Expensive Graphics Card .. !?

Monday, January 21, 2013 Labels: Rant

So, here is a rant I'm been holding on for quite a while now. When I look at games like Minecraft and a whole slew of similar retro-style, indie games they look like a lot of fun! And, most of them are! They are done really well too.

However, I just don't understand why the hardware requirements are so heavy and extreme in so many of these games. I know not everyone is a "Carmack" or "Abrash" but seriously! I wrote 3D game engines and prototypes nearly 20 years ago that looked better and would run on the hardware of the day, just fine! Those were what, 486's and early Pentium machines!? And, I am definitely not a game developer!

Minecraft gets about 3 fps on my kids' netbooks after disabling and/or lowering every possible feature. Most of these new indie games won't even start up on those netbooks! Basic platformer-style game won't even run!!

So, really.. the question is this: Are the gaming libraries used these days crap? Or are the programmers not so good, inefficient, lazy..?

Online phonebooks

Wednesday, September 20, 2006 Labels: Idea , Rant

I would really like an online phone book that didn't suck. It is sometimes impossible to find local companies online. Why is that? I would really like to be able to use the local phone book company's website, since the books themselves are very useful. But their site really sucks. Have you seen http://www.dexonline.com/? It's horrible to browse for businesses.

The only good thing about it is that I can store a list of places I frequently look for in a personal online address book.

For instance, I'm looking for a local bookkeeper. I can find the section online, but the site doesn't provide anything but the business name and contact information (usually). I can't see their advertisements or any features that each company offers over the other. And, there aren't any links to the business's websites either. That's lame!

What is really annoying too is that the site shows the "featured results" that are probably the people who spent the money to advertise in the book, but there still isn't anything provided that would help people decide them over anyone else. I bet that is even more annoying to the businesses who paid a LOT of money to do advertisements in the book and aren't given anything on the web for it.

Eventually, the local phone book companies are going to go out of business I think. They just aren't going to have enough business to make it cost effective or worthwhile for even the phone company.

And, it's sad just how easy it would be to create a website that would mimic how the pages of the book look and behave. Then you'd have an extremely useful web application that people would actually use. It would only take me a few hours to create the UI. Maybe the phone book companies should take notes!? Or, at least give me a call for some consulting work..