by Matt | Jun 14, 2005 | Culture
You guys haven’t heard from me in a few days. That’s 99% the BF2 Demo’s fault. It’s good…. really good. Up until yesterday however I was having some issues running it. I know my system is no slow-poke, but BF2 had to be set really low, 1024×768 at “low” details/textures/etc with no AA, AF and with lighting and shadows turned off, to be exact. That just didn’t seem reasonable. I thought maybe it’s just a really intensive game. Thats until my boss had issues running it too. He has nearly the same rig I do with a slightly older graphics card. We should really be able to play the game at reasonable settings he says. I agreed and started digging.
First thing I did was run some benchmarks. I hate 3DMark and think it’s a bias piece of shit, so I settled on AquaMark. I love AquaMark. Not only is it a “real game scenerio”, it actually gives scores that might make sense, and then breaks them down into easy to understand chunks. Anyway, I ran it and got THIS. That’s a score of 36978 (representing – CPU: 3622, GFX: 7553). Not bad I think. Until I compare it to other systems in my range. Someone with the EXACT same hardware is getting over 60,000. Thats just not right.
So I start asking around. With the help of the fine lads in the AquaMark forums, we determine it’s my VIA drivers. A quick reinstall from the original CD that came with my mobo and now I’m getting THIS. 53396 is MUCH more in range with where I should be. And that’s stock. I haven’t tweaked anything yet. I’m hopinh to break 60,000 by the end of the week.
A little video card driver tweak here, a little RAM timing change there, and I should be cranking out the power.
Oh, and as for the BF2 demo. I went from 1024 at Low, to playing it at 1280 at Med/High with AA and lighting/shadows turned back on. Just goes to show you, sometimes drivers make all the difference.
Out.
by Matt | Jun 7, 2005 | Culture
After years of going with IBM to produce chips for their computers, Apple is moving to x486 architecture and will begin using chips produce by Intel. I’m sure you’ve already heard of this. Nagle and Chris are up on their Mac news and Chip and Jason are as up on their general geek news as I am. If not, I’m sorry this is how you found out. Please turn you attention to a press release or two.
I’m not surprised in the least. First a move from OS9 to a linux based OSX, then rumors of the Marklar project about their PC compatible software. This has been a long time coming.
I like the part where they say “No, OSX will never be on anything other than Apple hardware” but… “Windows? Well, we wouldn’t stop you”.
Give it 1 year. 2 tops.
If you think people weren’t porting Apple OS to the PC before, just wait until they get their hands on a OSX version written for the x86 platform.
The official company line is that their not getting “into the software buisness” and won’t be selling OSX for PCs. That’s going to fuck’em. You think Microsoft isn’t going to jump at the chance to own not just PCs but Mac desktops as well? They’re going to push Longhorn HARD at Mac users, probably getting a few to switch as well. A lot of people don’t like having a PC at the office and a Mac at home, and this would just add a level of compatibility and reduce their conversion aggravations.
After saying all that, I think it’s a good move with the chips at least. The PowerPC chips are woefully underpowered. I read someone blogging about how the PowerPC chips are more “sophisticated” and contained millions of more calculations a second, or some bullshit like that. Yeah, so that’s why my old 2100+ AMD can open Photoshop faster than a G5 right? Because the Mac is doing it with sophistication? OK.
At least now we can see some real benchmarks. Before all we had were synthetic guesses at what comparable Mac vs PC test were.
If the new Macs have the equivalent of Pentium 4 (or higher) chips in them, they’ll be able to compete neck and neck with the fastest PCs. I would LOVE to see Apple win, and thats not sarcasm. I honestly think a P4 (or P5 at that point) Mac running a x86 version of OSX would be faster than the same P5 running Longhorn. I honestly do. But, since OSX will never be sold to PCs, they’ll be the preverbial “line in the sand” and we’ll all be making the same PC or Mac choice again. Only this time, the playing field is level, the computers are close in speed and you’ll have a choice of OS if you go Mac.
This can go one of two ways. Either comparable machines will go head to head and PCs will win because of Apples enormous price tag OR Apple drops the prices a bit, releases OSX for the PC, and we settle in for a long winter of back and forth competition.
Either way it’s exciting. I say Apple will take 20% of the market away from PC retailers AND will have to release OSX for the PC within 2 years of the first Intel Apples rolling off the line. Thats my prediction.
If I’m wrong, at least I’m not as wrong as this guy, who must be getting snickers all around the office this week.
Peter Glaskowsky, former editor of the Microprocessor Report, is an expert in the semiconductor business. Here’s what he told eWeek about the prospects of Apple switching the Mac to x86 processors:
“It’s a bunch of bull,” Peter Glaskowsky, analyst for The Envisioneering Group, in Seaford, N.Y., told Ziff Davis Internet News. “Firstly, Apple certainly pays much less for IBM and Freescale processors than Intel charges for comparable chips. Probably less than half as much on average. The G5 is a smaller, more efficient chip than the Pentium 4, and IBM has no other customers willing to buy large quantities.”
Ouch.
by Matt | May 31, 2005 | Culture, Tech
I want one. I want it now. I want it delivered to me on a platter, glowing like the jewel it is. I want it more than the Antec Overture. It’s so pretty!
Asus Vento
by Matt | May 10, 2005 | Culture
My brother-in-law tried to convince me over the weekend that the next Xbox console would be called “The Xenon”. Every time he said “Xenon” I almost laughed until I wet myself. I knew what he didn’t, that not only was it to be called the Xbox 360, but that there were both pictures from E3 and press releases to back up my claims. I present these for him, as well as you, in hope that maybe he’ll stop calling it the Xenon now 🙂
Official E3 Press picture
Picture for the Xbox 360 Revealed Party in LA to back up above picture
Post about the name
Pictures of the controller from Team Xbox’s E3 coverage.
Bigger shot of the box.
Leaked Xbox 360 Specs.
I rest my case.
by Matt | Apr 19, 2005 | Culture
GameStop BOUGHT Electronics Boutique/EBGames. That’s crazy shit. According the their last stock report, EB stock was around $30 and GS was about $18. That means GS had to come up with a hell of a lot of cash to buy them out. Of course, the “official” word isn’t that its a buy out or a take over, no, they’re calling it a merger. Yeah, like Cingular and AT&T “merged” but every AT&T store is now a Cingular store. Great merger boys. Anyway, all EB’s will now become GameStops. The line from GS corporate is that they want to compete “globally” with other game outlets…. like…. umm…. for example…. nope, couldn’t think of one. Awesome job guys, merge so you can crush your non-existant competition.
AND, as if that isn’t weird enough news for you, Adobe just bought Macromedia. Yikes!
Soon, all the flash, shockwave, dreamweaver, cold fusion stuff will be rolled into Adobes CS suite. Photoshop and Dreamweaver in one box. Go figure. Now, if only they could get a little fucking price control going on, cause damn, the new version of Photoshop (CS2) will be $300 FOR THE UPGRADE. Umm, guys, that’s a wee bit high. Especially since your competition is ALSO non-existant. And don’t feed me some BS line about production costs OR about piracy, cause thats horse shit. Hell, the operating system it runs on is a quarter of the price and even that is too much.
So, there you go, Adobe adds Flash to it’s monopoly on everything graphics related and GameStop ruins a perfectly good video game stop. Alright!
by Matt | Apr 5, 2005 | Culture
You know, it feels REALLY good to smack the shit out of a virus or some spyware. It really does. People who write that sort of shit are dickless, friendless assholes who will be serving me my coffee for the rest of their pathetic lives.
Yesterday I got an e-card from Blue Mountain, a company I’ve heard of and used before. I thought it was from my mom. The link to get my card when to the blue mountain servers (so I thought). When nothing opened in Firefox I assumed it was a flash/shockwave thing, so I opened it in IE…. God, why I did that I’ll never know. After nothing opened in IE (I got what looked to be a 404) I closed the browser and deleted the email. 30 seconds later AVG Anti-Virus is going ape shit. It’s detected that about 30 different backdoor trojans are trying to install themselves. I delete them all before they do anything… or so I think. Apparently I’ve caught the newest nasty virus on the block. A combination of malware, spyware, trojan and backdoor worm. Parts of it are called different things. The most common is wsup.exe and wtools.exe. WTools is a bullshit toolbar thing that hijacks IE and uses it to install more nasty things everytime IE is opened. Wsup is a system process that doubles, triples and renames itself. The kicker is that after it installs it changes registry information so that the files are undeleteable and the processes are unstopable. Trying to kill one process will literally spawn to more with different names. I had WtoolsA, B, C …. S, etc at one point. A quick trip to Trend Micro and those were gone. Or so I thought. These little fuckers were tough. They renamed themselves again, moved, and restarted even after I edited my mscofig to stop the processes from starting.
I was getting made. I restarted, booted into safe mode with a command prompt and BY HAND, tracked down each and every entry in the registry, changing them all so I’d be able to finally delete them. That worked. I deleted Wtools and Wsup. After that I booted normally and just to be on the safe side I ran AVG again. This time it came up clean. Just because I’m anal I started up TrendMicro’s Housecall as well. I’m glad I did. It seems they left me with a parting gift. A nice, hidden copy of Backdoor.Small.33x hidden in my CSRSS file.
Now, csrss.exe is a very important system file, I can’t just go and delete it… or can I? I tried all the normal steps first. I tried to kill the process only to have Windows say “this is a critical system file and it’s not to be fucked with”. Ok, ok… gotta think about this. So, I read up on csrss. Apparently its a wonderful little command layer file that sits in your system32 directory… not your windows directory. Huzah! I had an imposter. The little bastard cloned the properties of the real file so that it couldn’t be messed with but it was sitting in the wrong folder. A quick reboot with a dos prompt again took care of that.
Mess with my shit will they. Not if they know whats good for’em. It didn’t help that SpyBot was jumping around like a jack rustle terrior every 2 seconds trying to tell me that something was jacking with my registry but it couldn’t tell me what. It just kept saying “Process: -blank- is trying to modify: -blank- entry. Allow or Deny?” Great job there guys. At least it knew something was up, I’ll give it that much.
Anyway, after running AVG, TrendMicro and (after installing it) Norton, it appears I’m in the clear. Nothing mildly infectious to be found.
That’ll teach me to open IE… even for cards from my Mom. Stupid IE, if it weren’t for windows update (once a year or so) it would be completely uninstalled anyway.
But, back to the main topic at hand… those wang-less, pimply faces gas station attendents that have a sack small enough to write this shit…. blah, blah blah, explative, dirty word, vulgarity…. you get the idea.
Out.
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