April 2006 Archives
Imagine a world in which Epson made cars, instead of printers. In this brave new world you'd be admonished to buy special gas at Epson stations, no matter what the price. Use of other gas might risk damaging your car, and would void its warranty, although these stations would be rare, due to legal challenges by Epson. When filling up at an Epson station, you'd pay for a full tank of gas, but never know how much gas you were really getting for your money.
People seem to keep pointing me to domains of activity that I had no idea existed. Most recently my son introduced me to the subculture devoted to the cult of Chuck Norris, as expressed by this snippet of machinima using the Elder Scrolls: Oblivian engine. Who knew? The thing is, we don't know what we don't know. We rely on others to say, "Hey, look over here, you need to know this." It's on that principle that O'Reilly's venerable "cookbook" series is based, using a question-solution-discussion format the publisher has applied to a wide of development and graphics topics.
I'm a long-time Windows user. How long? Back to the 80s when PageMaker needed a runtime version of Windows to load on PCs. You might then think that I have some kind of affinity for Windows and the boxes it runs on. But you would be wrong. Fact is, Windows itself is neutral at best, annoying at worst, and historically the hardware it runs on is totally banal. But you see, that's just the way I like it.
