AmmarkoV `s Personal Website

In hindsight my Nintendo Gameboy and my first computer (1995) were a pivot point in my life and since then computer games have undoubtedly become my favourite entertainment medium. Great games made over 16 years ago still pop up in my mind as pleasant memories now and then , more vivid than books or movies..! Although I have a big collection of games with their original casing , manuals etc the architecture of modern PCs has changed dramatically along with Operating systems , libraries and peripherals. Needless to say although there are many projects such as wine , dosbox , scummvm , emulators etc created to solve this compatability mess ( and I use all of them more or less xD ) it is very difficult , let alone time consuming to setup each game and play it from start to finish..

Lately I’ve found an alternative , instead of actually playing the game , watching it as a movie , through playthroughs and walkthroughs on youtube..

Great games such as Metal Gear Solid , Sanitarium , Broken Sword 1 , Broken Sword 2 , Atlantis The Lost Tales , Fallout 1 , Fallout 2 and many others can be found one click away , on the internet. I usually open them as an always on top window while I code combining business and pleasure ;p ..

For those who erroneously think about Pacman or Tetris ( or Angry Birds ;P ) when they hear the phrase “computer game” ( and a lot of people do ) , this is a clip from Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear 2 a good indicator of what “real” computer games look and feel like..

With all the privatisation talk going on in Greece , I have been thinking about how if IT existed before lets say 100 years it could have been included on the public sector as a proven human need such as schooling , hospitals , police , fire fighters etc.
Imagine a state-run search engine , encyclopedia , or e-mail platform.! A state-run Wikipedia , Facebook or Youtube or a public e-university!
Even things like the android market that is a very big success story could very well be state run without anything changing. All these could in principle work very nicely but having them would eventually lead to monopolisation of their domain. If “Statebook” had 70% market share it would be terribly difficult for start-up Facebook to become so successful..

On the other hand , and back to reality , Facebook has the same effect on newer social networks , Google on newer search engines and Microsoft on new operating systems , so is it any different..? The only difference is that the person on the top of the pyramid benefiting from the private enterprise does not exist in the public paradigm.

Open source software , in my opinion fits both pictures but due to the competitive and incoherent nature of private companies state funding would naturally help open source developers more. There are a lot of very useful projects out there that involve state of the art coding and are totally free , if an additional incentive existed enabling developers to be able to live out of this work instead of working another menial job , one can only imagine the quality and quantity of useful software.

Added 27-3-2012
This project http://codeforamerica.org/ kind of proves the points above

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