GP2x Wiz
Here are some pictures of my (early) Christmas gift running my VIC 20 games:
Click for hi-res image:
Here are some pictures of my (early) Christmas gift running my VIC 20 games:
Constantine installed flawlessly as a partition alongside my Vista64 disks. Visibly, there are a few improvements that I won’t bother reiterating here, but it makes the desktop experience incrementally better. And the boot-up process remains reasonably quick.
Of special interest to me was the 2D/3D accelerated open source support of my Radeon HD 3870 x2 card, purchased 20-months ago. I enabled that support by a mere:
yum install mesa-dri-drivers-experimental
… and a quick edit in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to use the radeonhd driver. Woot!!
Bill Belichick claims he doesn’t understand how you can complete a pass like that and not gain a yard. It will become obvious to him when he watches the coach’s film today — you needed TWO yards, not ONE. Didn’t you have enough time to see that? Well, you should have called for one of your more cheesy maneuvers within NFL rules with “we want a measurement” instead of blowing your last timeout.
Oh, I agree you should not regret the decision — to admit that means you capitulate to the growing reality that the game has escaped you. Time to move on, before the Kraft’s exile you to Buffalo. I think you have enough marbles left to decide on a noble suicide than work for Ralph Wilson.
All joking aside, it’s hard to believe Bill was thinking that decision gave the team their best chance to win. I think he panicked. Let’s consider what was at stake. It probably means the AFC road to the Super Bowl goes through Indianapolis. And, it certainly would have stopped the Colts win streak at 17, and keep them from tying their 18 regulars-in-a-row streak.
So, was Bill really thinking of his team’s best chances? A football team has three aspects, and he was only considering The One he thought he had in Tommy. The only decision that has “paid off” for him, separating him from a lackluster coaching career that was always in the shadow of NFL titan Bill Parcells. The One was allowing Tommy to throw the ball in that situation. Bill can hide behind delusional football “statistics” that steered his decision, but he failed to do what he preaches: Situation, situation, situation. In that situation, you’re ahead, you’re on the road, you’re deep in your own territory, you punt the ball to a team with no timeouts and a short clock working against them. Only then can you objectively assess what kind of team you have.
… or you can panic and gamble for the win.
Bill’s gamble not only lost the game, but sends a clear message to the other two aspects of a football team. And to the fans, too, that also bought into Belichick and Brady’s proclaimed selflessness that brought them three championships this decade: a solid defense (2001, 2003, 2004), special teams (2001, 2004), strong running game (2003, 2004), and cerebral QB play (2003). Everyone observed that they were Team First.
So what turned him from that formula of success, the start of which the world saw from that Giants’ improbable Super Bowl win in 2007? Is Bill believing the hype? Did Bill succumb to Tommy’s “body language” of 2005 and 2006, with this selfish need to pad “statistical” worth by running up the score and “chuck it to Moss” plays? Did he turn renegade from the asterisk in their 16-win regular season? Why would an accomplished professional football coach deviate in THIS situation?
Well, it’s going to be interesting to me to see how this change in “tactics” will play out to the rest of the team and fans this season.
Being a venerable jockey on the internet for over the past 15-years, I thought I saw it all when it came to such technical acronyms. But today, NIH was New To Me, so I went looking for its definition and came upon some interesting application of it in differing industries of this all-too-human condition.
Of course, for me, NIH Syndrome was something I grew up with as information technology availability was encroaching upon the masses — the electronics industry pursuit for a captive market. Back then, it was coined as ‘home computing’. The home computing era was important to me, because it was a commonplace endeavor then of writing your own software programs. I fully embraced that endeavor, and as a result of that passionate pursuit, it became my choice of profession when I became an adult.
As it was back then, software availability was both sparse and expensive, so just about every home computer included a BASIC interpreter, with options to extend the language with graphics and storage commands, or to allow for programming in other popular languages such as Assembly, Forth, and Pascal. Without BASIC or the ability to write your own software programs, owning a home computer would have been completely pointless. In my opinion, the anti-competitive behavior that is a result of NIH Syndrome was a contributing factor to the video game crash of 1983, as it gave way to the long-term result of gaming console dominance shifting from the United States to Japan. Home computing begot personal computing — and a new software market was formed and essentially limited homebrew software development to the enthusiasts.
This century, I believe the lessons that have been learned from NIH Syndrome in computing include the acceptance of Open Source and GPL software within the captive market for ubiquitous, personal, and business computing alike.
