Microsoft Just Bought GitHub For Some Reason…

It must be nice having tons of money to throw around.  Microsoft just made its first major purchase of Satya Nadella era, GitHub.  You know, that site where all the open-source nerds host all their projects.  For free.  Well it turns out that Microsoft is hosting a bunch of their stuff there too since they closed down CodePlex in 2017.  I mean sure, it is a cool site, so I can kind of see the appeal, but they bought it for $7.5 Billion!  That is like buying a nice little bungalow by the beach for a couple of tons of gold bullion.  A slight overspend there.

Here is the thing, while there is a massive amount of data on GitHub, Git is an open-source version control system, and there is nothing, I mean nothing stopping people from making a new GitHub-esque site somewhere else.  Not to mention GitHub was only bringing in about $140 Million a year in revenue, so it will add next to nothing to Microsoft’s already massive bottom line.  This is nothing more than a vanity purchase.  Microsoft wanted to prove that they are down with open-source, so they bought where it is all stored (for the time being).

I just don’t understand it.  Hosting a bunch of projects on GitHub already sent the message Microsoft was trying to make, and if it is a code ownership thing, Microsoft could have made their own Git site in the blink of an eye, but so can all those aforementioned open-source nerds, so now it is just a count down until GitHub becomes an empty wasteland as the multitude of anti-Microsoft code jockeys leave to self made geekier pastures.

The Honest Trailers For Every Wes Anderson Movie Is Amazing!

Wes Anderson is kind of low hanging fruit for this sort of thing.  I mean he knows he makes movies with the same emotional beats, imagery, and story lines over and over, but we love him for it anyway.  It is just what he does.  However, Honest Trailers completely knocks it out of the park with this video.  It was all I could do to keep from crying I was laughing so hard.  Honest Trailers is usually pretty funny, but this is one of their best.  Obviously you will need to have seen a few Wes Anderson movies to truly appreciate it, but if you are fan of his work like I am, it is a must watch.

Shmee And Co Make An Escape!

People have been making a bunch of noise about Escape Rooms lately, so when Plumpy Thimble asked if I wanted to go on a triple date to Countdown Escape Rooms up in Abbotsford, I jumped at the chance.  If you have never done an Escape Room, and you like puzzles, you definitely should give one a try.

Our room was themed like an Egyptian tomb.  Which was pretty cool, even if the application of the theme was a little uneven.  The act of solving the room: rummaging around looking for clues, trying to make the logical leaps required to apply those clues, and just feeling the pressure of the clock, was a good time.

I don’t know if this is something I would do all the time, but it is a unique experience, and one well worth the $15.  There are a lot of Escape Rooms around these days, so finding one nearby shouldn’t be an issue, but Countdown Escape Rooms was pretty good.  Even if for some reason their Egyptian tombs feature constellations based on Greek mythology.

Well Disney Went And Did It; It Owns The Best Parts Of Fox Now!

What does $52.4 Billion buy you these days?  Well if you are Disney it pretty much gets you all of Fox except Fox News.  It is official as of this morning (12/14/2017).  Disney now has almost all of the Marvel Movie rights under its umbrella.  Bring out the count down clock for Wolverine being featured in a Marvel movie.  At this point it is just a best guess, but I am giving it a year and a half.  They have to re-cast him/her, and then figure out how to jam him/her in to story that makes sense.

Warner Brothers executives must be screaming in to a pillow somewhere.  Though it is kind of on them for not being able to make an actually good movie for two flicks in a row.

Of course Disney also gets another 30% stake in Hulu (they now own 60%), the Simpsons, and all of Fox’s random cable networks.  It is safe to say that their media empire just grew significantly.  As with any acquisition this big, regulators will get involved even though Disney isn’t technically buying all of Fox.  That way the regulators can pretend that they do something useful.  In which case, I may have to set the Wolverine Count Down ClockTM back another six months.

RPCS3 Works, But You Better Have A Beefy Rig.

I have always had fun playing with emulation, so RPCS3 has intrigued me.  The PS3 uses a very custom Power PC based processor called ‘The Cell’, so in order to emulate it on an x86 based processor it all needs to run at the software level.  The developer recommends an Intel Core i7 or better to get games running decently, but I thought I would give it a shot with my cheap overclocked AMD FX-8320.  It didn’t go well.

I couldn’t get games to run over 15 FPS, but I am guessing with a Threadripper or a an i7 I could have stabilized things a bit more.  Some people are able to get amazing performance, but most of us are stuck in frame drop city.  This is why it is incredible that the Xbox One is able to run un-recompiled Power PC Xbox 360 games so well, and even run some of them at 4K on the Xbox One X.

I am not condoning pirating, and if you are going to run emulators on your PC please buy the software first, and in RPCS3’s case, you can get a used PS3 for far cheaper than you can buy a PC that can run the emulator decently.  Not to mention most PS3 games are pretty cheap themselves theses days.  All in all, it is amazing what the RPCS3 team has accomplished, but don’t go thinking your bargain PC will be running PS3 games in a playable fashion any time soon.