The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (PC)
First, I realize that there isn’t much to be said about this game that hasn’t already been put out. Especially when one considers that there is already an expansion (Shivering Isles) and a collection downloads with new quests (Knights of Nine). However, with an upcoming posting on the PS3 version I figured I would throw my two cents in on the PC version.
The Good: Seriously, there are so many things that are great about this game that I couldn’t even begin to name them all, but I’ll try, haha. The overall graphics, the detail in the gaming environment, the customization of characters, the amount of quests and side quests, the many different factions (especially the Dark Brotherhood), and having played the PS3 version the game play is much better on the PC. Though, my favorite feature is the extremely long gaming time you get from the game, hundreds of hours can be invested in this game making it worth your hard earned cash.
The Bad: At times the quest can seem like you’re playing Simon Says. Simon says walk here and do this, then Simon says walk there and do that, and you end up doing this over and over again until you run out of quests.
Overall: The game is amazing, you can grab hundreds of hours out of without blinking. Also, once you have completed all of the factions and quests in the game you can begin again with a completely different type of character.
Rating: 5/5
Final Words: Overall one of the best games I’ve ever played.
Lenovo = World’s Thinnest Laptop?
Ambiguic Coherence
Lenovo, the X300… Dimensions don’t speak the truth (see title), but the way I see it – a full featured Windows based laptop that, by +0.16 in and 0.1lbs, is far better than that MacBook Air. I’m not going to write a full post on this one – I’ll let MountSpyder do that, since he reviewed the Air (Apple Mac Book Air: Who Its Really For and Why I Want One), but I am going to list the specs:
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$1,799 -> $3,098 Dimensions: 12.8×8.94×0.76″ 3.0lbs Processor & Memory: 800MHz FSB 2GB 666MHzDDR2 1.6GHz -> 1.8GHz Storage: 80GB 4200rpm PATA Upgrade to 64GB SSD Graphics & Display: 13.3″ WS TFT LED 1280×720 Intel GMA X3100 2nd Display – 1920×1200 Peripherals & Ports: iSight Camera Micro-DVI dongle port 78 key keyboard solidstate trackpad 1x USB 2.0 headphone jack Networking & Wireless: Builtin 802.11n Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR Battery: 37w Li-polymer - 5 hr Features: “multitouch trackpad” “smart LED display” Accessories: MacBook Air SuperDrive – DVD-RW? USB Ethernet Adapter Micro-DVI to Composite/S-video USB Modem |
$1,060.80-> $2,866.50 Dimensions: 12.5×9.09×0.92″ 3.1lbs Processor & Memory: 800MHz FSB 2GB 666MHz DDR2 Upgrade to 4GB 666MHz DDR2 1.2GHz Storage: 64 GB SSD DVD-RW Graphics & Display: 13.3 WS TFT LED 1440×900 Intel GMA X3100 2nd Display – 2048×1536 Peripherals & Ports: camera & mic VGA full keyboard trackpoint & trackpad 3x USB 2.0 Speakers & headphone jack Networking & Wireless: Wireless LAN, WAN Bluetooth Gigabit Ethernet Wireless USB + GPS + WiMax Battery: 3 cell Li-polymer - 4.3 to 10.0 hr Features: “illuminated buttons” “stereo speakers” “think light” “carbon fiber” “spill resistant keyboard” Accessories: Dock Port Replicator Extra Battery Any other Lenovo Accessory |
You decide.
Microsoft is Getting it Right
Ambiguic Coherence
The secret got out during CES. Vienna – the original undertakings of Longhorn before they changed it mid beta and Vista showed up out of nowhere. Anyway, Windows 7: Featuring minwin: a Linux like kernel. Customizable interface, plug and go packaging, security, essential interface… you get the point. Microsoft is keeping this one under wraps. ZDNet let this one through yesterday- “Why Windows 7 Might go in pieces” isn’t about things breaking, but about the customizables. If you’ve ever installed Linux, you can pick what parts you want to install. kernel drivers, what interface, security measure, etc. Set it up as a server, a workstation, or even a media center. Go to Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows to read a bit more.
I’ve been digging through sites and briefs from over the years to find more information during the last few months. A friend threw me the ZDNet link. We had a short but to-the-point conversation about it.
- It’s about time Microsoft catches up
+ yea. …[T]ook them long enough. I’m just glad they finally see the whole picture.
- … til it gets released and it’s not the whole picture.
+ yea. ‘like they forget to use water with the water color.
Super Smash Bro’s Brawl
The Good:
The addition of an adventure mode and the ability to build your own levels brings this classic game to a whole new level. Same great game play, with additional characters, items, and vastly improved ‘maps’.
The Bad:
The only real bad I’ve seen in that you must buy some classic controllers to play the game. You can play using the Wii Remote, Wii Remote and Nunchuck, Wii Classic Controller, or a Gamecube Controller, but I would highly recommend investing in some classic controllers as they a thousand times better for game play.
General Description:
Super Smash Bro’s Brawl is one of the greatest games out on the Wii today. Not only are you able to battle your friends like you’ve done in previous games (with new characters in Brawl of course) but the graphics are much smoother, you can build your own levels, and use a all new items to wreak havoc on your friends. Along with this, when you get tired from all of the battling the game offers you a brand new mode, Subspace Emissary. This is adventure mode, you go through over 30 levels collecting trophies, characters, and other unlockables, playing as a wide range of the characters found in the game. This brings a whole new dimension to Smash Bro’s as you can now battle your friends, take the classic route up the chain of enemies, or play through an adventure by yourself or with a friend.
Score (out of 10): 9.5/10
Final Comment: No game is perfect but the majority of gamers and review sites agree that Smash Bro’s Brawl truly raises the bar to that near perfect game level.
Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games
The Good:
Excellent game for family and friends to sit around and compete over many different olympic games. Offers fun competition as you try to win gold in every event to continue unlocking all the events found on the game.
The Bad:
Complicated gameplay at times as some of the events do not offer smooth motions for completition with the Wii Remote. Nothing over the top as far as gameplay as you are continuing on the theme of the mini-game genre are flooded with titles for the Wii.
General Description:
This is not a monumental mind blowing game on the Wii as it follows along with the many other mini-game style releases such as Wii Sports (packaged with the Wii), Wario Ware, Rayman, Mario Party, and Wii Play, along with others. However, this game does offer an escape from those titles by offering a different type of game play. Instead of purely feeling like a set of mini-games this Mario and Sonic smashup offers a quality series of games based on Olympic events, making it feel as though you are competing in the Olympic games. The game play can be quite tough at times, as the motions for Wii Remote can get a bit tough when trying to play out the different events; however, with some practice this can be a fun game for family and friends.
Score (out of 10): 7/10
Final Comment: Excellent game for the first few months as you learn to play and battle with your friends but in the end its just another set of mini-games for the Wii.
Obscure Questioning
Ambiguic Coherence
Merged Excerpts from a conversation.
There are times where one can be philosophical, some people aren’t. That’s fine too, even if they “ask really obscure questions that mean nothing in the grand scheme of life”.
“Well, as an engineer would tell you, that’s the best way to go through life, we just take what we learn and try to answer those questions, and if we can’t, then we can’t. but if we can – [it's] ambiguic coherence”
If someone, not thinking, is hasseling a room of engineers to turn in paperwork and they say “why? we’re busy making the company money” and they say, “well, why is the sky blue or the grass green”. Impromtu, they have 5 engineers giving them an answer to both.
The overall synopsis of this story is that the really isnt a point to knowing either of those. some things should just be taken as they are.
If either were of different color, it wouldnt change a damn thing.
Sure, there would be no fun in that, and that would ruin the fun in asking those questions.
But I think im trying to get at, obscure questioning is the important kind of questioning. even though it might seem like nothing in the grand scheme of life to you, to the person you’re asking the question (who also might be able to give you a reasonable answer) it just might be the question needed to strike motivation to solve some drastic problem in the grand scheme of lives.
Therefore, it’s a good thing to will always ask ridiculous questions.
The Multicore Processor Battlegrounds are Heating up Again
Ambiguic Coherence
Reading my daily news updates, I ran across Intel’s latest jab into AMD’s side – 6 cores on a package by late 2008. InfoWorld and Zdnet had most of the coverage on this topic. Intel is actually threatened by the Final, long awaited delivery of the Barcelona cores (Phenom) which should arrive at the OEMs in April. Intel’s next release will be called Dunnington and use the high-K 45nm technology. The only problem I see, and my view is shared by a lot of other authors, is that there are no true Multithread applications out there that the average user will be using. Now, I should get some feedback on that one, but I do have a point. Multithread apps like Simulia’s Abaqus, Pro/E, and SolidWorks require a lot of RAM and a heck of a lot of processing power, so one chip still isn’t going to do it – Xenons, Opterons, and server racks are a different story.
Here’s the thing -There is no point (at this point in the century) to have multicore-multithreaded-same architecture processors. If Intel were to release a multi-core processor that had multiple types of cores on it, then AMD and all the other manufacturers would close its doors. It would be like it was back in the day. A math processor + a standard processor.
I see it possibly taking the form of the cell processor in the PS3, for example. They should throw in a floating point, a doubler, an integrator, one for graphics, one for physics, and one to run the counter through the asm. That looks like six to me. And I would switch sides for it. But wait, isn’t AMD trying to pull this off with Fusion and the Spider platform?!? Intel is kinda late on that too. AMD thought of it first. If you look at the pictures those other sites have on the 6-core, you’ll notice 3 piggy backed cores (take a look at my article on quad core misbeliefs). Once again, Intel needs to watch some sesame street: the number of today is 3 versus the number of today is 6. Separate cores are not the same as piggy backed cores.
In other news: Another shot at the Barcelona in the later half of 08 is the Tukwila- Another Quad core model. However, it’ll be the first processor in the world with 2 billion transistors on one chip. Sure it’ll also have an exponentially higher cache of 30MB, but besides that, and running smoothly at 2+ GHz, it’ll be a performance rival of (if not surpass) any of the Phenoms released at that time.
A Brief Overview of Linux Video Card Drivers
Robinton
This article should serve as an overview of Linux graphics card drivers.
The major vendors’ graphics cards perform no different under Linux then they do for Windows: AMD/ATi, Nvidia, and Intel. Each vendor though, has a different way of providing their Linux drivers: Open source, closed source binaries, or a mix of the two.
Nvidia:
They provide closed-source binaries for their cards, as well as a basic open source 2D driver. If you are looking for solid performance from your cards, and want to play 3d games with good frame rates, Nvidia is your best choice. They provide a full-featured control panel which supports virtually all of their features: i.e. Twinview or Xinerama setups for multi-monitors, power management features, full card info, AA and AF tweaking and overrides, and if you have CoolBits available, you also have overclocking options at your fingertips.
Their open-source driver is a basic 2D driver that is heavily obfuscated. As a result, Nvidia is more or less the only contributor. An alternative to these 2D drives is the Nouveau open-source driver. It aims to handle 2D and 3D acceleration for all but the oldest of the Nvidia line. Currently it does 2D operations very well, but there is extremely limited 3D support for GeForce 6 and 7 series cards. Their website is: Nouveau
Intel:
Intel’s chipsets are all currently integrated motherboard gpus, and do not perform nearly as well as AMD’s or Nvidia’s graphics cards. Their cards all have open source drivers. Recently the register guides for the 965 and G35 cards were released, which cover all aspects of the card including 3D operations. These should all work out of the box nearly flawlessly.
More information on the release of the register guides Intel releases docs on 965 and G35 IGPs
AMD/ATi:
Unlike the other two brands, this is a story of change. What follows is a somewhat long summary of their drivers and position towards Linux. Bottom line: Their older and ancient series cards are very well supported, and can exercise nearly as much of their functionality as they ever will. The R500 and R600 (X1000 and HD series) are supported decently by the closed-drivers, and open-source support is shaping up to be quite good, and will only get better, but right now, if you’re looking for open source drivers, anything above midrange is buying for the potential it has to offer, rather than what it can do now. Unless Nvidia does something in the next 6 months to a year, they could be demoted to second choice after many, many years of being #1.
How did we get to this position? A long, long time ago (back in the time of R200- the 9xxx series) AMD/ATi were supportive of the Linux community, and provided documents under Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) for the, then, current cards. As a result, drivers were quite good, and were able to perform very well under Linux. Then something changed, and the documentation dried up.
We’ll call this period “The Dark Ages”. Without official support, there were two choices: reverse engineer everything and add it to the current open-source driver, or use the closed-source driver FGLRX.m This period formed many people’s opinions of ATi, and created perceptions of the company and its product that are hard to shake even to this day. Things were so bad that you wouldn’t bother advising anyone with a new ATi card to install Linux because the drivers were so crappy; in fact, if you wanted to run Linux anyway, you’d almost have to go get a new card- either one of the old, well-supported Radeon cards, or an Nvidia card, which had excellent closed-source drivers.
Fast-forward to 2007, and on the surface, it appeared that nothing would really change: reverse engineering was still the order of the day, and the FGLRX drivers were still widely regarded as crap: they worked, but each had its share of bugs, and regressions might strike at any time, and the performance just wasn’t there. A new driver release that year did in fact bring massive gains for the newer cards, but it also had its share of problems, and wasn’t nearly as good for older card owners. Then AMD started to drop hints about helping out the open-source community in early September:
AMD: Accelerating Open-Source Drivers?
Given ATi’s history, the community at large was understandably skeptical, especially since they’d been burned before when support dried up and left them to fend for themselves. Then in less than two weeks, it went from talk, to NDA-free specifications, to an actual release of specifications. It definitely turned heads, and even more so when the officially-supported RadeonHD open-source driver was released to the public. Since then, more specifications have been opened, and AMD has a public representative from their team on Phoronix’s forums to talk about any and everything related to the driver and AMD’s intentions for the future, as it pertains to the open-source community.
What he’s been saying has been very encouraging: they are looking to open up as much as they legally can, and are actually planning future models (beyond what’s currently out), so that the Unified Video Decoder stuff is not tied to the DRM module as it currently is. This would be incredibly awesome to say the least, as it would mean hardware decoding of all current and future video formats would be possible, as opposed to just MPEG-2 video.
The Radeon driver (open-source) currently provides support for nearly all but the newest lines, and should be available in your distributions package manager. RadeonHD on the other hand is best compiled from source to make sure you get the latest features, and also because the released versions become old very quickly as new features and bug fixes are added.
My thanks to Phoronix for their one-of-a-kind coverage of the Linux graphics card field, because without them and their tireless coverage of the topic, there’s no way this article could have been written. I’d also like to thank John Bridgman from AMD who’s spent a considerable amount of time on the Phoronix forums talking to posters and answering questions as best he can.
A Tribute
George Carlin – a hero of logic dry humor. He tells it as it is. Things that most people overlook because they’re too integrated into the media and society. We’re not all conformists. The word ‘MEH is a tribute to his 4 letter monologue/rant.
‘-M-E-H
A Four Character Word
I’m stealing this word from a friend because I can; because there are far too many more meanings of it than are being used.
When you screw up something and you want to scream out loud that FOUR letter word…
When you are frustrated and just can’t figure it out…
If you’re trying to keep it PG at work or when you’re out with the kids…
Shrug your problems aside and say ‘Meh. It’s the new F%@K of our times.
Everything is so politically correct and it’s no longer a curse word. Well F that, we have a new word ! ‘MEH to those media critics with my hands in the air
- In the News: More soldiers died today. ‘meh, can’t do anything about it. It already happened. Shrug it off and say ‘Meh. I can’t do anything about it at this point. It’s the excuse to the excessive human error on a project.
- I wanted to go to sleep earlier than I did, but that old action flick was on the TV. So I stayed up and I watched it. It was great… Waking up tired as hell, I said Meh. It was worth it.
- Take the Liam Lynch song – United States of Whatever. Well guess what, ‘Meh fits perfectly: (http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/liamlynch/unitedstatesofwhatever.html)
I went down to the beach and saw Kiki
She was, like, all “ehhhh”
And I was, like, “‘meh”.Then this chick comes up to me and she’s all, like,
“Hey, aren’t you that dude?”
And I’m, like, “‘meh”.So later I’m at the pool hall
And this girl comes up
And she’s, like, “awww”
And I’m, like, “‘meh”…
George Carlin’s tribute to the F word.
http://www.lyricsandsongs.com/song/576828.html
All I can add to each part is ‘MEH.
Integration and Confrontation
Ambiguic Coherence
What to do about an unusually shy girlfriend.
From my take on meeting her, she seems very shy and isolated, in the sense that she’s too family oriented and isn’t outgoing – even though she says she is. She did an over-the-top amount of talking about her siblings. She has her little ‘circle of trust’ or comfortableness within her group of friends; whether they are from high school, (where she most likely had the same problem until senior year) or they we’re forced upon her as roommates are.
As a confidence situation on her part, She’s like a Jane Doe who doesn’t know how to take that step forward and say, hey, I’m Jane, I’m Jill’s friend from home; What’s up. As far as that story goes, I went to a recital for a friend from high school. Her extended family was there included a friend of mine from middle school. Anyway, his sister was getting married to a guy who was an old coworker of one of my coworkers; Which I found out almost instantly while catching up with him. This guy was sitting next to him – and chimed right in – Now, that’s confidence. My friend’s girlfriend (at the time) was there too. She sat there quietly. Now, my old friend has never been the type to introduce anyone, but was always in the right place at the right time where everyone meshed well so there was never any need to do so. At the end of the recital, we’re all talking at a reception and I still haven’t been introduced to this girl who has also not said a word to anyone. As they were leaving, about 100 ft off she started talking to him about who knows what – but that’s the circle of comfort thing. Becuase she couldn’t make the first assertive step, that he didn’t help her with, She played ‘total avoidance’.
This avoidance falls within the confidence circle of her friends. They’ll talk about your relationship, but can’t do it publicly with anyone who is not in that circle and this includes you’re close friends. She got stuck/forced into a temporary comfort zone, when you and I first hung out with her. She had no way to avoid it. You and I starting to talk to her right away and that put me in her comfort zone.
So, getting back to it all. What i would do is have a little [forced] meet and greet that was impromptu or secretly planned with your friends. Let me explain that. Have her over for a movie or something. Have a friend show up and just hang out, even better, synchronously several of them. If they talk a lot, they will either have be excepted or make out to be a real jackass. Next, over do any public gestures or public displays of affection that you might do. Say hi, but get in her way. Have your friends say hi too. Try to also have a short conversation. That’ll force her to make her side of your relationship publicly acceptable.
Second, you could bluntly sit down and talk to her about it. But first outline what you would say and practice it with possible responses of why she publicly avoids you. It’s a toss up to which one is easier to pull off. It’s up to you.
