Technology

ONE LAST UPDATE ** and one more. Laura and Toby are a hoot.





UPDATED AGAIN ** one more video





UPDATED *** HD versions of videos

Went back and captured the video using fraps at full size. My native resolution is 1680x1050; I resized to 1840x1080 which meets the top-end HD requirement and makes the frame size compatible with my h264 codec. Came out pretty good. Now I just need to find the embed tag that tells Youtube you're linking to a widescreen video rather than a 4:3.

Playing around with fraps and Virtualdub...finally uploaded some videos to my Youtube account. Either I'm doing the HD upload wrong, or I'm just doing too much to the video before giving it to Youtube. I get a pretty nice 784x480 video about 10Mb in size, which is pretty good. Youtube resizes it again and seems to cut about half of the picture information out. Can't see a difference between standard quality and 480p. I'll work on it. Here are the videos as they are; the quality is good enough.

Pickup in shop for front-end alignment; this will be followed by another trip to another shop to figure out why the Low-4 won't engage. I'm guessing it's dirty, but I don't know what to wash.

Got new phone. While it's good to know for sure that jailbreaking and rooting phones is not illegal (I mean, according to the law it was legal, but when does a silly thing like written laws stop lawsuits? Or the government?), but I didn't really see where the iPhone 4 was better than a Samsung Captivate. The iPhone 4 has a slightly better screen, the gyroscope and a front-facing camera; the Captivate has more storage capability, a more open OS (and a faster one, in my experience) and a not-buggy antenna. It's taking a bit to get used to doing things differently, but so far I really like the phone. Oh, and it's $100 cheaper than the top-of-the-line iphone 4; same price as the cheaper iPhone 4.

I'll try to get some screen grabs and commentary from Saints Row 2 up later. I never played the first Saints Row, but I remember that it was a fairly popular game when it came out and SR 2 carried some anticipation. Kinda fell off the radar pretty quick; but then, there are sandbox games with mini-games, story missions, side-missions, unlockables and purchasables coming out every week. I've found there is a small but dedicated fan base, and a handful of people working on some pretty major mods. As is, from where I am now I can see playing through the game twice; it's an open-world sandbox but I'm not sure it really should be. At least not to the extent that it is.

Very shortly, I will have $100 in Gamestop credit. I'm not the biggest fan of Gamestop in the world, as I mentioned in a Twitter post not too long ago. But, I get credit there easily.

I've got a huge list of games for last gen systems that I need (want) to get, but I'm way behind on games anyway. As $100 is not a small amount, I started thinking once again about picking up a 360 or a PS3. I had been planning to get a PS3 if I ever got anything, but some recent research, and events in general, have complicated the decision again. Here are the relevant facts, my handful of readers may chip in with their thoughts (I would appreciate it, in fact.)

1) I have a pretty good computer (rather, a really awesome computer). The only game, oddly enough, that I have been unable to run at maximum settings recently is the Champions Online Demo. Had to set everything just about to minimum. I think that might be a bandwidth thing, though. If a game is available on PC, I have no doubt that I would be able to play it, and play it better than either the 360 or the PS3. BUT, not everything is available for PC. It would be nice if I could find a list of which 360 and PS3 games are published for PC.

2) I will not pay for Xbox Live Gold. Period. There are rumors that the Playstation Network is going to start charging, but at the moment, it's free.

3) I don't care about the BD drive in the PS3. I have a great HTPC, and GPL BD drivers and software are finally showing up for media programs to use. I figure I'll add a BD drive to my HTPC before the end of the year.

4) Unless the title is programmed well, the 360 usually provides a better game experience with it's more capable graphics chip. What mainly impresses me is that the 360 seldom falls below 30 frames per second on any game, while the PS3 seems to run around 20-25 fps in the same games. To be clear: neither system's visuals look "better" to me, but the 360 does seem to run more smoothly most of the time...

5) when it's running, anyway. I can't find firm numbers, but the newest 360s are supposed to be much more reliable than older models, but that's a hell of a record to overcome. I never bought the anecdotal stories that the 360 had a first-year failure rate of 50%, but the more-likely rate of 15% is beyond bad enough.

6) Do I need both? I don't want to spend that much money, even with $100 in gift cards.

Maybe I should just ignore it all for another six months. Again.

From Sankaku Complex (site is NSFW, link is ok):

You know how when you start typing in a search term in Google, the search engine will pop up suggestions? Generally along the line of, for example:

I type "hobbit" Google will suggest such phrases as "hobbit house", "hobbit name generator", "hobbit travel" and so on. If I type in "how can I" I get suggestions such as "how can I keep from singing lyrics", "how can I lose 10 pounds in a week", "how can I tell if i am pregnant" and such like.

If I type in "Christianity is" Google suggests some fairly insulting search phrases, although to be fair most of those suggestions are repeated for Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and so on.

But not for Islam. If you type in "Islam is"...you will get nothing.

Apparently Google has been made aware of the problem, and they deny any type of "favoritism". The suggestion feature has a bug that for some reason the Google programmers can not discover, won't make suggestions on the phrase "Islam is". Weird, but possible. In fact, If you search on "Islam" plus any other preposition, you get suggestions. You even get some negative suggestions...but not many. E.g. search for "Islam should" will prompt you with "Islam should be banned."

If there is any story here, I think it's much more telling that suggestions for all other major and minor religions include predominantly negative phrases, while Islam includes mostly positive statements.

No, not what you think. With few exceptions, the "holidays" aspect of the Fall and Winter is a stress-reliever for me. What I'm referring to is that my financial year usually starts in March, April or May; and ends in December. I start getting some income in December. So, the period from November to the end of the year is filled with making every dollar count. Plus, you never "really" know how good a job you did during the year until this final huge, expensive effort.

The amount of work that goes into a harvest and all of the stress mentioned above means, as I posted last year, that I don't really have a lot of time for posting...and when I do, I don't feel like it. I don't want to just do more re-posting from other blogs. I like to try to keep blog mentions confined to other bloggers' original work rather than contributing to another round of viral videos. OTOH, Wonderduck comes up with some of the more unique and entertaining examples I've seen, there are currently two good videos on his front page.

So, just to force myself, I'll just run through some randomness.

Recently found the Let's Play Archive. This particular LP got me wanting to play KotOR 2 again...he made the game sound pretty good. As I tweeted recently; though, I actually think the writing is WORSE in 2 than in one. Different, yes. The story certainly has the basis for something MUCH deeper and more complex than KotOR. Unfortunately, the writer(s) didn't know what they were talking about half the time. Obviously, somebody made it through the first chapter of the Pop Guide to Chaos Theory and a Psychology 101 primer, but missed out on War Strategy and Tactics That Anyone Can Understand and Principles of Leadership: A Common Sense Approach. Then there are the "moral choices." Bioware games and western RPG's in general have become well-known for their "black and white" moral choices. KotOR 2 was made by Obsidian rather than Bioware, and a lot of players felt that Obsidian did a better job of making those choices more like "multiple shades of gray." I don't see it, myself. Most of the choices are still "Save/Eat Puppy", they just word them differently. Most of the "gray" choices are actually railroading by the plot...which is to say, rather than "Save/Eat Puppy" you get to choose "Eat Puppy Now/Eat Puppy Later." See, the writer(s) don't really give you a lot of freedom in "defining" your character. Sure, you can level and play your Jedi as Light/Dark Side, Neutral or Insane; but KotOR 2 goes well beyond KotOR's "this is who you are and what you did, now what are you going to do?" KotOR 2 says, "this is who you are, what you did, why you did it, who you did it with and for, and what you thought of them. Now what are you going to do? Oh, and you're still mad about this, so you should probably choose A, and even though we've made it perfectly clear to you repeatedly, and you have high intelligence and wisdom, you don't really understand B, so we'll just fill in "duuuuuuuuuuuh" for that answer.

And so on.

End the end, it still comes down to "side with/kill bad guy". But there's so much arrogance and ignorance in the story, and the frequent Character Development railroading make the game less enjoyable than KotOR...at least to a certain degree. On the other hand, the story IS more complex...not better, just deeper. The game is bigger, the mechanics are a little better, the crafting system is much improved, and the animations and graphics are much better. On the third hand, the rushed development time means that something like 20% of the game got cut before release, and you see a lot of the resultant broken bits still in the game. I don't bear any hard feelings about that, though...13 months is not enough time to develop a game like this.

---------

I'm just about tired of my iPhone. Getting sick of what I can't do with it. It's a decent multimedia phone, but it just can't compare to a full smartphone with better desktop integration. Add to that the number of ways that Apple WON'T service the phone, and the dreaded iTunes. Think I'll switch to THIS.

---------

Thought about playing Dwarf Fortress. Got over it.

---------

Can't think of anything else, right now. Although this is good:

I've stated repeatedly that the first current-gen console I would buy, if I had an urgent need to spend money, would be a PS3. But the current God Mode really nails the unbelievable levels of Sony Fanboy-ism going on these days:

Yeah, there's this one: Some guy on the moon...

But there's also this one: Do You Remember Love?

The end is nigh.

Sony dropped full PS2/PS1 backward compatibility from the PS3 a year ago, presumably to cut costs. The original two models of the PS3 had the Emotion Engine processor from the PS2 included in hardware, which meant that each PS3 came with, in effect, a PS2 built in. This solution apparently worked pretty well, but didn't sell too many $600 - $700 PS3s. Sony came out with a new design WITHOUT the Emotion Engine and dropped the price; that didn't help much either. Finally, this spring saw an increase in sales for the PS3 in Japan, driven apparently by several new A-List software titles. Sales in America have not increased outside of normal variances.

Not surprisingly, one of the most-quoted reasons by gamers for not buying a PS3 is the lack of backward compatibility. Gamers wanted the PS3 as introduced, except cheaper (game developers were pushing hard for this, as well). What Sony gave us was a slightly cheaper PS3 WITHOUT backward compatibility (a few other features were dropped in cheaper models, as well).

Presumably, Sony may have learned their lesson. From Sankaku Complex comes a story about a recently filed patent in America that (supposedly) shows a method for the PS3 to emulate the Emotion engine via software. I'm a bit confused on several issues here:

1) I thought it already did that?

2) Obviously, there IS some confusion about this...

3) The best I can tell, this chart from Wikipedia is accurate. To sum up, the original 20GB and original 60GB had an Emotion Engine built in. In 2007, an 80GB model was released that had emulation, rather than an Emotion Engine processor. Later in the year, a 40GB model was released that had NO backward compatibility. Neither have the current 80GB or 160GB models.

4) I have never understood why Sony dropped the emulation (code, once written, does you no good if it's not used). The only answer I can see is that according to anecdote, Sony's PS2 emulation didn't even work as well at Microsoft's Xbox emulation.

5) Unless the re-introduction of emulation is accompanied by another price drop, I don't see how this will significantly boost sales. If it's GOOD emulation, that means I can go back to buying a NEW PS3 instead of a used one for myself, but...if there's no price drop, why buy it now when you wouldn't buy it before?

6) I seriously doubt that emulation is going to allow you to play ALL of your PS2 titles on the PS3. Even including the Emotion Engine IN the PS3 didn't give you 100% flawless playability. Xbox emulation is pretty good, and you get, what 85% backward compatibility? Maybe close to 90%? Haven't looked in a while. If you're a Sony fanboy, I'm sure you believe that Sony will do it better than Microsoft, but it STILL won't be 100%, or even close to it.

Don't have anything to add right now, but you REALLY NEED to read this article by Galrahn at Information Dissemination:

"We may find the Tweeters take political power and what are we going to do then? Talk about a paradigm shift."

- Dr. Anne-Marie Slaughter, Director of Policy Planning for the State Department, June 18th, 2009

There is irony that Dr. Slaughter was expressing this opinion on Wednesday morning, because this week Twitter has become not only a tool for channeling population centric political power against a government, but perhaps even a tool for leveraging population centric military power. As I observe the events unfolding online surrounding the Iranian elections, I see a sustained global, generational, multinational cyber skirmish against the current government of Iran with the intent of expressing political support for the Iranian people.

If that sounds a bit odd to you, all I can say is welcome to the 21st century, because you have just stepped into the reality of Generation Y's virtual world.

Full Article Here: Information Dissemination