Recent Posts

People complaining about the operating systems that other people use sucks.

No, I'm complaining about an operating system that I'm using because I don't have a license to use anything better in my VM.  The fact that I use it for nothing but syncing my iPhone and can still find things to bitch about should be indication enough that something is seriously wrong with the way it does things.

My rant was mainly directed toward the general populous because I have to support that shit and try to hack it into behaving rationally at least once a week.  Supporting XP is a grating experience because Vista and 7 just handle networking that much better.

Trying to get XP to network in an anonymous workgroup environment nicely sucks ass compared to literally anything else (including "classic" Windows and pre-SP2 XP).  That is a simple fact, and it's all thanks to Microsoft's placebo "security model" that they introduced in SP2.

People complaining about the operating systems that other people use sucks.  As does Mac OS X, fuck you Apple~

Also what the fuck can somebody resize vlad's gifuckingnormous image or link it instead of uuuuuuuuuuugh

You're missing the other point on those games (Fallout 3 and Mercenaries 2) and that's that the other flavor of the month these days is sandbox games. Market games and tell people that they can do anything in them and they'll play it.

I'm still not entirely convinced that the only reason that Mercenaries 2 sold was because it was a sandbox-style game.  With Fallout 3, at least Bethesda could lean on the success of Oblivion and Morrowind.

I'm sure there were some people who bought it for that reason, and I'm sure some others bought it because they enjoyed the original game, but most of the people that I know that played it or bought it did so solely because they couldn't stop singing "Oh No You Didn't."

ignoring shitstorm (with me not in it?  is this a s.net first?)

Yep.

As posted on my tumblr:

Why in the hell do people cling to Windows XP?  Yeah, I used to like 2000 and XP back in the day, but that day was almost a bloody decade ago.  I can't even stand using it part-time in a VM nowadays because of its, uh, "intricacies" (to put it politely).

It sucks.  Upgrade to either Windows 7 or Mac OS X already!  I'm running Windows 7 perfectly fine on a five year old laptop.  If your machine can't handle it, you're due for a system upgrade.

Posted because I'm having a horrendous time with its "secure" file sharing.  I'm not putting a fucking password on my iTunes VM.  That would just be stupid.  And I don't want to couple a password with automatic logon just to satisfy some lame kludge that "enhances security" (protip from a former network admin: it fucking doesn't; all it does is annoy administrators and people who just want their fucking anonymous shares to work).

It's a good thing I have XP Pro running in my VM, since XP Home is much more guarded about its group policies for some reason (which, again, makes no fucking sense!  Group policies cannot be fully utilized because you can't join domains, so the only reason you'd want them is to disable stupid fucking handholding features...thank goodness for Microsoft getting a damned clue with Vista and keeping that -- and the graphical ACL editor -- unlocked in the home editions).

it's a nice game because i put in the disc, turn on the console, and unlike pc shit most of the goddamn time, it works. 

Eh, Steam did make things a tad better.

I was particularly impressed with Mafia II for PC.  I was literally able to start the game up and click play.  In the case of both my system and my dad's system (my dad's system resembling my old one, only with a faster dual core CPU rather than a slower quad core), it automatically picked display options that provided an excellent mixture of performance and quality.  The game both looks nice and plays smoothly.  I haven't seen a game do quite as good of a job as that before; usually they wind up dramatically underestimating your computing power, even if your system is from the same era as the game.

Of course, there's no telling how it's going to handle systems that are newer than it, but from what I've seen of it, it probably has the best set of optimized settings I've seen for the computers of now.

That being said, I really hate the way developers are treating the PC, and not just in control sets.  In particular, I'm kind of angsty at the way game developers treat ATI owners.  Almost every fucking time I see a "Designed for nVidia" logo on a game, it seems to be broken on ATI cards in some way (with Mafia II being one notable exception).  Usually the excuse is that "wahhh ATI has buggy drivers lol."  Right.  In that case, explain why companies that hire competent -- sometimes world-renowned programmers -- like id Software and Epic Games, don't seem to have any issue supporting everything out of the box with their engines.  Say what you will about Unreal Tournament 3, but that game can play at an extremely playable framerate on my laptop, and the only thing that its video card can beat nowadays are Intel's chips (though it can play a mean game of Doom 3 and FEAR).

Also, I really, really doubt that "driver bugs" are really the issue here.  Batman: Arkham Asylum is a particularly notorious example, as it locks out (or used to, at any rate) anti-aliasing on ATI cards.  Needless to say, the game has a "designed for nVidia" logo, and when anti-aliasing is hacked on it works perfectly fine on ATI cards.  Even if there were driver bugs, you'd think that they would work around some of the "bugs," considering ATI has roughly 50% of the market share for discreet video chipsets.  You know, the thing that developers usually do when certain video card driver releases have bugs.

Don't even get me started on all of the PhysX bullshit.  Between them choosing to use the slowest possible x86 instructions to do math to cripple operation on CPUs, limiting support to nVidia cards, and preventing people from using a hybrid configuration (i.e. nVidia GPU for physics processing and an ATI GPU for rendering), I don't think I really need to say anything.  I could understand nVidia limiting support to, well, nVidia cards, but the other two issues are just inexcusable.

The long and short of it: nVidia makes some rockin' hardware, but the company itself is worse than Microsoft in the late 90s.  Fuck 'em.

...wow, that was quite a tangent.

spending way too much goddamn time getting this beta to work, then it does, but random textures fucking everywhere and i don't want to play it this way when i can hardly see where im going.

this picture is what i have to deal with.  look playable from that image?  yeah, but some textures block out the whole goddamn screen, or most of it, so you can see how annoying it could be.  ohh, and they are everywhere, even in cutscenes.  only place they are missing is the character creation/selection screens before you log onto the server. 



im not about to admit how much time i have invested in getting this far, and failing at fixing this graphic problem, but it's enough to piss someone off. 

back to fear effect 2 with me.  it's a nice game because i put in the disc, turn on the console, and unlike pc shit most of the goddamn time, it works. 

ib4 BUT ITS A BETA ITS SPOSED TO BE BUGGY, not aware if this is a problem on my end, or the games end, but regardless of beta or not, this is annoying and if i can't get it working before the beta ends, this could very well finalize my decision to not buy the game

I just finished it and after the first hour it gets really really good. And then once you "beat" the game you get a real nice epilogue that's a lot of fun. And then you can just search the ship for everything that you have left.

I do blogging now, apparently. This was spawned by a very impromptu trip, in many fashions.

http://crushtheinfamousones.blogspot.com/

I bought Metroid: Other M but haven't gotten around to playing it yet

I hope it's good :S

Firefox's tab separation isn't that great.  If one tab crashes in the right way, the whole browser will go down.  While they implemented plugin separation (so that, in theory, Flash taking a shit won't bring the entire browser down), it's still not great since all plugins work in the same sandbox.  Essentially, one dying Flash plugin can impact all plugins in the sandbox.  Similarly, if the rendering engine takes a dive, the entire browser will still go down faster than the titanic.

Yeah, I've seen that happen before. I always wondered why I could be watching a flash video in one tab with this site open in another, then have the whole thing crash because the one tab couldn't play the flash video for some reason. Youtube uses flash so it happened more than once for me.

If you're worried about losing out on AdBlock Plus, there is an AdBlock extension for Chrome which uses the same filter list.  I've had it installed since I switched and it's worked fantastically.

Excellent. I was really happy to hear that its available on Chrome; should make the experience that much more awesome

That's actually an incredibly descriptive site.  Unlike many "ZOMG IM A TWEEKAR" sites, clicking on the service name actually gives you detailed information on the service.

I certainly wouldn't go with the barebones configuration (though I really doubt that was intended for general use), but from what I'm seeing of the tweaked configuration, it looks like the guy really did his homework on this.  There is a possibility that some of the choices could potentially affect applications (hence the inclusion of a safe configuration set) but I doubt it would affect most of the programs that people run; plus, that's a bridge that you could always cross when you get there.

So then his "safe" category is a sure bet then. Thats good, I had always looked for a comprehensive list on this stuff but when I found them, they never really had a good reason or explanation.

Well if you do decide to get one, I suggest checking thrift stores first. The ones in my area often have them though they're not always in the best shape, so this one was a pretty good score. Especially since it was only $30. I've never seen one less than around $80, even second-hand.

What he said.

I also have a futon and my god, a futon is a good thing to have around, especially if you're on your own. It switches easily to couch mode too for those "movie nights" you are bound to have with your new futon. Even though its nice to find a used on in good shape though, if you have a bit of extra cash, hit up a mattress store or bed store or whatever. They usually offer different kinds of mattress sets for your futon so you can get anything from something firm to lie on to "sink in until you can't see out." I got a middle guy for an extra $50 bucks or so, but again, it depends on where you get it.

ignoring shitstorm (with me not in it?  is this a s.net first?)

don't know if want, but will be interested in seeing how it turns out. 

i am not a duke nukem fan, the most i played was about an hour of the n64 version at a neighbors house.  but i am into the whole duke nukem theme, the "not seriousness" of the thing.

but for fans, this is fantastic news, and hopefully it proves to be a fun game at the very minimum.