December 2011 – Page 10 – Shall Not Be Questioned

X-Plane 10: What Else is Keeping Me Busy

X-Plane 10 was released over the Thanksgiving weekend, so as a fan I immediately put in an order. I’ve been working on a project that revolves around X-Plane, a bit more slowly than I would like over the past month, but I’m still convinced I should do it, as it could possibly make me money. I’ve gotten as far as a skeleton prototype plugin written in Python. We’ll have to see how well it works in version 10.

I also have some first impressions after playing with the demo for a couple of weeks. I think the product has great potential. It’s certainly pushing the boundaries for what flight simulation can be. But I also think it was rushed out the door before it was really ready. Framerates are pretty terrible and not entirely predictable. I’m running on a 3.2GHz dual-core i5 with an ATI Radeon 5870 running Mac OS X Lion 10.7.2. This machine is not top of the line, but no slouch either, and the frame rates can get quite disappointing.

Part of the problem, I think, is that X-Plane 10 looks fantastic with all the settings turned way up, but since few machines can really handle that, you have to make sacrifices, and those sacrifices are disappointing. But no doubt they wanted a good base to build on, and I think they have that. Take a look at some of these demos:

My system isn’t quite good enough to look that good. Here’s one from a helicopter:

You can see the jumpiness as it deals with ground detail, which is what I noticed. Hopefully much of this will be fixed in short order. With Microsoft getting started with betas of Flight, indicating they have not abandoned the flight sim market, Laminar is going to have to move quickly if they want to capture some of Microsoft’s dominant market share in this arena. They certainly have the potential to.

Confusopoly

It’s a common theme on Scott Adams blog, the notion that many companies, in order to avoid competing on price, creating buying structures that are impossible to understand, thus hiding true cost.

I think what’s surprising to me is that I’ve only ever heard the term from Scott Adams, but anyone who buys things, particularly corporate purchasing, knows this is common, so why don’t you hear mainstream economists speaking of confusopolies?

A Consequence of Winning

Tam has another link to training fail, which seems to becoming more common. While I think gun bloggers have a role in pointing this stuff out, I think there’s no better evidence for the phenomena of lots of newly minted gun owners than the training fail phenomena. If it’s correct that guns and shooting are going completely mainstream as a hobby, you’re going to see a lot more unqualified people getting into the business in an attempt to cash in on the larger pool of newbs floating around out there that wouldn’t know good training from bad.

So I put this phenomena in the “good problem to have,” category, because of what it means. It would be interesting to see as well, whether NRA’s had an uptick in problem instructors, since NRA’s credential is not all that difficult to obtain, and widely recognized. While they probably would want to keep quiet about that if it were the case, it would be more evidence there are a lot of new shooters floating out there on the market looking for training.

On Propaganda

Santa stopped by the house a little early this year and dropped off a Kindle. Yay! I kind of went nuts downloading the free books the first day. To date, I’ve only purchased one book – Brian Anse Patrick’s The Ten Commandments of Propaganda. It’s available only via Kindle at the moment, though he plans to publish a paper version next year.

I haven’t started it yet, but when I do, I’ll probably pull out some of my old communications textbooks on related topics just for fun. This reading hobby is dangerous.

Japan Looking to Ease Gun Laws?

Maybe I shouldn’t have changed the blog name:

Farmers in rural areas have been reporting increasing damage to their crops by wild boar, deer and other animals. To make firearms more accessible, a bill that would loosen the currently tight restrictions on hunting rifles has been proposed in the Diet. But, the Sankei Shimbun (Dec 4) reports, the police remain adamantly opposed to changes in the law.

You hear this a lot in foreign countries, but you have to wonder how often it’s true that “police” opposition in these countries is also nothing but political appointees.

Don’t Try This At Home Kids

The Mythbusters screwed up in a big way. It’s one of those things that’s funny since no one got hurt, but that could have very very easily been a different story, given what a cannonball is capable of doing. I’m sure the Alameda County sheriff’s office is pretty spooked too, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t let them do projectile experiments there anymore.

Personally, if it were me, I’d be happy to settle with Discovery Networks in exchange for them fixing what they broke, and letting me be on a Mythbusters show :)

A Days Blogging

The real difficulty with working at a job that doesn’t have as much flexibility is that I can’t just blog when I’m inspired and make up the time. So when I come home, if I’m just not feeling it, the next day’s posts will suffer. Such was the case last night, so today I got up early to post. I appreciate everyone’s patience. If you don’t notice any difference, then success, but I have about 20 minutes to get a whole day’s worth of posts up.

Gun Control a Goal of Fast & Furious Sales Number Reporting

Sebastian said I should report on this CBS report on documents that show it was used by ATF to push for more gun control. Sadly, my first thought was wondering how it is news at this point. Everyone who paid even scant attention to the scandal knew this was a tactic to push for more gun control. It hardly seems news now that it’s proven.

I look forward to the amusing announcement that these documents are just part of our paranoid conspiracy theories about gun rights as Media Matters so frequently likes to argue. If they were intellectually honest, they would admit that this new evidence shows it wasn’t paranoia run amok, but I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.

County Wasting Money on Gun Buybacks

It looks like the County (my the County) officials are busy allocating public funds to cover the costs of gun buybacks in Bristol Township:

BRISTOL TOWNSHIP: $50,000 for municipal building roofing project; $35,000 for a 80 kw portable generator; $17,000 for GIS mapping services for GIS system upgrade; $200,000 for road improvements; $58,000 to the township public works department for a diesel bypass pump; $48,000 for a township public works department roofing project; $60,000 for a storm water inlet replacement project; $30,000 for a municipal complex solar lighting project; $22,000 for a municipal complex sign project; $25,000 to the township police department for a gun buyback program

The authority that is responsible for distributing these funds is the Bucks County Redevelopment Authority. No doubt Bristol Township officials requested it, but the redevelopment authority still approved. In other news, it looks like the County SWAT team will be getting some money for new toys.

My concern here is that this a waste of money that could be better spent on measures more proven to actually do something to reduce crime. The amount being allocated here would cover a decent portion of the cost to hire a whole extra police officer. I thought I’d let me local readers know in case anyone wants to go stake out the buy backs and make sure no one turns in history for destruction; my other big issue with buy back programs.

A Date which will Live in Infamy

If pictures are worth a thousand words, then here are a couple of thousand to honor those who gave their lives 70 years ago.

According to this article, the ashes of another survivor from the USS Arizona who passed recently will be placed on the ship this week. As of November 14, there were 18 known survivors of the Arizona. We can also find this profile of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association which served any veteran who survived the day that reflects on why they are being forced to shut down this year. It’s the struggle of an organization which is rapidly aging and literally has no one from which to recruit new leaders. Read it because history is wrapping up in front of us.

John Micek of the Morning Call linked to these scans of the AP bulletins from December 7, 1941. It also includes the story of what was happening behind the scenes in the newsroom as the story broke. The details on their experience of the day are incredible, including tidbit at the end about the reporter who wrote the second “flash” of the day and could never eat the peanut butter & bacon sandwiches they were all having for lunch that day again (at least until the time the account was dictated more than a month later).