll hit your friends"), continuous air assault on all the military installations across the country (which, in fact, isn't all that big), a few diversionary sea landings along the eastern coast (also with close air support), and of course the final ground assault across the DMZ once it and all the troops on the north side have been pounded into rubble.

i.e., no land war until physical installations have been pounded flat.

You also have to figure that NK has left a few goodies behind that are going to blow up later, so we don't want to be standing around waiting at the DMZ.

Of course, what would actually happen would be that as soon as the first CBG started to get close, NK would go all crazy and launch missiles at SK, and probably throw some of their experimental stuff at us. We'd want to begin with a number of Patriot counter-missile batteries, brought in quietly. Then the CBGs. and eventually pound Yongbyon into rubble no large than peas.

iPods

Apple announced a new round of iPods last week. Annette wants the new silver 16GB nano. I got the old 160GB classic, since it was discontinued and it sounds like they won't do another high-capacity unit again.

I have about 100GB of stuff on it at this point, so I have 60GB available...I probably won't ever fill that all the way...I'm not into video on the ipod, although I do have most of Strongbad on it (*that* is why you get a video-ipod).

This is my 3rd one. First I had a 20, then a 60, both of which got filled a little too easily...now, everything I have in terms of music will go to about the 3/4-full point.

Nice.

Jade Empire

Having done an upgrade (well, to Win XP) on the older PC, it turned out that Jade Empire installed ok and played. My son already ran through the game, in roughly a week.

Seems overly linear to me, and I have not figured out the combat system. Don't like it, though...I can't tell whether I am supposed to continue clicking on targets or what.

The voice acting is pretty good, but despite it supposedly being chinese people, they have clearly no accent whatsoever.

Otherwise, it's kinda a Crouching Tiger appearance...

Travel

What is it with women and travel?

You know the story...retirement comes around, and they want to travel.

*I* want to have retirement be my home time--where I can have plenty of hours to work my projects that don't get enough time now, and read, and so on. Travel prevents most all of that.

Travel via driving isn't so bad as travel via flying--I *really* don't like flying. Airports have become such a hassle. If I never fly anywhere again, that's fine with me. Driving, altho slower, I'm ok with.

What I don't know yet is how much she wants to travel when the time comes...part of the problem, I think, is that when at home they can't relax, really let go...gotta worry about laundry, dishes, phone calls, etc.

Gotta learn to let go.

Getting Old, and what to do

I'm going to turn 50 shortly...already got the letter to join AARP a month ago (and sent it back with the $, so I'm official)...and then, last week, when Annette asked me "what do you want for your birthday (besides sex)? You're turning 50, don't you want something special?"

and suddenly it struck me: The XKE! It's time for the mid-life-crisis sports car! And I've wanted one since I was about 10. Click here for a gazillion photos.

So I've been investigating them online...there's a fair amount of interesting info, history, tales of restorations, plenty of photos, and apparently plenty for sale, from junkers that were literally "found in a barn" to immaculate restorations that are probably *better* than they were when they left the factory; and of course the prices reflect all that, too.

And fortuitously, just this past weekend was the local Jaguar Club annual meet (with judging). About 10 XKEs were there, including the (apparently) #2 show car in the US (VERY nice looking).

It did come in a variety of colors, but British Racing Green is, imho, the only one to have; red, and a pale yellow seem next-most common; I'd be ok with the yellow, or a silver-gray. More convertibles ("OTS") were made, but I have never liked them as well, so I'm getting the hardtop ("FHC" or "2+2").

I'll be getting the series two (68-70) model, probably a 69.

One good reason to get a car like this: evidence that women are turned on by them

I'd probably go for a series 3 (the ones with the V12 engine) except that I really don't like the bumpers on them, those are stupid bumpers. The wire wheels are best, too.

Jags have a rep for problems and breakdowns. Not looking forward to that sort of thing, so it'll be important to start upgrading parts pretty soon.

I've found one this is almost exactly what I want...BRG exterior, but black leather interior (hot!) and no A/C (hot!). If I still lived in Texas, no way I'd buy this one. My first car, when I moved to TX, had black vinyl interior (Dad's fault), and no A/C (my fault). Never again down there.

A little higher-priced than I'd have preferred, but I think I won't have any issues with it right away, which is critical.

Plenty of new stuff to learn...fortunately, with an engineering degree, and some experience in car repairs on another car from '73, I have some existing knowledge...

Should be interesting.

an interesting blog by someone else...

Here it is (yeah, that's the guy with the goofy-looking beard/hair inversion I wrote about last week)

Pointing out some amazingly ridiculous things. Dangerous things.

Like this


and this

although that graph is clever, if you compared it against which party controlled congress, it'd be different...Dems controlled Congress while Reagan and Bush 1 were prez...and the President does NOT write budget bills--Congress does. An awful lot of people seem not to remember this (there was a fabulous ObviousMan cartoon on this topic ("The president can't make tax law!"); click here for the homepage)

Facial hair

Can someone explain to me why it is that so many guys grow a beard when they lose it up top?

http://stupidevilbastard.com/graphics/seblogo.jpg

Far Cry

Got this yesterday for $10...and the specs aren't so hairy that my better machine can't run it (unlike some *other* games)


FC has a stellar rep, been waiting for it to be cheap enough for a while...

Two Worlds -- another game

got this cheap recently...only to discover in the unreadable tiny print on the back, that it won't install in XP x64. Slugs.

well, after tribulations with the old PC (disk drive disasters, followed by new big disk), got it installed and running. A tad slow, however; I probably should reduce video settings.

Also on the box: "it's like Oblivion on steroids" -- must be those steroids that reduce in size, because it's less large...but it is still similar, probably the reason I bought it. Well, when I say "less large" I mean there are fewer "locations" to explore. In terms of distance side-to-side, that is probably comparable.

Fighting is pretty much a click-fest. One cool thing: if you find two of the same thing as loot (weapons, armor, spell cards), you can drag the new one on top of the existing/equipped one, and the stats are increased--you can stack them as high as you want; unfortunately, the stats don't increase as a simple summation, and there's diminishing returns. Eventually you find things that are good, or have the money to buy them with...

Opponent hardness levels up with you, and you don't get a choice about leveling-up, it just happens. So those 30-pt wolves at the beginning are later going to be 300-pt wolves. Some enemies seem just about unkillable, you'll need a Summon for some; others (Flesh Golem) seem just unkillable period, but I was able to run around them. Eventually I discovered the solution: once you have a big stack of a ranged attack spell (like Fireball (i'm at 52), or Poison Dart (36)), you want draw one near a mana fountain, close enough that you can stand next to it and shoot the opponent, and then pound it until dead, mashing the 6 key as often as you can. This works on dragons, golems, cyclops, ogres.

Your favorite spells are these: Heal, which you'll be using first, Summon XXX (Devil seems best), and Chaos Rage, which causes enemies to attack each other (and your horse, if it's too close, so always dismount a ways off before your attack). The Demon is an extra-strong summon, and combined with Chaos Rage, means you don't have to get in the fray too often (important with undead, whose hits poison you); unfortunately, you don't get the kill points if you or your summon doesn't do the kill. This is valuable if you attack a Tower of necromancers, let them kill each other, you just do cleanup. I found the Hell Master to be a lousy summon, it can't actually hit a target; swings and misses endlessly. When you encounter them as opponents, they are far better than that. The Soul Helper (? Air) has a bow, but mostly runs from danger.

Some quests oppose each other, so you get a choice about which groups you help out.

You can drag/drop a power-up magic enhancement onto a weapon, but only one kind...but you can keep on doing it, so you can also enhance that aspect, not just a second instance of the weapon.

There are entirely too few dungeons here. Oblivion had hundreds, it seemed, between caves, Ayleid places, houses... TW has a few dozen; I feel kinda cheated, but I am having fun with the game.

NPCs all do the Morrowind-style random bopping-around town behavior. No big deal, except that finding which ones you really need to talk to is harder than it should be. And made worse by the fact that the merchants tend to do the bopping around too. In an improvement over Oblivion, the merchants' stock changes over time, which means you can buy new stuff they didn't have before.

Visuals are pretty good...long-range seems better than Oblivion, but close-up seems worse. There's no real "night-time" behavior, but it does rain some, and the desert has sand-storms. and once I got rained on good in the desert, which is fairly improbable.

I have read that once you complete the main storyline the game terminates, so I'm not working too hard to finish that one. There's more than enough else going on to leave that alone.

There are certain weapons that seem pretty rare...they are of course high-end, but I'd like to find/buy them a little more often...I have the "chinese sword", it's class 3. ONLY class 3, and I've been using it for a while now...would like it to be more like class 10. This suggests that it may be better to go with lesser items that occur more often, so you can stack more often. And you can repeatedly add enhancement gems to weapons, although this too has diminishing returns, and eventually stops (if it didn't, I'd have the chinese sword of +6000 spirit damage). Not all weapons work equally well on all opponents, so you seem to need several. Turns out there's a non-obvious location for a couple of spare weapons, and a quick switch mechanism, which is nice, so you aren't carrying lots of weapons.

In the stacking, most (all?) items reach a point where you can't always add new ones. Apparently this has to do with the magical enhancements, some don't allow stacking others.

Creating potions is iffy. Sometimes when you are hoping to get a +10 potion of strength from items with permanent effect, instead you get a gem of +10 lightning or some such. More gems is the last thing I need. I have bunch of perm-effect potion items that won't do what I want (I have one recipe that creates +4 Will from ghoul-brains, I want that same behavior from other items). Could be I need more alchemy skill. Online reading: yes. Wish I could *buy* training skill levels, like in Morrowind. I have the cash...

Having been ill with a major toothache this month, I've had extra time to play during the night, since the tooth wouldn't let me sleep. Root canal coming, yuk.

Online game guide: the main storyline isn't all that long in TW, so definitely do the side-quests first.

Gor Gammar is interesting. I went once, looking for a special item for the main quest, cleared it out (lotta orcs). Then I found a magician who wanted to give me an orc-genocider gizmo to take to Gor Gammar. I can't tell him I already cleared the place, so eventually I went back and dropped it off, for the points. Back to the magician, only to find he's dead, by the hand of *another* magician, who say the first one has created an army of undead at Gor Gammar, with help from someone (awkward!). No, I was just there, place was empty. So I went back...sure enough, big pile of undead. I let them kill each other inside and out. But I wonder--if I had not cleared out the original brigade, would there have been twice as many? Ouch.

Armor and weapons appear to peak out about at the level I've been for a while. I haven't found anything new that is significantly higher in terms of HP or protection. Online elsewhere I've read of folks with apparently much higher numbers, but those comments are from a year ago, which is probably several game-updates back. It also sounds like potion ingredients were more common.

Magic appears more important at the high end. There are fewer attack spells than I think there should be (DS 1/2 had this right all along, with merchants having plenty, in fact always more than I could ever use).

As I'm writing this right now, TW was released exactly one year ago (Aug 21, 2007).

Uniquely, if you want to re-assign your skill points, you can, by finding someone who (for $) will undo them, allowing you to re-assign to something better. A good idea, imho. I haven't done it yet, but I will.

---

I finished, at about 73 hours of playtime (not even remotely close to the 1000 or so hours I put into Oblivion). Once you defeat the final two baddies (which is vaguely tricky at the start), game's over. You want to finish up some other things, you have to reload a previous save and re-kill the final two...Well, I'd about lost interest by this point, which was why I went ahead and whacked the last two bad guys. (so when I said tricky, you can't just attack the first of them, you have to actually talk to him, he says you've eliminated the magical protection for them, and then he's a pretty easy takedown--I'm level 65, and I continue to find Steel Golems harder than these two were.)

Get Smart

yes, it's actually a post about a movie. I love movies, but I seldom go to the theater: there's no pause button, and the theater is likely to screw up something.

well, we went anyway.

This is hilarious. You do have to know the original tv show, however. Lacking that, a bunch of funny parts aren't going to even register.

This show is about CHAOS trying to take over (as usual on the original GS), and Siegfried is once again at the helm--played by Terence Stamp.

Spoilers: near the end, a car almost runs Max over as he's trying to get to California. The car is driven by Bernie Koppel. yeah, the guy from "Love Boat"--but before that he was on Get Smart, as the original Siegfried. He yells at Max. It goes by in about 3 seconds. If you haven't seen the show, it will mean nothing. Likewise, Agent 13 won't make any sense, and that goes on longer than 3 seconds. Hymie won't make sense either, at the end.

They managed not to beat certain jokes to death, which was good. "Would you believe...", "Sorry about that chief", etc. Although I think they could have done each of them twice...

it also manages to parody a few other things (True Lies comes to mind, with the dance scene, and James Bond with the "swiss army knife").

Two thumbs up, as they say.

Free Music again

turns out there are a couple of classical music sites, I just learned...

MusOpen a bunch of these MP3s require either emusic or napster, which I don't want to mess with.

and

Classic Cat

Mind you, these two don't much include the great stuff we all know and love...what's available tends to be somewhat obscure.

Look up Rimsky-Korsakov. You don't get the entirety of Scheherazade, you get a couple of very short excerpts. Shubert: full Ave Maria, and a lot of others I never heard of (well, I'm hardly an expert, but I do like I reasonable amount of classical). And you apparently can get different versions of things: two complete Beethoven's Fifth's different in length by three minutes. Are these different arrangements, or different tempos?


Apparently Wikipedia can lead to some free classical...I haven't looked at that yet.

Jamendo and BeSonic continue to be favorites.

a Great quote about economics

“No one in Asia wants to live in a Chinese-dominated world. There is no Chinese dream to which people aspire,” explained Simon Tay, a Singaporean scholar.

Esp not me. One only has to look at the gov response to the earthquake to know you don't want to live there...Complain about why the schools collapsed and you go to jail. Talk to your friends about it, and you go to jail. Yeah, that's quality of life.

Why the Taliban are assholes

Remember what used to be here?

"alternative energy sources"

chatter about "alternative energy sources" has been around for a long time...I recall hearing this probably for the first time right after the original 1973 "oil crisis"...

what are these sources of energy? remember your physics: energy can neither be created nor destroyed, just converted from one form into another. That is not necessarily easy to do (atomic bomb), but it can be done.

(numbers used here: from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power) -- go look at this, there are some interesting numbers towards the bottom)

the sources you hear about:

1) Wind power. If you put a fan blade in the path of moving air, it will rotate. if you have the mechanical linkage from that rotation to a generator, you can draw electrical power from it. This is a conversion--you are taking kinetic energy from the air movement, and converting it into electrical energy. So what happens to the air as a result? It slows down. Or it cools down. Or both.

How much energy can you extract without causing some other problem? If you could remove 100% of the kinetic energy, the air would come to a stop. Well, what causes it to move in the first place? Energy from the sun, the daily heating and cooling cycle, rotational differences (you know, Coriolis). You'd also end up removing thermal energy, making the air colder; perhaps that would help with global warming :)

2) Ocean currents. Pretty much the same as wind--if you could put a fan of some sort in the water perpendicular to the Gulf Stream, the (albeit slow) ocean current would cause a rotation that could turn generators for electricity. What would happen to the water? The current would slow down, and it would get colder.

The bad thing here is that ocean life is super-sensitive to temperature changes. A drop of one or two degrees would be a disaster for marine life.

Fortunately, the engineering cost of doing this would be insane, so it's pretty unlikely.

3) Geothermal. Taking advantage of the thermal gradients underground. If the earth's core is pretty hot, as we've been taught, then this should work fairly well. I'd argue that the engineering cost is again way too high for large-scale use.

4) Solar. The biggest, and essentially inexhaustible, energy source within a light-year or two is the Sun. You can look this up (got my number from Wikipedia, so it's as trustworthy as that is): solar energy striking the earth is about 1300 watts/square-meter. I don't know if that's at the equator, the poles, or average over the entire surface, but let's use it anyway. ("1.366 kW - astro: power received from the sun at the earth's orbit by one square metre" -- sounds like equator to me)

Solar power conversion efficiency is about 10-15% right now (we've been doing this for >30 years, but that's all the better we are). So figuring other losses, let's say we can reliably get 100 watts/sq-yard. There are 3 million square yards per square mile. That means we can get 300 megawatts of electrical power for each square mile of solar cells we build. During daylight, mind you, which IS a problem. Let's suppose we gave approx 100 square miles of otherwise unused land per state to this (so Rhode Island probably can't do that, but Nevada could pick up the slack). That's 300 MW * 100 * 50, or 1.5 Terawatts. That's in the ballpark of total world electrical consumption (Wikipedia: 1.7 TW - geo: average electrical power consumption of the world in 2001 (presumably that's daily average)).

The current retail cost of solar panels is about $5/watt, which is kinda high. In large-scale construction quantities, let's say that drops to $2 installed. That means that our proposed qty above is $3 Trillion. We would not, of course, pay that all at once, and other costs would go down as that got phased in (oil consumption would drop quite a bit, because we could stop using it for power generation during the day (still need night-time--what to do?)).

The night-time issue is interesting...Options are to continue to burn fossil fuels (oil, coal) for this. Another alternative is have a lot of batteries underneath the solar panels; I doubt this is adequate for the entire night...A friend has suggested that excess power should be used to spin up large inertial masses that would thus be storing a lot of energy in their rotation (giant flywheels), and the night-time extraction would be far less than the daytime need, so they could hold enough for overnight every day, all year. This strikes me as having some real engineering problems: how big can these things be? how quickly do they wear out? what are they made of? can you spin them fast enough (material strength)?

Ultimately of course this leads (as it inevitably must) to the Dyson sphere, but we don't need to try to do that any time soon :)

But...imagine that we had spent $500 Billion on energy development instead of a war in Iraq, which has not made the cost of energy cheaper (the opposite, if anything). That's a relatively small fraction (15%) of the total needed, but it's a certainty that the process of having done so would change the world. I think it's engineering-feasible. and we MUST get off the oil.

final on Spellforce 2

I played this through to the end, and there were nearly no crashes. I say "nearly", because there WERE a couple of crashes, but that seemed more a problem about how much other stuff I had running at the same time (which was generally way too much).

As you aren't the Rune Warrior, you don't auto-respawn if "killed", and if YOU get killed, your whole team likely will too; not always, but likely.

There's an expansion pack, but I won't be getting that. The only way it comes in the US is as part of the get-all-five-games-in-one-box-on-one-disc, for $30. Maybe not...unless I can find it used <$10 or something.

Spellforce 2

I finally finished Spellforce 1, but not before it crashed a couple more times. Infuriating. Won't play that one again, too many crashes.

Got Spellforce 2 yesterday, for $10, at MicroCenter. Could have also gotten the entire game series, SF 1 + two expansions, and SF2 plus 1 expansion, for $30. Maybe not. I had tried the SF 2 demo game a month or two ago, but that didn't install and run properly, don't know why. Took the gamble on the full game having been patched enough to behave...and it worked fine.

Seems to take place let's say 30-50 years later. You meet up with Craig UnShallach's daughter pretty early. You see a Rune monument, but it's inactive. You aren't a Rune character.

So it's similar, but different. The skills tree looks just like the one in a number of other games. Can't say I think that's good.

Overall the game looks good, the detail is better, the 3D is better. I'm not convinced the UI is any better.


---

I was at MicroCenter to get a couple of things: in particular, a new, bigger disk for my laptop. Laptop is just old enough (summer/fall 06) to not have a SATA drive, which means the 120 GB I got is really the biggest thing that's going in there. Fortunately I don't need to do too much with it; no digital video, in particular. I was running out of space on the old disk (80GB), which turned out to be because I had a couple of video podcasts collecting up and hogging space (15 GB). Killed those, and I'm good again, but it's time. I'm thinking about a couple of other possibilities, but it's also time for O/S upgrade, to Leopard, soon as taxes are done.

Anyway, having gotten some games cheap there, I looked around, and SF 2 was $10. That's my threshold at which I'm willing to try most anything.

A programming tidbit

from the PDF Ref doc for Hibernate:

----

4.1. A simple POJO example

Most Java applications require a persistent class representing felines.

----

I had no idea. I have clearly been remiss in my past work. Conveniently they provide just such a class def on that same page, so I'll use it in the future.

another amusing non-affiliate

Hyde Yoga, a clothing operation in NYC.

Of course our name is Hyde, and my wife is a yoga instructor.

Crysis

just for grins, I tried to install the Crysis demo today, but it aborted near the end, saying an archive file was corrupted, and that I should download it again and retry.

The installer is 780 Megabytes...I don't think I'll download that a second time...sayonara.

Final on Spellforce

I stopped playing this...was partway into the first expansion pack (Breath of Winter), and it seg-faulted on me one too many times, cost me 5-6 hours of play time that I hadn't done a save from, and I decided it was going to be too painful to go back. Granted, that does give you the opportunity to play some part a little differently...which you might not otherwise do.

The problem is this: there is some C++ fault about loading a texture when switching maps. Doesn't show up all the time, but it's fatal. If you saved just before doing the jump (either via a portal or a bindstone), you're fine. You restart, reload, try again, maybe jump from another location (one particular jump just would not work for me, I had to go to a different bindstone). But if you forgot to save, you'd have to do it all over again, which I finally decided was not worth my time. I got a similar kind of fault sometimes when I would go to DO a save, which was really aggravating.


The real problem, I think, is that (besides the crashes, which are just bad) the armies you have to create are weak relative to the opponents...I was trying to take on groups of 10 level-25 mummies with an army of level 15 orcs, in a space limited area. I am level 35, so the mummies are not a big problem for me, I can take on 3/4/5 of them at a time, no real problem. Eventually I had to go to god mode to wipe them out, which I did, and then when I was jumping back to wherever, it crashed. In addition, same map, there was a spawning point of level 34 demons, where you have to drop a 'seed' on a dead tree stump. There are six of the demons, and your entire army of 80 will be wiped out while they distract the demons so you can do the seed and run away. So your army doesn't really keep up with the advances of the opponents, and outnumbering them 5 or 10 to 1 may not help enough.

[Later: this last piece turned out to be my fault: your team is the same level as the worker rune, which was 15 at the time; I had the level 21 rune in inventory, but not in use. After I discovered that, I punted the existing team, used the new rune, and then the demons were fairly easy to beat. This general problem doesn't go away, however--your team always lags behind the opponents by some significant amount, which can require you to be very careful about managing your team.]

Still...no end of crashes, usually costing me some hours of play time. The do-overs were good, they provided an opp to really stomp the enemies (generally by saturating an area with defensive towers).

Still Later: I eventually finished the game, but I wouldn't do it again...the crashing was just bad.

more on Spellforce...

I finally gave up on this...it crashed one too many times...

I played through the original game, the first expansion, and into the 2nd expansion. Still too many crashes, and they pretty much always occur when you take a portal to a new/other island. You really have to do a save just prior to exiting the portal.

I had just finished playing an island that was particularly hard, in fact so hard I had to use the god mode cheat to complete it.

Why? because of two things: you have two companions on this one, but they can't be controlled. They follow you everywhere, run into camps of opponents as soon as they see them, which then draws attention to you sneaking around.

This map has four groups of opponents. Two of them you can eliminate by yourself, although your companions make that a lot harder. You want to do this because otherwise if you activate the Orc monument, the patrols start, and you waste resources on them.

SPELLFORCE LESSON: ALWAYS ELIMINATE ALL OPPOSING FORCES BY YOURSELF TO THE MAX EXTENT POSSIBLE.

Opponents are created via these "magic fountains", which are activated when you touch a monument. Usually. Sometimes they are activated anyway...usually quiescent, once you touch a monument, the patrols begin, with a single sentry at first, but then more, and stronger sentries. Avoid that problem by eliminating them support buildings yourself. You have fairly long-distance version in the ground-level almost-1st-person view, and they are easy to spot a long ways off. Generally you can sneak up and destroy the buildings that support the fountains, and then they go away.

On this map, you have to use orcs, and they aren't very strong (no idea what level, but probably not more than 15), whereas your opponents range from 22 to 36. I too am 36, so *I* don't have a problem with the opponents, as long as I don't get surrounded by too many, but the 3rd and 4th groups of opponents also have magic fountains, albeit no random patrols.Group #3, the demons, are level 34-36, so even an army of 80 orcs doesn't really have a chance against them--the orcs are primarily a distraction, while you go fetch something the demons were protecting. Same with group #4, the mummies; they are level 25, which means I could take on a bunch, they'd not have all that much health, but they are surprisingly well armored--at best I was only doing 40 pts of damage. An npc you are supposed to help warns you that you really want to burn them (ok, mummies=bandages=flammable, makes sense), but your orc fire mages are still pretty weak, and run out of mana quickly, and you encounter these mummies primarily in waves of ten, in narrow chasms.

All of which was annoying me further and further, and then I forgot to save before taking the exit portal, and it crashed, I lost hours of work on it, and said--enough is enough!

So it is possible I'll come back to this at some point, I doubt it. I have the Spellforce 2 demo, now I'm less likely to try it out...Unreal Tournament calls me instead--it runs fine, doesn't crash...

Home Network Trauma

I have cable-modem-based internet connection. Over the last six months (or something like that) it has been having odd slowdowns, where it appears I'm just losing the signal or something.

So I happened to pass the tech guys at the mall booth at lunch 2 weeks ago, and asked about it. They said my cable modem is dying, I was really lucky to have gotten the number of years from it that I did (probably about 8), they said 3 was more realistic.

Well, I thought, I was one of the really early signups for access, so maybe the problem now is that it is being overwhelmed by the traffic volume on the cable (as I doubt they have class-C-subnetted all the neighborhoods in the county). And the standards have taken a step forward as well. So I went and got a new model, a Moto Surfboard.

Called the cable co to tell them the new MAC address, figured that would do it...but no, twas a disaster--nothing inside my house would work after that. I spend days trying to figure this out...went back to the old modem, trying to recover to where I was, to isolate the problem. It began to look like the router, but why would that suddenly go bad because I changed its input? A guy at work suggested I had gotten a lot of time out of the router, too...

These things run in a benign environment, electronics generally will last a long time like that. As a former hard reliability guy (early 80s), I know this. MTBF on component parts is generally in the million hours range at room temp. That's over 100 years. Failures are generally catastrophic, rather than slow degradation.

All of a sudden, however, it looks like the router has a break in the middle. The cable co can detect it from their side, and my machines can get DHCP addresses n stuff on my side, but nothing crosses the divide. I know the modem is still ok because I can separately test that from my laptop, and get outside just fine.

So I got a new router, too (Netgear, since that's the only one I saw at Best Buy that actually said "firewall" on the box). And then it turned out a cable was bad--not one of the crappy ones I made with a crimper, but one I bought (or it came with something). This time the router has 8 ports on it, which let me get rid of the little 10T punk switch I had in there limiting speeds internally. But I am still on the old modem, again, and still have the slowdowns. Maybe I can ebay the old router.

It took me four DAYS to get this figured out this far, and be back to "normal", i.e., working again.

Gotta get the Moto modem back in the picture, but I'm vaguely worried about that new arrangement. I do know it works solo, tested that too with just a laptop. But still...all I wanted was for the weird slowdowns/dropouts to stop, but this has so far cost me $210. I'm going to be perturbed if I spent that much only to achieve nothing more than eliminating the one little four-port switch.

The basic arrangement inside here isn't trivial. Wish I could inline a picture here...anyway, calbe modem connects to router/firewall. Router connects to wireless switch, another 8-port switch, a printer. The wired switch connects to most of the machines, the wireless to my laptop and my Apple TV unit. The old firewall only had one inside socket, so that went to the 4-port which then went to the other things. Now I have plenty of empty ports inside, and I can/will re-arrange a few items, probably just moving the printers.


(related: my laser printer had kind gone off-network for some reason. It had 3 sockets on the back, ethernet, paralle, USB, so I was able to set it up so that my wife's compy could use the USB, and my son's pc could use parallel, and my machines could use those two as print servers. awkward, but it worked. So I was able to get a new network card for the printer, off ebay, $25, in the hope that that was all I needed to replace. Installed that, and then discovered that I had to reset its IP Address back to the right subnet, the default was something 10.10.10.10 So I fixed that and it was back on the net...later I wondered if that was the problem with the original card--suppose it had just lost it's IP address (a static one I assigned it in my internal subnet, since it doesn't have to get outside, it doesn't need DHCP or DNS) ? It did not even occur to me that that could have happened...but I haven't put the old one back in to find out.

These things are apparently more sensitive than I thought...

For comparison: sitting on the bookcase across the room is a digital clock. Works fine, keeps good time unless there's a power outage or serious flicker. It has taken a few hits, so the display is slightly cockeyed, but not much. Never wrong about the time, it counts 60 Hz line frequency.

I built that clock in 1974. I've had it longer than nearly everything I own. A very small number of books and records I've had longer (I do have a fair number of books that are older than that, but I haven't had them that long).

So I know that electronics can last for a lot of years, even under power (the clock has been plugged in almost non-stop since I built it).


Unrelated, but about compy upgrades...I did swap out the old drives for the 500 GB units in my G5. That is nice to have a huge amount of space again.

AJAX Tools

Had occasion recently to learn an AJAX tool called "Thinwire"

It's pretty interesting. There are about six tools I know of in this category. Thinwire, ZKOSS, JSeamless, Echo2, Karora, TIBCO GI, and GWT.

They all purport to separate you from the need to write a bunch of javascript and do the comm.

Which is good. I have experience with Thinwire, it appears to be the most java-like (well, it IS java, and ONLY java). Echo2 appears to be prettier, and is also all Java. Karora is a clone of Echo2. The others stray from the pure java idea, with mixed results. Thinwire ONLY does java, which means you can't integrate javascript tools like Simile, FCKEdit, or GMAPs. ZKOSS can integrate those things, but it isn't pure java, which means you are doing a weird hybrid (java, XUL/XML, javascript, html, css).

I would like to be able to take the time to make an example that runs in all of them, to do a solid comparison. but no time at the moment...each of the above websites has demos (although the JSeamless one is all Flash (!?) which is quite curious---I mean, if you tool is really good, your entire website should be built from it, incl the demos), a sandbox tool, and documentation.

played yet another computer game or two...

Got several new games either for or near Christmas...

Guild Wars (right after TG)
Sam and Max, Season One
Jade Empire
Spellforce (actually, I got this a while ago, finally installed it)


Guild Wars is an online-only MMO game. I've written about it elsewhere ...haven't played for a few weeks while I did the others...


Sam and Max simply wouldn't install--the very first time I could see the disk, but the installer would not run. After that, couldn't even see the disk. No idea what the problem is, I read online a few comments about the disks having trouble with certain drives, so I swapped out the DVD-RW in my machine for a CD-RW in the old machine, and that worked just fine...so there's something about that disk that didn't like the DVD drive it was in...kinda strange.

Anyway, a pretty funny game. Not a style I normally play, this is, while interactive, one of those simplistic ones where you have to click on all the stuff you can in each venue, and various little details you learn and items you pick up get used later. So it does involve some puzzle-like thinking, as opposed to:


Spellforce, which is pretty much your standard RTS, with a multiplayer mode. There are multiple races you can and will play/use during the game. Each has strengths and weaknesses.

Humans: pretty good overall, no specials. You can build defensive towers, and breeding farms for more food. At the moment, I think I don't have those structures available...
Elves: not great melee fighters, but excellent archers, and you can build defensive towers. Mostly the opponents won't even attack the defense structures, and you can often build a massive qty, effectively doubling or tripling your force strength. Structures require wood, and you can grow your own forest, which I recommend doing almost immediately. In general, there isn't going to be enough wood available to build everything you may want.
Dwarves: No ranged fighters, and no defensive towers. This is really bad. On the other hand, you can grow your own food (pig farms), which means that you can rapidly increase your food supply, which is the necessary resource for increasing your limit on force size upgrades.

My pref is the Elves, because of the towers, and the forest. My least favorite is the dwarves, because no ranged fighters (well, you can get ranged, they throw axes, that's an upgrade on one of the buildings), and the possibility that you won’t have enough iron to keep making fighters, and the "healers" don't seem to do that.

Managing your structures is important, as with most RTSs, which means that you have to micromanage this. I’d like to be able to take a squad of Elf workers, and tell them to make Towers in a particular area, and not stop until I say so. Once an area is cleared of trees, they should plant a forest to replace what’s been used. Then wait a bit, and start harvesting. I’m not really into this micro-managing routine, but that’s probably because the first really great game I played was Alpha Centauri, and while it allowed you to micromanage each city, you could also just provide a general goal, and the “city manager” would make the construction selections. That was good.

Resources do slowly regenerate, so just because you use one down to zero doesn’t mean it’s gone forever. But once it hits zero, you don’t need to leave > one worker on it, because that’s all the faster it will regenerate.

There are also Heroes, and Titans. Your Heroes are limited, but you do occasionally get new/stronger ones. These are not your primary forces, although a few maps allow only heroes. The human Titan is a Gryphon, the Elf Titan is what looks like an Ent.

On one of the maps, there are two different sets of opponents (beasts and skeletons; I LOVE ambulatory skeletons, those are even better than zombies), and they will attack each other if they get too close, which they will because once they start sending their waves of attackers towards you, they have to go through the same path chokepoint, and will tend to do it at the same time.

Your bots, of course, all run on Artificial Stupidity. Just like all the other games that feature AS, they will run towards a fight, and even when you stop them and make them go another direction, they are likely to run right back to the fight. And they’ll tend to bunch up, which is bad if your force is larger than the opponents. What happens: you’ll most notice this with the dwarves: your fighters will attack, and attempt to surround individual opponents—and you can only get six of them around one opponent. Others will attack a different opponent. But if there are two opponents adjacent to each other, you probably only get 8 of your fighters in there, reducing the odds from 6:1 to 4:1. If there’s room to spread out, your Elf archers can attack at 10:1 or greater, resulting in fast kills.

As with too many other games, the in-game economy is not very interesting. GET A CLUE, FOLKS! Either do this better, or drop it entirely.

The quest book is reasonably good, but the info doesn't tell you where to go back to to find NPC X who will give the next step.

I have also had clipping errors where the camera position was inside a wall my player was standing too close to.

Another nifty aspect here not generally done elsewhere: you can go from overhead view down to close-in 3rd-person, which can be interesting. In overhead view, map territory is dark until explored. In 3rd-person, intervisibility is the limiting factor for the terrain.

Other things to note: often you don't want to play the game the way they think you should. I.e., just because there's a monument doesn't mean to want to activate it and starting making things. Often it's better to fully explore by yourself, kill everything you can, because once you activate monuments to make workers and fighters, the opponents starting spawning things too. So if you can avoid that, it's better to do so. This also avoids the micro-managing of construction. (Hero monuments don't count in this, since they only make Heroes, and not workers/buildings. Always make the Heroes.) Also: if you can get to a point where you have enough defensive towers to protect you completely, while the opponents keep on coming, just let them do so for a few hours, overnight/weekend...all those kills are XP for you, and with the towers, don't need to be attended to all the time, which means you can level-up while doing nothing. I don't know if you get points while opponents attack each other. Some opponents' defensive towers can take off 250 HP at a time; you are dead if you get in range, and so will be your team members, one shot, maybe two.

I've played through the original game, and nearly all the first expansion; definitely got my money's worth. It's buggy, I get crashes all too often, generally with a C++ message about failing to a texture. It's getting to be a grind...I have the demo for Spellforce 2, but I have not installed it.


Jade Empire won’t run. The installer goes fine, but the first thing the game wants to do at startup is run a “Config” step, and this goes into infi-loop right away. I’m going to be able to get the disk replaced for free, but my suspicion is that that won’t fix anything, I think this is either a prob about being Windows x64, or my video driver. I’m pretty sure that I saw this before recently…forget where, tho.