Why are things always so complicated. :-/ Ah well, long weekend at least. Think I’m feeling a bit off colour, my throat and nose have been bothering me since last night. Hopefully a good long weekend rest will sort that out at least.
Archive for ◊ January, 2005 ◊
• Wednesday, January 26th, 2005
Been pretty busy of late in one way or another. Finally got around to upgrading the video card in my Powermac. I had originally planned to get a NVidia 6800 Ultra upon their release in the middle of last year despite my general dislike of NVidia’s Mac cards. Apple NZ actually had them on order and despite the ridiculous price (would have been around NZ$1300 all up) I had thought I would get one to avoid having to import one or trying to flash a Windows card. I put in the order right at the beginning of july 2004 and the delivery time was estimated as being later that month. Despite this, come october 2004, I still didn’t have my card and when I asked them about it, they still could not give me a date. Due to this I cancelled the order and got a refund thinking something better would come along or I could order again when they became cheaper or just available. So anyway, at the recent Macworld show, ATI announced the Mac version of the Radeon X800 XT. In the Windows world, the high end X800 cards are generally faster than the Nvidia cards except when it comes to OpenGL. As OpenGL is the 3D API of choice on the Mac, it would appear that Nvidia’s cards should be faster. It seems though in practise this is not the case with the X800 XT literally destroying the 6800 Ultra in terms of performance when antialiasing and ansiostropic filtering are turned on as I would have things set. It is also US$100 cheaper, half the length, does not block a PCI-X slot the way the 6800 Ultra would, has better drivers, and much to my shock, is quieter than the 6800 Ultra despite having a smaller fan (typically small fans make more noise). ATI also supports the ability to override certain settings such as anitalising and ansiostropic filtering that Nvidia does not. It also appears to actually be shipping. This made purchasing the card a no brainer for me. Buying this sort of thing overseas is a bit of a pain as I had to manually verify my address by sending some documents but it appears that it will end up costing me about NZ$720 in total…substantially cheaper than the Windows X800 XT retails for here in NZ (Typically over NZ$1000). Needless to say I await it’s arrival with baited breath.
Been chatting lots, way more than usual. Kind of need to stop but oh well, I don’t do it all the time. Was very good to see Don Brash, mentioned in my last, post get owned by newsreader John Campbell on TV tonight. That was awesome. He was backtracking the whole interview trying to defend his claptrap in the face of facts and common sense. Shame it was so short. I wonder how long it will be before the complaints start flowing in from Don Brash’s office about the channel being biased.
Category: General, Politics, Technology
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• Tuesday, January 25th, 2005
Some stuff that is only of interest to New Zealanders but our crazy politicians are at it again. The local National party had been getting lots of press today as their leader, Don Brash is talking of “getting tough on welfare”. The media is making this out to be a huge win for them. I can’t help but have a different take but I guess I have seen what people actually get on welfare and how much trouble the people get put through by the system. Personally, I make quite a lot of money. Sure, I wish it was more, but I don’t begrudge paying money to help those less fortunate and I don’t buy the “they are all lazy and won’t work” line…I know better. I’m happy to do what I can. What really bothers me though is that the public appears to agree with him. He says “When you have 300,000 people who are on welfare you have a big problem” and I thought, “Okay, so what are you going to do about it? How do we solve this problem”. What followed hit me with it’s sheer stupidity. Cut back on this, make it harder to get sickness benefits, make them work for it, etc, etc. Nothing constructive, no innovation, just sweep the problem under the carpet and suddenly the country will be rolling in spare money we can give to the rich in corparate tax breaks. In other words, the same old tired and old policies that National has always pushed and have failed so often in the past and ended up costing the country more money due to excessive administration and other costs. I really can’t believe these people have the nerve to claim they understand money. Real businessmen know that cutting back a streamlined system is no way to make any money. I guess the thing that annoys me most is that they are claiming these are new ideas and will win votes….people have such short memories…
Category: General, Politics
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• Sunday, January 23rd, 2005
I’m finally starting to get bored of World of Warcraft. It’s fun and all but it just takes soooooo long to go up levels. I also find as a mage that there’s just too many mobs and as soon as you have more than one enemy attacking you, it’s all over even if you’re 3-4 levels higher. This is probably intentional to encourage party play which is all well and good (and I do participate in groups regularly) but there’s plenty of times where soloing is the only option. There’s also still quite a bit of “greifing” going on where high levels feel the need to enter newbie areas and cause havoc. I fought heaps of them today, I didn’t mind getting killed lots but a lot of people do. I can at least do a bit of damage to them now at lvl 18 and got some kills they didn’t expect.
Category: Games, General
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• Tuesday, January 18th, 2005
Okay, I know this is getting old now but I’ve been playing World of Warcraft in most of my spare time. I had hoped I would like this game but really didn’t hold out much hope as I’ve never been much of a fan of massively multiplayer online games. This one though is just plain fun. I’m on the Nathrezim server which is one of the quieter ones around and the balance between the two opposing sides, the Alliance and the Horde, is a tad more even than most servers (still more Alliance than Horde though). Made it to Level 14 so far as an undead mage on the Horde side (The max is currently level 60). They really seem to have eliminated most of the problems that plague online games. For a start items are “soul bound” so there’s no point killing someone just to steal their items since you couldn’t use anything of theirs even if you could steal it. Certainly lowers the need for high level players to randomly kill newbies. 
This also has the added benefit of encouraging player vs player encounters as you know you aren’t going to have your corpse looted even if you do loose the fight. Now if they could only find a way of eliminating corpse camping everything would be right with the world (Not that I’ve been CC’d myself yet thankfully). The server I’m on also seems to have quite a good community too although it seems not all servers are like this.
Category: Games, General
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• Thursday, January 13th, 2005
Hmmmm, very soon for another post, but I’m still waiting for that patch. It’s nice to actually have the house to myself again. Not had that much in the last few weeks. I really do like having my brother’s kids around, it’s a lot of fun, but I’m really still quite tired from Christmas.
Picked up some slimline DVD cases to move my collection into and have some more on the way. They really do take a lot less space and much to my surprise, the covers typically fit without any cutting involved and the spines are still perfectly readble. Might even have enough room soon to put a few more books on the shelves.
There’s been lots of talk recently about copyright laws with all the bittorrent sites being taken down and people being sued left and right by the RIAA and MPAA. I really find myself sitting on the fence in a number of these cases since obviously downloading things without compensating the authors and people involved in the creation process is not right, but I really don’t think the music, movie and game industries are much better at this. The terms theft and stealing are thrown around by the industries involved but to anyone who understands what these terms mean, they are clearly not used correctly in these cases. Let’s just call a spade a spade, this is copyright violation. It’s still a crime nonetheless, but this is obviously not the same as stealing or theft. They are just spreading FUD and demonising their opponents. What is theft though is the efforts of the companies involed to extend copyright indefinitely. By doing so they are depriving the public as a whole of the benefits of past works and creations and this should not be tolerated by the public. Don’t get me wrong, I do think copyright is a good idea, people should be compensated for their creations and I believe they should have a period of time to benefit from their work on them, but a line has to be drawn and in due time, their creations should be made freely available, where possible, to benefit society as a whole. Due to this I personally am starting to favour the idea of a ten year copyright system where after ten years, the original work (derivatives having their own fresh copyright) is considered to be owned by society as a whole. This gives the creator ample time to benefit from their work while minimising the damage to society that a copyright granted monopoly brings.
Might write more about this some, but the patch is installed, I’m of to try out WoW.
Category: General, Life, Politics, Technology
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• Thursday, January 13th, 2005
Thought I’d make a post while I wait for World of Warcraft to patch itself. Picked up a copy today quite a bit cheaper by making use of a NZ$50 off coupon I got a while back. I’ve not really been a fan of massively multiplayer online games in the past and still would rather avoid most of these but this one does actually sound like it might be fun. Also I do feel I should give other genres I didn’t like in the past a try again every once in a while to see if I like them any better now. Most recently I did this with real time strategy games and first person shooters but nothing there really swayed my opinion too much. Hopefully this will be different. I will say right now though, do not buy World of Warcraft if you have a 56K modem. It’s going to take about an hour all up for me to download the 56.4MB patch and this is with 256K ADSL. Given that there will inevitably be additional patches of this magnitude, I really think 56K users should give it a miss. On a side note, the official patch client does look suspiciously like a bittorrent client which I find somewhat amusing.
Lots of big news at Macworld the other day, most of which was exactly what the rumor sites predicted. My predictions on hardware updates were totally wrong but I do still expect Powerbook updates very soon now. It seems the eMac though might just be dead. I think the new iPod will sell well but it’s not a product for me. I’d say the same about iWork and the new office apps, I just don’t use these things enough to justify the price. The new version of iLife sounds like something I want but at twice the price, I’m a bit more wary. Much to my surprise, the new “Mac mini” headless mac appeals to me quite a bit. The idea of a desktop computer that small which is still powerful enough to do most tasks is quite attractive to me. I had expected a more pizza box styled thing more like the old Mac LCs but this far exceeds my expectations. Of course there had to be a fly in the ointment and in this case, it’s Apple NZ’s excessive pricing. The base model will end up being about NZ$940 once tax is factored in. Doing a straight exchange rate conversion from US$499 gives at todays rates, NZ$707. Adding the 12.5% tax on top gives NZ$795.38. Obviously there’s shipping on top but the difference is NZ$145, way more than shipping costs will be. Some may not think this is too bad, but for contrast, if we take the higher spec model selling for US$599 and do a straight exchange rate conversion we get NZ$848.66. i.e. we’re paying substantially more for the low end model in real dollar value than US residents pay for the high end model. It’s not that I don’t expect AppleNZ to make a profit on the things, but this machine is clearly designed to increase market share and be a no-brain impulse buy to complement iPod sales and I would assume, increase software revenue. It really seems that they don’t get it. At least though it does come with the new version of iLife so maybe I can justify buying one in a few weeks time by imagining I’m paying full price for iLife and saving $250 off the price of the Mac mini…hmmmmm, that might just work….heh…
Category: Games, General, Technology
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• Tuesday, January 11th, 2005
Been back at work two days now. I know it sounds strange but it’s more relaxing. Still got family staying so I haven’t had spare time to chat to friends or go visiting but all in good time. Amazingly it’s sunny today too. Rather unbelievable considering what the weather has been like here for the past few months, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was late winter rather than summer.
The OpenGL manual I ordered a few weeks back arrived yesterday. Not planning any big projects yet, I just want to familiarise myself with the API (and refresh my MacOS X Carbon API knowledge). Maybe sometime though.
Got bored of most of the other games I was playing and have now gone back to playing Morrowind when I’ve had spare moments. Playing a good game like that (even one that is a few years old now) really makes you realise what utter drivel otherwise passes for games these days. Not to say Morrowind is perfect by any means, the dialog system is tedious and the mission scripting seems rather broken and lacking robustness (doing the steps of a mission out of order can really stuff things up) but it is still a very good game and is just plain fun to play which is what matters.
The deluxe edition of “The Downward Spiral” from “Nine Inch Nails” that I ordered sometime back in November arrived the other day. It’s a hybrid SACD and I don’t have a SACD player so at best I can only listen to the regular CD layer (typically these seem to be mastered rather badly on SACD). I mainly wanted it for the bonus disc. It turns out that I had some of the tracks on there already too with other EPs I’d bought over the years but there’s still enough unreleased bits on there to keep me happy. What also impressed me is that the quality is very good even on the regular CD layer. I’m only guessing here but it sounds like they took the new 5.1 mix created for the SACD and ran it through a matrix encoder of some sort to create the CD later since this is the only CD I have that actually sounds good run through my Dolby Pro Logic II decoder. All in all I’m quite happy with this release, the storage case is quite nice too. Hopefully one day I’ll pick up sometime that plays back SACDs as this will only make things much better.
It seems Macworld San Fransico Expo 2005 has now started and the big keynote should happen tomorrow (9AM PST I believe). The rumor mill has really been churning more than usual and with all the lawsuits Apple has been throwing around, it seems there may actually be some truth to the talk of flash memory based iPods, the iWork office suite and the sub US$499 Mac. This is even without the inevitable Tiger (MacOS 10.4) previews and hardware upgrades (I’d hazzard a guess at the eMac and the powerbooks).
Category: Games, General, Life, Music, Technology
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• Saturday, January 08th, 2005
Turns out that link I had in my last post to an interview with Hiroshi Yamauchi was fake afterall. I had my doubts but that just spoils the fun.
Category: General
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• Thursday, January 06th, 2005
Had a really busy few days. Family staying, friends visiting and the phone ringing almost non-stop (At least dial up internet has some benefits ). Haven’t slept that well either so I’m a bit tired again really.
I picked up the game “Republic: The Revolution” for 50% off in a sale in Electronics Boutique. It’s an interesting game but rather flawed unfortunately. I had been interested in it for quite a while but just didn’t feel comfortable paying NZ$79 for it. For the NZ$39 or so dollars I paid though I feel happy enough. The box shows all this 3D going on but I suspected it might not be very representative of the game and I was right. It does have all these flash 3D graphics and you can look at them any time you want, but they really have no purpose and don’t really add anything. They are well used for cut scenes though. The core of the game plays best using the 2D overhead map though so I find I never really bother looking at the 3D at all. The core of this game is that you are a political activist who wishes to change the corrupt and downright nasty tyranical government in the fictional ex-Soviet state referred to as “Novastrana”. The map consists of a city (there are multiple cities to play) and is divided into suburbs. Each suburb has a pie chart representing the popular appeal of the various political factions within the game and what kind of ideology the suburb is best represented by (There are three base ideologies, Force, Commercial, Intellectual and each faction will have a combination of these in various degrees making them appeal more or less to the suburbs depending on how close in ideology they are). The object of the game seems to be to improve your popular appeal overall in each city in turn while achieving various political goals to change the government of the country. You change your appeal by holding rallys, running poster campaigns, performing chartity work or, if you prefer, by blacking the character of or publically criticising your opponents, or even going to the extremes of having them taken out. Needless to say there is much I am leaving out here, but this is how the core of the game plays. The worst problem it has is that it runs in psuedo real-time and the days take ages to pass. Each day is split into morning, afternoon and night and each member of your faction (typically 3-4 people it seems) can only perform one action in each part of the day. There is an option to speed up time but it works akwardly and even on the fastest speed seems very slow. Having an “End turn” button that moves you forward to the next time period would have made the game play so much nicer and would have eliminated a lot of the dead time where you’re sitting there doing nothing (Maybe this is when the developers wanted you to look at the 3D?). I think I need to play more of this game but I don’t feel like doing so soon.
Did a trip to Manukau City in Auckland today with mum. It was my first long distance driving with her and overall went very well despite the weather being totally awful. Had quite a good time. We did some shopping in the big mall there and just enjoyed the outing. Saw some pretty crazy driving by others on the road which really was pretty bad considering the really wet conditions. The car seemed to go through a lot more petrol than normal but I guess that’s to be expected considering the higher revs needed to keep it up around 100kph on the motorway.
Came across this interview supposedly with Nintendo’s ex president, Hiroshi Yamauchi. He comes across very arrogant and says many shocking things but it seems to match well with the kind of personality he is well known to have. Definitely an amusing read and if true, explains much of the motivation behind his controversial business decisions over the years. I have never really agreed with Hiroshi Yamauchi on much and still don’t but at least he’s consistent and if he really did hassle Microsoft the way he describes, I have to give him some kudos.
Category: Games, General, Life
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