Death of Windows XP

It saddens me that the days of windows XP are numbered. It is my favorite operating system that I have ever used, and I’m sure many people will agree with me. However, because Vista is not as much of an upgrade as I had hoped, I have no strong desire to upgrade any time soon. Microsoft plans to put a stop to people like me. As of June 30th, 2008, no company can sell a system with XP installed. As of April 19th, 2009, the mainstream cycle will official end. This means there will be no more licensing, no free help, ect. This makes getting and using the product much harder. But as if that were not enough, the extended phase cycle will end a year later with discontinued software patches, downloads, documentations, or any mentions of the mere existence of the most popular operation system on the planet. So unless you have multiple copies of XP and enough licenses to go around (not to mention service packs, patches, and extensive documentation on disk) you might be forced to switch. Its sad that you don’t really have a choice in the matter of how you would like to compute.

Similar Company Ideas

The idea I had for our group’s company has to do with independent video gaming. The basic premise is that developers who do not work for a large company (Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony) will be able to showcase their talents and the projects they are working on by submitting demos and games to our company. Our company then makes a database of the games and allows users to pay a small monthly fee to have access to these games. You then rate the games and they can be searched for by popularity, newest added, a developer, name, genre, ect. The developers will then get paid by the proportion of people who play their games. So say developer A has x amount of hours of play time and gets paid y dollars, then if developer B as 3x amount of hours of play time they would receive 3y. This will help developers get noticed, see what others are doing, form bigger groups, get feedback, and possibly even get hired by a major company. There is more to it than that but that is the basic premise.

However, there are two other similar ideas out there that I have found. The first is called The Phantom. This idea is very similar to mine, also allowing a hardware cache they keeps the players favorite games in fast memory so it wouldn’t have to download from the internet. It never went very far because of lack of funding, pushed back release dates, and a very high monthly subscription.

Another, more popular idea similar to mine is the Xbox Live arcade. The major difference with this is this is created by people who are just starting out in programing with the company, and it shows games that they are working on as they become better to help out with the company. So it is under the umbrella of an already established video game giant, whereas my idea is to let freelance, potentially unhired game developers to get noticed.

Video Blog

So I’m sitting around the IST building trying to make an interactive 3D roller coaster in openGL. I can’t seem to do this, so I figured why not post some blogs, at least that makes sense? Well as I was going my previous blog about the online game, I dawned on me that text bases blogs are kinda dull. I mean at the end of it all each of us will have lots of entries, so there are bound to be topics that aren’t read as much as they deserve to be.  So how to we make blogs quicker, more exciting, and quicker to view? Video blogs. Sure, not everyone has a webcam, but it would make posting a blog even quicker. People would be more included to watch a video as to read text as generally the same message is much more interesting in video format. I’m sure there are video blogs, or blogs where you can upload videos out there, but I’m talking strictly video blog with no text whatsoever. Maybe there is an easy way to do this..

Predicably Irrational

I just got done playing the online game. It kinda confused me, but that’s not all that surprising. On my first run I switched doors 18 times for a total of 1622 points. Then, after the doors shrink, I got 17 door switches for a lower score of 1558.  I’m going to go ahead and guess at what this all means, but I’m probably wrong. In the first time it says click on the first door to open it up, and click it again to get the value. Then it suggests clicking on the same one over and over again because its the highest value, but I found that not to be the case so I switched. Then the next one had the same concept, only you would lose doors if you didn’t click on them in a certain time. Well if the one had the most points like it said it was, it would make no sense  to save any of the doors as they are less points. I’m assuming natural human instinct is to save the doors, and thats what predictably irrational is all about. I just saved the doors because I found that they often times had higher values than the door I was on.  Who knows.

Snow

While I was skiing today I came to a realization. For the past five weeks, we have not had the same snow conditions once. Whether it be powdery, icy, flaky, it has yet to be the same type of snow. Each class our instructor points out the pros and cons to skiing in whatever condition is currently facing us, and then produces to teach us how to maximize our efficiency in it. Even though this is perfectly normal, I began to talk to one of the kids in my group about how bizarre I thought it was, and he told me about how Netsilik Eskimos have over one hundred words to describe snow it all its glory, because that is the primary weather condition that affects every aspect of their lives. Anyway, what it made me realize is that when planning an invention and trying to market it, we often just view it from one angle. When really, just like snow, the same ‘thing’ could potentially come in a variety of different flavors if we look at it properly. Therefore we should enumerate all of these possibilities, and just like learning how to ski different snow conditions,  we should learn how to market and add to the varying facets of our idea.

The Tree!!

So I was looking around for cool experimental musical images, and it didn’t take long before I landed on what is known simply as the tree.  It was originated by a lonely man who was walking through the woods when he decided to tie fishing rod string around branches and began to play a song. Since then, it has grown over the past 20 years and has almost 800 strings, each with its own song. It is 6 feet tall, 6 feet long, and almost 12 feet across. Made from wood, it would be extremely hard to really play this since you’d have to know each of the 800 different sounds it can make, but it seems pretty cool. There is also no tuning, since the developer does not believe he needs to be held down by any mathematical principles guiding the pitch and range of the music it can produce.

Sometimes you learn more outside of class..

So in part because of the snow thats dominating State College right now and partly because of the topic I just posted on, it made me decide to talk about a tactic of mine that I have used to get by in college. Now I would say I am a hard worker, but I’d like to believe like most sane people I need at least a few hours of fun per week and at least of few hours of relaxation. Yet with some engineering classes, if you were to go to every class, read every assignment, do every homework, and study hard for every test you would never sleep or eat let alone have any friends. I, like hopefully a few others, sometimes have to budget my time around what will give me the best advantage of doing good while still having some time left over. Most of the time this comes to skipping many classes that don’t take attendance and also post lecture notes online. However, when I skip, I’m really just working on homework or a project for one of my classes.  If you can skip classes that aren’t to hard in order to get work done to give yourself some free time, is this really that bad? We make trade offs in every other situation in life yet when I bring this up around most people they view me as wasting tuition money and/or as a slacker.

So is it really a problem that instead of wasting hours trying to get my car out of the snow, on to campus, sit through a class, and come back that I’m busting out the majority of my work so I can start a project that will take forever so that I can get it done in time for THON and also have time to sleep for 8 hours? I hope not.

Well after looking at what I/my family spend money on, I realize I cost a lot.

First of all, my apartment is 420$ a month. This includes shelter, housing, heat, water, and electricity.

To get around, I don’t drive anymore so I don’t spend money on gas. However I do have a car at home that my parents pay car insurance on and I believe that comes to around $330 a month.

My parents are teachers, so that don’t have to pay all to much for health care. It gets taken out of their paycheck. It is somewhere around $200 per month from them, upwards of $700 for the employer, and maybe $10 in co-pay assuming I have one doctor appointment a month.

For clothing, I usually buy clothes only in a lump sum, maybe twice a year. Each purchase is around 200-300 hundred, so we will say $500 a year on clothing.

For communication, I spend 50$ a month on internet that is split 4 ways, so $12.50 a month for internet. My cell phone runs in around $40 a month.

For food, I spend about $100 in lioncash and maybe $40 in groceries for a total of $140 a week.

Beer we will say lands about $20 per week, as does entertainment, and we’ll say ‘random purchases’ rank upwards of $15.

That makes around $2,420 per month, $60 5 a week, and $31,460 a year.

After takes these figures become  3140, 786, and $40,898 a year.

This is insane. I plan to make about $50,000 coming out of college, so with the lavish lifestyle I would like I guess I gotta be single my whole life.

And with respect to the project, the money I made on this project would barely be able to cover one day.

Sad

Ethan Kilmer is the man

After reading the discussion question about failure, and since this weekend has been packed with sports, I feel compelled to briefly share the story of my favorite ex Penn State football player. His name is Ethan Kilmer. Many fans might not even recognize this name. He did, however, make the game winning catch in the Orange Bowl in 2005. He also was responsible for more than 80% of the tackles on kickoffs. Now that we might remember number 43, lets take a look at his athletic career. In high school Ethan tried out for his high school basketball team but was cut because he was not athletic enough (according to his coach). Not much is known about what exactly he did to improve, but I’m sure lots of hard work went into him walking on the Shippensburg University Track & Field Team. Two years later he walked on to the Penn State football team. After playing almost 5 different positions, he was drafted in the 2006 draft and is now an active player for the Cincinnati Bengals. It just blows my mind to see how someone can go from not even being able to sit the bench for a lackluster high school basketball team to making thousands of dollars starting defense and special teams for a NFL team.

Bait

This weekend was filled with sporting events. I saw Penn State (a 17 point underdog) beat #7 Michigan State in basketball. I also saw the 13 point underdog New York Giants win the Super bowl against the New England Patriots. However, one thing that was peculiar was that more than half of the fans who saw those two contests with me were hardly interested in the sporting contest nor even knew some of the basic rules of the games. In the basketball game scenario, many of the people were there simply because all student tickets went to THON. And with respect to football, most of the people watched the games so they could catch a glimpse of potentially funny commercials. Now while there is nothing wrong with this, its interesting to see that its possible to have half of your audience/customers not even really interested in the product your selling. The question it raises in my mind is simple, what are some tactics that are easy to implement that one could add to a business/service/product to dramatically increase revenue by attracting people who would have absolutely no interest in your product as a stand alone item. Hmm…..