I’ve made mention a few times here on ye olde journal that I used to be fairly big in the games arena. We dont really do much with the games industry these days here at work, mostly because there isn’t as much testing anymore… No need to hit QA really hard before gold master when you can just push a patch for the game they downloaded anyway.
Anyway, have some history!
Just got back from Microcenter with the parts to build myself a PC-based gaming rig…
$2400 in parts… But I plan to run Second Life at 30fps come hell or high water!
I tend to buy a new Mac on my birthday, and this year is no different… Though this year it came from Microcenter versus the Apple Store.
17″ MacBook Pro, 2.3Ghz I7, 4Gigs of ram, 750G HD.
While I was at Microcenter I picked up 16Gigs of ram and a 256G Samsung 840 SSD to put into the new laptop. Apple ram and drives are simply too expensive and I can get better parts cheaper and just install them myself.
As a bit of a belated birthday present to myself, this afternoon I jumped back into the Apple realm with the purchase of a brand new 15.4″ Macbook Pro. It’s the 2.2Ghz i7 with 4Gigs of ram and a 750G HD.
It’s pretty slick, and will work well for road trips!
I picked it up at the Apple Store in Park Meadows, which is kind of an interesting shopping experience.
First post with my new HP DV7-4060…
Much better than the netbook I own or the Dell I borrowed from work. 🙂
I have all weekend to get it loaded and configured before the flight to LA Monday for E3…
The new laptop came with Vista, so once again I’m using Vista… Have I mentioned I despise Vista? There’s just so much of it to hate I’m not sure where to start…
Again, for those who might be unaware, I’m an old fart at this point and actually remember when the computer we all take for granted took its first few baby steps around the home. This gives me a fairly good perspective on the whole thing and Vista is not going in the right direction…
An Operating System (OS) exists to do one thing: Provide a compatibility layer between the user’s hardware and the user’s software. This means if I buy a computer I expect there to be a bit of software on it that will allow me to run the software I desire to run.
Vista does fill this requirement – mostly. Where it fails is that it attempts to do 1.1 million other things and does them all poorly or for evil purposes.
I need vista to basically glue all of my hardware together – make the hard drive usable, read the keyboard and mouse, operate the video card drivers and maybe even the sound card so that I can run the software I desire to run. That’s it. Simple right?
What I don’t need Vista to do is include a bunch of applications I’ll never use, lock me into certain applications like web browser or media player, or play net-nanny for me by making sure I use my data according to Microsoft’s rules (DRM).
Microsoft even decided to ‘lock out’ the hobbyist which has made them the number one OS in the world by requiring a $4-500 certificate to write drivers for Vista.
Basically every decision in Vista was driven by questions such as “if we force users to use our DRM Hollywood will give us more money”, “if we force users to use our browser we can control the web and make more money”, “if we make 7 versions of the OS and make the cheap one all but useless for the same cost as XP, we’ll make more money”, and my personal favorite “let’s charge all of the developers out there to write things for our OS, that will make us more money”.
But, even though Vista is the devil, I’m having to run it… All of the hardware is this laptop isn’t supported by XP and Microsoft won’t add support to XP – forcing me to use this bloatware OS. While I have the technical acumen to eventually get XP to run on this machine, I wonder if the time investment is worth it.
Maybe I’ll just see if I can ‘fix’ Vista by surgically removing the tumors and maybe applying a bit of liposuction to the bloat…
Well, I picked up a new computer yesterday. The 24″ iMac I had was awesome, but I spent so much time in “Bootcamp” (a Windows OS partition via OSX) that I eventually decided that I should just get another PC.
The PC this time is a Sony Vaio AW180 laptop – pretty much the best laptop in the world right now.
Though in 6 months it’ll be average and by next christmas it’ll need to be replaced… I just love technology.
Other than that, I’m still slaving away to keep a roof over my head and food in my belly, pretty much like all of you are I’m sure.
So there’s the update. I need to get back to installing and importing all of my junk on this new computer, so take care out there and I’ll be back again soon.
Yes… As of last night I too am a happy little pod-person.
I finally broke down and joined the teeming masses by purchasing my very own iPhone; the 16 gig variety even.
This replaces the generally ancient flip-phones I’ve had since my ‘starTAC’ made a perfect swan-dive from my hip into a puddle back in 1998 or so… Since then I was determined to use the cheapest phone possible with the fewest features possible as, for me at least, buying a very expensive phone was just asking for something bad to happen – which of course necessitated buying yet another very expensive phone.
Since that day I’ve generally used a cell phone costing less than $29… If I could get it free with service that was even better. And, interestingly enough, nothing ‘bad’ has ever happened to these cheap/free phones.
But I find I need a bit more these days than the generic cell phone offers – mostly because the features they offer are primarily aimed at kids: I don’t want the latest top-40 single as a ring tone, I don’t need MTV videos piped to the 1 inch screen in the phone, I have no use for texting plans that offer 5+ digit message counts, and I especially don’t need marketing tie-ins between my phone service and whatever the scientifically-derived “hip” thing of the hour is.
So, I could get a PDA I suppose, but only the terminally obsessive require a full blown PDA and while I’ve owned many over the years, I just don’t have enough ‘important’ data in my day-to-day existence to really use one. So I generally I wind up selling them off or giving them away a few months after I buy one.
There are ‘Blackberries’ too, but I don’t own nice enough clothes, enough stocks, work in sales or marketing, have a bluetooth tranceiver in each ear, or drive a Mercedes/BMW/Lexus – so I don’t think one would work for me.
Enter Steve Jobs (iGod) and his iPhone…
It’s a pretty nice phone all things considered. AT&T has good coverage and the Edge Network they offer doesn’t completely suck. The iPhone also has a lot of very nice features aimed squarely at the folks between points (A) (high schoolers) and (B) (people who have a summer/winter home in some other state).
The built in email system is very nice, the iPod functions are even better then the iPod, and having access to real internet web sites (not portal-based cell-phone microsites) is fantastic.
Now, there is one glaring error with the iPhone in my not-so-humble opinion – it’s a closed system, meaning you can’t run any software on it that it didn’t come with. And it was this error that prevented me from buying one when they came out.
But the other day the iGod finally wised up and decided to grace humanity with an SDK for the iPhone so that the world can write applications for it… So now I own one.
For those who list me in their phones my number is the same (ends with 2999) and I’m fairly sure I got everyone in my old phone transfered into the iPhone. So, nothing much should have changed.
So, with that, if anyone needs me I’ll be trying to think different enough to make all of the iFeatures in the iPhone iWork.
Well, a great many things have happened since I last posted and I’ve been very busy keeping the world safe for game software – so the postings have been few and far between.
This post I will detail my two-week adventure with Windows “Vista”…
Since the ‘release’ (I still call it ‘extended beta’) of Vista a few clients that we have at work have required some testing to make sure their application indeed does not work under Vista. Due to this I’ve had more than a passing encounter with the OS, but we still required someone at work to become intimately familiar with it so we could actually test with it… That person was me.
So I took home the install DVD and one of the 10 keys we have at work for Vista “Ultimate” and set about installing it. The reason for using the most expensive “Ultimate” version was to gain a familiarity with all of the available functions in Vista – and as I was volunteering to be the lab-rat, I wanted to have a reason to be the lab-rat.
I backed up everything on my home PC – a rather uber gaming system which consists of a dual-core AMD 6000+ cpu on an Nvidia nForce 590 SLI motherboard, SLI’d 8800 GTX video cards, 2 gigs of fast DDR2 ram, raided sata-II HDs, etc, etc… – and started the Vista install.
Installation of Vista was fairly straight forward and didn’t present any real issues. It had basic drivers for all of the motherboard components which made getting to the internet to get the latest drivers easier than I figured it would be.
After getting all of the drivers to the latest ‘release’ version – I don’t run beta drivers – and patching up the OS to the latest versions supplied by Microsoft, I got a chance to play around with the OS a bit…
“Aero”, the new ‘shiny’ Windows interface, is interesting but I’m undecided if the ability to see the window and desktop under the window you are working on in a hazy, frosted glass kind of way is really worth the performance hit.
Before I go any further I should qualify my opinion of a good OS – minimalist. The OS exists to run your applications, nothing more. The more the OS tries to do with fancy-pants graphics tricks, backgrounds, frames, mouse pointers, and widgets, the less CPU time is available for what you are there for, which is running some program you want to run.
So, having gotten everything running and after figuring out how to turn the handful of extraneous Aero “enhancements” off, I set about loading some games onto the machine to see how the new OS performed…
So far my experience with the OS had been ok; sure, Microsoft went and moved, renamed, or hid everything just to create reasons for people to attend classes and added a slew of new “wizards” which really turn me off (see the minimalist OS comment above). But overall it was a fairly good attempt at copying Apple’s OSX.
And this is where things took a turn down a dark alley.
I sat down and started re-loading ‘World of Warcraft’, a popular MMO that I play when time permits, and the OS started popping up all sorts dialogs asking for permission to do just about anything. This annoying tendency to interrupt anything you’re doing with a dialog got real old, real fast, but I soldiered on and got the game installed…
Too bad Vista wouldn’t allow the game to update or actually run.
So I stopped there and attempted to install a few other games with various levels of success before going back to WoW and fighting enough to make it run.
Ultimately I did get WoW to run under Vista, but it was about 10fps slower on average than XP sp2. In addition, with Vista consuming almost twice the memory at idle than XP sp2 there was less ram for my applications, which slowed them down even more.
So, I got my gaming addiction running but none of my gaming tools would work under Vista… My Razor Deathadder mouse, my Belkin Nostromo, even my Logitech G15 keyboard had issues with Vista and either didn’t work outright or were buggy enough that not working would have been preferable.
Software that didn’t work right included Nero which I used to burn cds and dvds, WinRAR which is how I open all of my backed up or archived files, VLC which I use for watching movies, and even iTunes had issues under Vista… This left me with Windows Media Player 11 for music and movies but even it was buggy under Vista and either the sound for music was bad or the computer would reboot when I tried to play a divx video.
So I put up with this for about two weeks before loosing my cool one night and simply just formatting the machine and re-loading XP… Two hours later and all was well with the world once again, sunlight streamed through the clouds and the birds began to sing.
And that was my two weeks with Vista…
As I will undoubtedly have to install this on *something* in the near future, if only for the inevitable tech support issues, I figured it’d be good to get it as cheap as possible… Which means getting an OEM copy from either Microcenter or online.
First off, the exact wording of the OEM agreement: Microsoft licenses OEM software to “system builders,” which are defined as “an original equipment manufacturer, or an assembler, reassembler, or installer of software on computer systems”. I think everyone who reads my journal qualifies.
But, there are some additional rules one should know:
OEM software cannot be returned once opened. There are no exceptions. You open it, you’ve bought it.
OEM software is also tied to the motherboard it is first installed on. Unlike the retail versions of Windows which can be transferred to a new computer, OEM versions are not transferable. What about upgrading hardware? Microsoft says that anything is fair game, except the motherboard. Replacing the motherboard in a computer results in a “new personal computer,” which Microsoft considers to be synonymous with a transfer. It’s not permitted with an OEM edition of Windows.
OEM software has no technical support. Not that the tech support Mumbai offers is real support…
So, if you must shoot up with some Vista, get the OEM from newegg or Microcenter, it’ll save ya about $200.
Vista is coming, Vista is coming!
Well, being the good little technology whore that I am, I wanted to see how my laptop, which is pretty much the supreme being of laptops, stacked up against Vista’s system requirements. So I checked out the Microsoft web site cleverly set up for this purpose…
The Microsoft web site devoted to this question takes the ludicrously arrogant stance of informing potential buyers whether or not ‘they’ are ready for Vista, rather than the other way round.
To find out how well Vista might run on my machine, I installed and ran “Microsoft’s Vista Update Advisor Utility” and gave it a whirl.
I know that my laptop has all the raw resources needed to run *any* OS well: an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, an nVidia go7800, and over 100GB of storage. The system is more than adequate; still, one worries about device drivers, backward compatibility with older applications, and the like, and I really wanted to make sure none of my games were impacted by Redmond’s latest.
So imagine my surprise when the Advisor reported that several devices might not be compatible with Vista. And just look at how mainstream these “questionable” items are: nVidia go7800; Creative X-Fi Audio Processor; Intel 82566DC Gigabit Network Connection; Intel ICH8 Family USB Universal Host Controller; Intel ICH8 Family USB2 Enhanced Host Controller, etc, etc…
I was also warned that some of my software might not be compatible. There was nothing on the list that would concern me personally or interfere with my gaming, but I was quite surprised to find Windows Messenger included in the list. Surely, one should expect Microsoft’s own products to work tolerably well with Vista.
Now, for me, if Vista fails to run properly on my machine, that’s just fine; I’ll be delighted to report it in excruciating detail. But if I were a consumer, I would certainly think twice about Vista after consulting the Upgrade Advisor. It’s given me a very poor first impression of the operating system.
Undoubtedly, the Advisor’s chief purpose is to put consumers at ease about this overhyped and confusing product, but in its present state of development, it can only add to the confusion and increase doubts.
Just got back from seeing “Hellboy”… It’s a pretty fun romp with all of the prerequisites for a good SciFi flick including some really nice special effects
We, Zeze and I, went to a new theater up in Woodbridge at the Potomac Mills Mall which was really nice. It’s actually unusual to find a theater anymore that has both a nice screen and a working sound system… Of course the reason we were there is a tale in and of itself…
See, last night I set up my laptop and got this white line though the screen which is usually indicative of a blown transistor… Something that is expensive to fix requiring the replacement of the screen.
After backing up all of my data and booting off of the OSX install CD, the line went away and stayed gone for the rest of the night. (odd)
So, thinking that my mystery line might have been caused by OS corruption, I reloaded everything… Today at work it popped back up for a few seconds and vanished again. Ok, so it’s time to get the laptop swapped out…
Of course it does this exactly four days after the CompUSA warranty ends, but Apple has a great warranty system and it’s not a big deal… Except that I have to send the laptop to Cupertino California for 3-4 weeks…
Well, Apple also has these big stores all over the US and there just happen to be two of them here in Virginia; so off we go to the mall-city of Tyson’s Corner.
Now, you hear me go on and on about the number of people living here these days, but nothing I say can prepare a person for the sheer numbers of folks you will run into both on the highway and in a mall. Getting from here to Tyson’s Corner took nearly two hours of creeping though bumper to bumper traffic, then once we made it to the mall it was bumper to bumper people.
Well, the folks at the Apple Store weren’t exactly sure what the problem is either as it’s sporadic at best, and simply refused to manifest itself again in the presence of a technician, but they logged it and recommended that I remove the 512 megs of RAM that I added. I’m also going to snap a photo of the problem for them…
And – presto:
So I guess I’ll close up for the night, I’m heading over to the local theater to see “Home on the Range” tomorrow.
Hmm, it’s midnight now so I suppose I’ll head off to bed. G’Night out there…
Flint looks around, “Ummm, where exactly are we?”
Well, I made it back to Virginia after swearing that I’d never set foot back on this side of the Mississippi River again.
The new laptop, which replaced the desktop computer that Wolf is now using, is pretty slick: A top-of-the-line Apple G4 Powerbook; the huge one with the 17-inch screen and the 1.33Ghz processor. It rocks.
And it really is huge… You could entertain all of first class on an airplane with this thing,
So far it has exceeded all of my expectations both hardware and OS wise, but unfortunately there isn’t much of a standard yet for software companies and that makes installing each piece of software an adventure.
Speaking of OS, OS-X is really, really cool if you’re a nerd at heart as its BSD flavored unix with a very useable interface placed on it.
Ok, enough about the laptop.
Let’s see, what else? Oh, the debacle regarding my driver’s license is pretty harrowing…
See, seven years ago in Alexandria Virginia (the association center of the universe) I was driving a borrowed car and got pulled over by a bored officer that was guarding a school cross walk because the inspection on the car was expired. During this it was discovered that my Colorado driver’s license had also expired by three days and that I was technically driving without a license, so Mr. Irate “I’ve been busted to guarding a crosswalk” doesn’t bother with a warning, seeing as I’d just moved to Virginia a mere week prior, and writes me up for “Driving without an operator’s license.”
Ok, three days later I’m in possession of a brand new seven year Virginia driver’s license and a week later I take a vacation day and go to court to pay the fine. Everything seems ok right? Wrong…
About three months later I get pulled over in Rhoadesville because I have a friend’s kids in the car and they’re going ape in the back seat. The officer was just making sure everything was ok, and I come up as having a bench warrant for the violation in Alexandria… He’s pretty cool about it all, stating that they see this sort of thing from Alexandria all the time. He let’s me drop off the kids and drive over to the Rhoadesville police station where we try to sort this out. Apparently Alexandria wants me sent immediately to the station up there (for a traffic violation) and the Rhoadesville officer thinks this is ridiculous and lets me go with my promise that I’ll show up for a new court date.
Two weeks later I’m back at the Alexandria court house, taking an unpaid day off, to figure out why I’ve been saddled with a $300 fine for “failure to appear” when I have a receipt showing that I had already paid the $200 “NOL” fine. They determine that they cannot verify the signature on the receipt I have and that I need to pay both the $300 FTA charge and the $200 NOL charge again. So I pay the fines again, get all the receipts, and get back to Rhoadesville to get back to work.
Several months later I get a letter in the mail stating that my license has been suspended due to unpaid fines in Alexandria. This was right before I moved to Baltimore and I decided to ignore it for the immediate future as I had bigger things to worry about. Some length of time later I moved to Connecticut and it was there that I contacted Alexandria in regards to my license. I’m told by the Alexandria police that they cannot find anything regarding me in their database and that I should contact the District Attorney’s office “just in case”.
The DA’s office tells me that I still had an outstanding $200 fine for NOL and a $300 fine for FTA and that to take care of it I needed to come to the Alexandria courthouse. So once again I take time off from work and drive from Connecticut to Virginia.
I eventually end up in front of the judge and he starts to look over the paperwork in regards to these charges. He has to call the DA to the stand to try and decipher the ball of worms that my paperwork has become. Eventually he tells me that they’ll have to figure out what happened and re-schedules for a date two weeks in the future… For me that date is just as classes resume at the school I teach at and there is no way I can take those days off. I’m told that it’s basically “my problem” and I can call the day of my court appointment and tell them that I can’t make it, and just take whatever ruling the judge comes up with.
I call, they decide they can’t tell me anything over the phone, I get pissed off, and decide to just ignore the situation till I get back to Colorado. See, Colorado couldn’t care less what Virginia thinks.
Well, here I am back in Virginia and I’ve decided to get back into the fight for my driver’s license before it expires at the end of February:
Monday I went over to the DMV here and was told that I had an unpaid fine of $288.14 and that I couldn’t get my driver’s license renewed till I paid it. So I called Alexandria, used a credit card, and paid it.
Yesterday I went back to the DMV and was told that I needed a receipt for the payment before I could get my driver’s license.
Today, Wednesday, I drove up to Alexandria (a 45 minute drive btw) and got a receipt for the payment I made Monday and took that receipt to a DMV office in Alexandria. Once I got though the line there I was told that Because the Social Security Office has my SSN associated with “Bill” and my driver’s license says “William” that I had to drive back to Fredericksburg to the Social Security Office here and have them update my information.
I get back here and get the Social Security folks to update my entry in the national SSN database and I’m told that it’ll take 10-14 days for it to happen. I tell them that I need it before the end of the month and the nice lady there expedites it for me as well as giving me a typed and signed form to take across the street to the Fredericksburg DMV.
I run back over to the DMV office where I’m told that the new software that hooks the DMV, Police, SSN, and other government databases together simply will not allow them to go forward with my driver’s license until the SSN database is updated…
So I’ll have to go back over to the DMV Friday and hope that things have been updated.
This is what it takes to get a driver’s license in Virginia. And people live here voluntarily.
Here’s view from where I’m sitting at this exact moment, taken with the new Casio EX-Z4:
Once again I have taken the OS plunge. My little world now runs on Windows 2003 Server…
I’m happy to report that Microsoft seems to have gotten yet another step closer to the perfect OS. It’s obvious which parts they are swiping from the other OSs out there, namely OSX, but I’m not going to quibble over that. The OS in general is quite a bit more responsive than XP Pro on the same hardware base and has some really handy features even if you never use any of the server functions. It seems quite a bit more stable too. Even when I loaded an application known to “Blue Screen” XP every time, 2003 kept right on chugging though wowexec (the 16 bit app handler) hung and needed to be manually killed.
For starters *all* of the server functions, heck, most of the network functions in general, are disabled from the outset and need to be enabled before you can use them. Even something as simple as sound pops up with a box telling you that you must enable it when you first go to its control panel. This, in some ways, is very reminiscent of OSX which has a similarly flavored approach to network security which comes from its BSD roots I’m sure.
So far all of my regularly used software has installed just fine, with the exception of Norton Utilities 2003. Norton detects that the OS is server class and won’t install on it in favor of making one buy the very expensive “corporate” version.
You also get the latest drivers .CAB which is usually worth the upgrade in and of itself.
All in all, based on my 12 hours with 2003 Server, I can recommend it as a worthy successor to XP Pro…
What’s the cost for all this speed and security? 2003 Server starts at around $1000 (though you can find it online for around $700) and goes up from there. Compare that to XP Pro which costs around $150 these days and it becomes a very pricey upgrade. This leads one to note that one has to spend thousands of dollars to get a working product from Microsoft…
2003 isn’t a “required” upgrade for most folks and I would suggest, if you don’t need to upgrade immediately, to wait for Microsoft to finish “Longhorn”. What is Longhorn you ask?
Longhorn is Microsoft’s “next big thing” and will feature a task-based (or “iterative”) interface that goes far beyond the task-based interface found today in Windows XP. Microsoft has been working to move beyond the dated desktop metaphor still used by Mac OS X and Linux. The Longhorn Start Menu and task bar will be enhanced with a new Sidebar component that can optionally appear locked to one side of the desktop. The Sidebar is an XML-based panel that includes links to local and remote resources. So far, from what I’ve played with in the 4015 build of Longhorn, this is basically the “dock” from OSX.
Longhorn will require 3D video hardware to render special effects that will make the screen more photorealistic and deep. This doesn’t mean that the basic windows and mouse interface is being replaced, just that it will look a lot better. This didn’t work so well in the 4015 build I ran on my laptop because the laptop is lacking in 3D video hardware.
Longhorn will optionally include the Palladium security technology Microsoft is developing with Intel and AMD. What this holds in store for those up us not wanting to have our every move scrutinized by Brother Bill has yet to be seen.
Longhorn will include a database-like file system add-on called Windows Future Storage (WinFS), which is based on technology from SQL Server 2003. This file system add-on will abstract physical file locations from the user and allow for the sorts of complex data searching that are impossible today. For example, today, your email messages, contacts, Word documents, and music files are all completely separate. That won’t be the case in Longhorn. WinFS requires NTFS. This, again, is *very* reminiscent of the new file system used in OSX. Under OSX the file system acts like a large database which lets you do neat things like put a program folder anywhere on the HD and have it run the same… The install for Microsoft’s “Office X” under OSX is simply a matter of dragging a folder off the install CD and dropping it somewhere on the HD.
Longhorn will include new anti-virus (AV) APIs that will help developers more easily integrate their wares into the base OS. Microsoft will also offer Longhorn customers a subscription-based AV feature that uses AutoUpdate to keep your system up-to-date with new virus signatures. Herein begins the end of the “User Hard Drive”… Microsoft has wanted, for years now, to have everyone “subscribe” to their software. Basically you never own the physical media and just download the app, or key parts of the app, when you use it and pay a small fee each time… An example would be if you used Word once a week, you’d just pay 25 cents a week to use it – downloading the app, or a key for the app, each time. Of course there would be pricing schemes for those who use Word on a daily basis…
Longhorn will also include integrated recordable DVD capabilities and will work with every type of recordable DVD format. Digital media enthusiasts will be able to copy video from a digital camcorder directly to recordable DVD, bypassing the system’s hard drive entirely, if desired.
Longhorn will also have an advanced version of the successful Error Reporting Tool (ERT) that shipped in Windows XP; the goal is that only a small number of customers should have to report a bug to Microsoft before the company fixes it and ships the fix electronically and automatically to users. There is also a new Setup routine that installs the OS in about 15 minutes… More shades of OSX here.
All in all I think, based on some of the betas I’ve played with, that Longhorn will work out to be a very nice OS. What its initial price point will be has yet to be determined but I figure it’ll be in the $250-$300 range if you don’t buy a computer with it installed.
