Yeah, I’ve never really liked MSN, but today I finally felt I had enough. 9 out of 10 messages that I try to send never get sent due to “timeouts” or some other cockamamie bullshit Microsoft cooks up.

So, basically, MSN (or Windows Live Messenger or whatever the hell Microsoft has rebranded it as today) is dead to me. I never liked it, I only used it for those people who I consider friends and who insisted on using this braindead protocol for communication. I don’t really care if it’s that I use a third-party client or not, as far as I’m concerned that shouldn’t be an issue and if Microsoft are (once again) trying to abuse their property to lock users in, then I’m not having any of that.

So, if you contact me and get no reply: it’s not me. It’s Microsofts mess of an IM-protocol. Get me on ICQ or give me an old-fashioned phonecall. Either is preferable.

In the future I’m going to merge all my IM to Jabber, but that’ll be a while

When I grew up the term “game console” was virtually unknown. I grew up when the NES was king, and back then those machines were simply called video-games. The were primitive, clunky, rather expensive and I wanted one badly. Unfortunately for me, there were no video-games in our house.

Since then I have obviously grown up. I was ten years old in 1988, and for the last twenty years I have become less and less interested in game consoles, while the consoles have grown more and more powerful. In fact, I’d say that the consoles of today resemble full-fledged computers more than those primitive ancestors of yore.

And now is why I’m going to wonder why us who prefer PC-gaming has to wait in favor of the consoles.

See, the original Xbox when it arrived back in 2001 was essentially just a PC in a more manageable case. It had a harddrive, it had essentially the same kind of CPU as in most budget-computers, it had a graphics circuit which was essentially a GeForce3, and it had a network card. The new 360 and PS3 are even more powerful, and are essentially computers in a neat package.

Today it’s unheard of to release a game for consoles exclusively, since the PC gaming market is as huge as it’s ever been. Yet we have to wait for games, for seemingly no other reason than an artificially introduced one.

I’ve been looking forward to GTA4 since I first heard it announced. But it seems I’m going to have to wait until October simply because I don’t own a 360 or a PS3. Why? It doesn’t make sense to me. It can’t be THAT difficult to port a game to the PC, especially since they managed to release two versions of it for two different platforms at the same time. The 360 and the PS3 are (I imagine) as different from each other as they are to a PC, yet no PC version is forthcoming until fall. When GTA: San Andreas was released it was the same thing. In that case it was even worse; the PS2 version came almost a full year before the PC version. Why?

Mass Effect is another example. For the 360 it was released in November 2007, yet it has taken six months to make a version for the PC. That version will be released the 28th of this month.

I strongly doubt that there’s a technical reason for not releasing games for the PC at the same time as the consoles. So why do companies do it? Do they just do it out of spite? Or is it that they have to put tons of (in my opinion) useless DRM/Copy protection schemes into the game, and this is what takes six months or more?

But to me as it stands right now, it doesn’t make sense.

… or, how I’d rather have my eyes gouged out by scalding irons than use it again.

I deleted my Windows-partition a few weeks ago when I had finished playing through the games I wanted to try out. Recently I felt another hankering for some gaming-action and decided to reinstall Windows. This time though I went for the 64-bit version of Windows Vista, thinking that I should do it properly. Or whatever. Mostly I just wanted to see if there was such a huge difference in Crysis between DX9 and DX10.

Well, anyways. After moving around some drives I popped the disc in the drive and proceeded to install. The installation is fairly straightforward, essentially as dumb as the XP-install but at least it’s prettier to look at. Partitioning is a bit smoother though, although as usual the way of thinking in Windows is somewhat backward.

After some reboots there was some information that needed to be input. Create a user, etc etc. Then, for some inexplicable reason Windows decided it was time to do the Windows Performance Benchmark or whatever it’s called. Stupid, since I was running on stock-drivers and all that. There’s no way of skipping it though, so I just rolled my thumbs and waited.

Until a minute or so later when it bluescreened. Something about the memory controller. I sighed and waited until it rebooted by it’s own volition.

When it started up again I was greeted by the create-a-user request. However, my chosen username was apparently already taken, so I created another. This time it didn’t do the Windows Performance-whatever thing since I guess it had already been checked off somewhere inside the corridors as “done”. A moment later I was looking at the login-screen. On screen were two icons with my first username and then my second one.

Before I continue, let me say now that I hate that login-screen. First off, it looks like it was designed by Mimi from the Drew Carey Show. It’s garish, it’s loud and it takes itself way too seriously. Secondly, whoever thought it would be neat to have an icon to click on and then forcing the user to type the password is stupid. Logging in takes twice as long since you have to flail your arms around your desk as if you were on fire. And as you will find out, I had to look at it a lot, which annoyed me even further.

I felt adventurous and clicked my original username. You know, the one I created first and then followed with a nice ol’ BSOD. I clicked it, punched the password, was greeted with a message as to how Windows was “preparing my desktop” and then for no good reason the computer rebooted. I sarcastically remarked to myself that it was impressive how Microsoft had managed to emulate the look and feel of a BIOS-bootscreen.

Next time around I clicked the secondary username. This time I was not greeted with a reboot, but instead the desktop appeared. Of course, “appeared” isn’t a proper description. Jerked itself onto the screen is probably a more accurate metaphor. It was in glorious 800×600, and everything was the size of Montana. I downloaded and installed drivers for my Audigy2 ZS and 9600GT and then rebooted. Now the login-screen was in a more human resolution.

I logged in and was greeted with the amusing effect that my monitor went into standby. Weird. It made it rather difficult to troubleshoot as well, since I was effectively blind. After a reboot into Ubuntu and some brief googling I found others with the same problem. Apparently Windows or the Nvidia-driver or whichever sometimes got confused as to what port the primary monitor was plugged in. The work-around was to move the monitor to another DVI-port. I tried it, no dice. On a whim I unplugged my TV-out and after a hard reset (ouch!) I could control my own computer again. Apparently Windows though the TV-out was the primary monitor.

Then the fun really began. I installed some basic applications and for every one of them I was hassled with a barrage of “Are you sure you want to do this?”-type questions. I guess some were UAC-related, others were, well, I don’t know why they insisted on popping up for no good reason. Either way they were extremely annoying. It was a little odd as well when I double-clicked a folder and found myself staring at another bluescreen. This time it was the good old “page fault in non-paged area” which was an old buddy of mine. I think every computer I’ve owned for the last 8 years has seen that BSOD happen.

I wasn’t particularly impressed by Aero either. It felt too frail, and after having used Compiz Fusion for almost a year I wasn’t very impressed by any of the effects either. I felt rather constricted by being limited to one desktop; often I would ctrl-alt-left to try to find another desktop, then remember that yeah, Windows still didn’t have that feature. I felt that the whole Vista-experience must be similar to being at a brazilian carnival for mentally retarded people. Everything is dressed in bright, gaudy colors while loud music and sound-effects play, and everyone shouts stupid and obvious questions at you.

“ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DRINK THAT? YES/NO/CANCEL. DO YOU WANT TO OPEN THIS DOOR? ALLOW/CANCEL”

And so forth, and so on.

Moving right along. I started installing Crysis. It took forever. I swear, it went less than a quarter of the speed that the same install took under XP on the exact same machine.

To top it all off, I got another bluescreen. This time it complained about something else, I really didn’t pay attention any longer. Instead I pushed reset and booted into Ubuntu, laughing at myself for the folly of even trying this. Tomorrow I’ll instead install XP strictly for gaming, and never again bother with anything else.

Bill, let me give you some advice. I know you don’t give a rats ass about me, but let me suggest that you and your soul-crushing company just bury Vista already. It’s been more than a year, and the Wow hasn’t started yet. It’s been more like “Why?” than Wow. Just bury Vista, pretend it never happened, pay off whatever people are going to sue you, don’t listen to the fanboys, and simply stick your head in the sand over the whole dang thing. Bill, listen to what an old friend of mine has to say:

(slightly paraphrased)

“Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Source.”

Today’s date is Thursday, April 24th, 2008. That means that today is the day that Ubuntu 8.04 is released. At the time of writing this, Ubuntus own page hasn’t yet been updated to reflect that so hold off downloading for a while until it’s been updated.

I’ve been running the 64-bit version of Hardy on my workstation for the past month or so, and it’s the best so far. Because that’s what Linux is, small but steady improvements. I’ve read a lot of comments on the net saying that they’re always disappointed that there’s never any huge improvements in each new version of Ubuntu, and compares it with Windows who introduces a lot of new flair.

Unfortunately, what they forget to factor in is that Ubuntu ships a new version every six months. That is twelve (12!!) releases for the time it took to finish Vista. Consider again that each new version of Ubuntu contains myriads of improvements - some small, some big - and Windows just looks plain silly. The only really new improvement Vista brought over XP was a flashier interface.

I recommend everyone to download it and try it. It won’t cost you more than a CD-R and some time.

There are however a few issues for me left from when I earlier wrote about Hardy. Pretty much all of them have been fixed, except for

* I’m still not completely happy with btnx, and evdev seems to be broken still. After some fiddling with it, researching it a bit more and generally spending slightly more time than ten seconds thinking about it, I discovered that a minor bit of tweaking was needed. Just point evdev at the right device and it works fine. Sidescroll works fine now, but I need to figure out a way to reverse it - right now it scrolls right when you punch left and so on. Btnx is history for me.

(it should be noted though that this might be residual annoyance since my Hardy-installation started life as Alpha6, and it might be some old configuration that lurks beneath the surface)

* Flash has issues. I realized how Flash is implemented in the 64-bit version, it’s simply a 64-bit wrapper around the regular 32-bit Flash binary. This is an ugly hack, and the wrapper has a tendency to lock up every now and again. It should be pointed out though that this is not Ubuntus fault - it’s Adobes, for insisting on not releasing a 64-bit Flash for Linux.

* I don’t know if Ubuntu has updated it’s proprietary driver-manager to support newer Nvidia-cards such as the 9xxx-series. I know the driver supporting them is still in Beta, so it might not be supported by the easy click-and-say-yes method Ubuntu has. This means that owners of 9xxx-cards (including myself) have to visit Nvidias site and install it the old-fashioned method. This is quite user-unfriendly, but again, blame Nvidia and not Ubuntu. I don’t know if the famous Envy-script supports installing the drivers for 9xxx-series cards since I’ve never used it.

Here’s two screenshots for you. The top is a standard desktop, the bottom is the exposé-like view featuring the “curved” option enabled. I think it’s pretty.

UPDATE: The official page has been updated. Grab your copy from the download page.

Yeah, keen observers might note that I’ve removed the “Ubuntu Linux” page from my blog.

Why?

Well, I realized that it was futile to try to have a static page about such a fast-moving target. By the time I’m even close to getting around to finishing it a new version of Ubuntu has been released, and the cycle starts over again.

Instead I’m going to write a static page about Ubuntu, I’m going to some day create a static page about my thoughts on Free Software, Linux and that stuff. For Ubuntu-related news you’ll simply have to read the blog instead. Or search it.

In two days Hardy Heron is officially released. It’s a bit obvious saying this, but so far it’s the best yet. I roll my eyes a bit when I read about how people try it and are disappointed that the changes aren’t as big as they expected. Well, that’s how Linux works. Small, but constant and never-ending improvements - unlike Windows who builds a hype-machine for five years and then falls flat on it’s face since it’s essentially the same stuff as before.

The other day Gartner published a warning that Windows will collapse unless something dramatic is done on Microsofts part.

Let me correct that statement: Windows has been collapsing for years, and Microsoft knows it. They also know that they’re screwed either way, and have so far been sticking their heads in the sand trying to ignore reality.

See, regardless of what Microsoft tries to tell you, they’re selling a product that is a legacy-system. They retired most of the Windows 95-codebase after Windows ME proved to be a spectacular failure in every department, but most of Windows XP, Windows 2000 and I would assume quite a lot of Windows Vista’s collective codebases date back more than a decade, back to Windows NT.

Since 2001 when Windows XP was launched, every release since then has basically just been another spit-n-shine polish of the old Windows NT-codebase. Sure, they’ve tacked on some new bits, but the core dates back to around 1996. Don’t be fooled by Vista either, even though Microsoft likes to hint at Vista being a complete rewrite (thus attempting to explain away the extended birthing process) it isn’t. It’s another legacy-OS dressed up with new clothing.

Windows has been falling apart for a decade. The only thing it’s really bored into peoples consciousness is that Windows is unreliable. By extension, this has caused a deep, almost subconscious feeling in the human population that computers are unreliable regardless of what system they’re running.

What Gartner suggests is that Microsoft is going to have to do a complete overhaul of the Windows codebase, or face complete and utter failure in every department. They point to the extended process behind Vista combined with it’s failure to live up to the hype as reasons why this is needed. Vista took a long time to develop. A long, long, long time. It required at least one complete restart of the project (that we know of, there might be others that Microsoft is black-bagging) and yet the reception to the new version can’t be described as anything more than lukewarm. And I’m being somewhat generous in that description.

Why did Vista take so long to produce? Simple. The codebase has become an unmaintainable jungle, and every effort to make it straighten up and fly right is failing. This is also reflected in Vistas much less than stellar performance. Even on powerful computers it limps along and is having a hard time keeping up with it’s much older cousin Windows XP.

Additionally, while a lot of people are quick to defend Microsoft using Windows XP’s success as an example, we need to remember what Windows XP was like when it was young. It was a temperamental beast lacking most of the hype that we were promised. Sure, it didn’t take six years to reach the market. But it took six years and thousands of patches, driver updates and general tweaking to get it to where it is today. It’ll probably take another six years of applying tough love to Vista to get it even remotely into shape.

“Why yes, this is the size of the Windows codebase!”

So, suppose that Microsoft actually bites the bullet and decides to overhaul Windows. It will take them years upon years to rebuild a new codebase that comes even close to delivering what people are expecting these days.

Apple is a good example of what Microsoft is going to have to do. Apples MacOS was failing miserably when it depended on the legacy of what’s now called MacOS Classic. Versions 8 and 9 were miserable and not well-received by the users. Apple did bite the bullet and did a complete overhaul of MacOS. It took a long time, a lot of work, and a lot of inventiveness but Apple now has an operating system that is flexible, robust, well-performing and scalable. All the things that Windows badly needs. MacOS can be scaled down to run on a cellphone, and it can be scaled up to run on supercomputers.

— Lots of semi-technical mumbo-jumbo starts here—

Along the road Apple had to make a lot of tough choices. Not too long ago there was an uproar about how Adobe isn’t going to ship a 64-bit Photoshop-version for Mac. This has it’s base in Apple deciding to not support Carbon, the API that Adobe has used to make Photoshop under OS X, in 64-bit environments. Carbon is one of the five API’s in OS X, and it was originally only meant as a transitional API. This was since a lot of companies (including Adobe) complained about having to port their existing codebase to Cocoa, the preferred API in OS X. Thus, Carbon was born, with the intention of retiring it when companies had gotten their codebases up to speed. Adobe never bothered, and now that Carbon is becoming history, Adobe has to rewrite Photoshop to use Cocoa in order to produce a long-awaited 64-bit version of Photoshop, which they originally should’ve done years ago. Apple made a tough choice deciding not to support Carbon under 64-bit systems, but it’ll be a choice that will prove fortuitous in the long run.

(Disclaimer: I’m not an Apple, Photoshop, OS X, Carbon/Cocoa or Adobe-expert. So any errors are simply my own)

— Lots of semi-technical mumbo-jumbo ends here—

This is a much simplifed example of one tough choice Apple had to make. Apple realized they’d had to do a complete overhaul, or go under when the ship sank. Microsoft is going to have to do the same thing - a complete rebirth of Windows with a brand-new codebase and a completely new approach to operating systems. They can no longer rely on their old codebase.

The difference here is that Microsoft will probably be screwed no matter what they do. If they decide to do a complete rewrite there will probably be at least a decade before we see a new Windows. Even then I doubt it will be a mature product. Think of it as being in a car-crash, damaging your brain and then having to learn to walk all over again. That’s what Microsoft is going to have to do. They can no longer rely on their previous knowledge (i.e. codebase) and will have to start from scratch.

Apple didn’t really have anything to lose. Instead they had everything to win by doing this. In 1997-1998, Apple was a dying company, desperately trying to find their way again. Microsoft on the other hand has everything to lose, and very little to gain. While they’re busy re-creating Windows from scratch they will lose customers. Apple is coming strong, with fairly innovative and high-quality products, at least considering they’re a corporation with profit-margins. On the other side of the forest are the hungry Free/Open Source systems. Linux is just as scalable, powerful and flexible as OS X - if not more. The big difference is that anyone can install Linux, without paying a dime, and without annoyances common in the Microsoft-sphere. No viruses, no firewalls, no rootkits, no NSA-backdoors into your computer, no EULAs and no trouble.

On the other hand, if Microsoft insists on continuing to re-use the existing Windows-codebase the problems will persist. Windows of the future will be an even worse, virus-infected, unstable thing. Microsoft will spend billions of dollars trying to reign in their legacy-code, spend fortunes trying to get it under control - and fail spectacularly.

Microsoft is damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. Either way, I think that the future of software and computing will be radically different.

I’m an active member of Seti@home, running the BOINC-client on both the server powering this website as well as my workstation.

The software for crunching these numbers is quite good, but there’s one thing I really miss - the ability to specify idle-time for each core.

As it is, I run Seti on three of my four cores. Unfortunately, it’s all or nothing. I wish there was a way to specify that BOINC uses, say, one core while the computer is active, and when I’m gone and I don’t care about fan-noise and such it uses all three cores alloted to it.

Currently there’s no way of doing that. At least not as far as I know. Now it’s either being annoyed by the CPU-fan while working, or wasting valuable CPU-cycles waiting for the system to go idle.

Although I suppose a third solution would be to buy a better CPU-cooler. I’m running the stock AMD-cooler that came with the processor, and while it’s virtually inaudible it gets rather noisy when the temperature goes up. Right this second it’s spinning at 4500 rpm and sounds a bit like a polish vacuum-cleaner.

—

Secondly, I’m not particularly amused by Wordpress 2.5. Yeah, it’s nice and all, but there are a few things that annoy me and that I hope will be corrected in Wordpress 2.5.1

1) There’s no “save and continue editing”-button. Either you wait for it to automatically save your post so you can preview it, or you save it and get dumped into a preview.

When I blog I like to have the preview open in one Firefox-tab and the editor in another. In previous versions this allowed me to quickly edit and preview posts. With 2.5 there’s a lot of shuffling in and out of the admin-interface.

2) The new image/media-uploader is a little confusing. While I greatly welcome the capability to upload multiple files, as well as having more options for thumbnailing, I do find the interface rather confusing.

3) The admin-interface is pretty. But when writing I feel that it was a dumb thing to move categories and such down below the post-field. Several times I’ve forgotten about checking the categories for a post, and had to edit it immediately afterwards. Instead of having it down there, why not use all the whitespace to the right and put it there, like in previous versions?

I thought up a tricky question for myself. It’s a doozy, and there’s really no good answer to it.

But I asked myself, if I had to decide on the one thing I dislike the most about Microsoft, what would that be?

There’s a lot of things I dislike about Microsoft. Tons of it. If I made a “top ten list of things I think sucks about the beast in Redmond” it wouldn’t be a top-ten list. It’d be more like a top one-hundred list. And even then I’d not manage to fully divulge my distaste for the Borg Collective.

But deciding on just one thing, now that’s tricky. The winner. Numero uno. The big enchilada.

I might say that their products are crap. But that’s a bit like saying the sky is blue or water is wet. It’s kinda redundant. I could say that every time Bill Gates says something, his smug voice makes me want to puke all over him. But that’s more a personal opinion rather than something profoundly sucky. He just happens to have a really annoying voice.

I might point out their predatory, extend-and-embrace practices, their gobbling up of smaller, more inventive companies who we never hear from again. I could point out Microsofts constant dropping of the ball, and always being four or five years late for the party yet pouring money all over everything and suddenly making it seem like they were the hosts of the party to begin with.

Again though, that’s really just stating the obvious.

No, if I have to decide on the one thing that really irks me the most about the Borg Collective, it would be that they for some reason always manage to sell The Next Big Thing rather than some real product.

Last night I was having a hard time falling asleep, and as is customary with me then I start thinking. Roughly 98% of the thoughts sloshing around inside my head are essentially brainfarts, but every once in a while something insightful comes along and shines a light.

Last night I was thinking of that bloated monstrosity Microsoft calls “Vista”. Don’t ask me why I was thinking about it, I can’t give a good answer to that. But while I was lying there in my bed I realized that Microsoft will use their oldest, most trusted tactic to make money off of Vista, even though it was dead on arrival, and even though nothing seems to change this.

This tactic can be summed up in one sentence.

“The next version will fix everything that’s wrong with this one”

That, my friends, is Microsofts oldest and most reliable sales-method. For more than a decade and a half they’ve managed to use this method to sell shitty, proprietary software to a lot of people. They’ve essentially been using it at the very least since the late 80’s. Probably even from the very start of Microsoft.

And when you think of it, it’s actually quite brilliant. No other industry on the face of the planet can use this method.

“Oh, sorry about the explosion in your brand-new car, the one that killed your wife and both your kids. Don’t worry though, the next version will fix that!”

or

“Oops, your house burned down. Well, just have fun in that tent until we release Home 2.0 and then you can pay through your nose to buy the same dang thing all over again!”

If any car-dealer or homebuilder tried that they’d find themselves dangling from the nearest tree. But Microsoft can do it. Microsoft is indirectly acceptable for people losing everything from photos of their kids to data worth millions of dollars every day. Yet they somehow manage to sell the next version even though it’s still vaporware.

Compare Vista with what’s currently known as Windows 7. Windows 7 is the term being bandied about the playground as the next version of Windows. Microsoft makes some very generous claims that it will be out next year and it will be awesome! At least, that’s if you listen to the honeydew that Microsoft pours into your ears.

Vista has floundered in pretty much every area it’s been introduced to. Corporations have wrinkled their nose at it, since it requires a lot of work and a lot of investment in new computers, despite not actually doing anything that corporations need. In fact, Vista is a dead fish as far as most coporations are concerned. XP does most of what they need (i.e. run Office) and that doesn’t warrant an upgrade.

A lot of Joe Generic computer-users out there in the world is rejecting it as well. Even a lot of diehard Microsoft-fanboys are being rather vocal about their less than stellar experiences with Vista. It’s been reported that Vista is a failure compared to what Microsoft was projecting about a year and a half ago. Back then, Vista was the best thing since pre-sliced bread. Now, it’s lying there on the floor, gasping for air.

Which brings me to Windows 7. Of course, it will be named something else when/if it’s released, but for a codename it’s easily the unsexiest ever. Hell, even Vistas codename (Longhorn) was better.

Have you all noticed how Microsoft are revving up their sales-dachshunds and having them yap about Windows 7? I have. And I think Microsoft has opened their vault and brought out ye olde “The Next Version Will Be Awesome!”-sales pitch. Windows 7 is going to be everything that Vista wasn’t. It’s going to be leaner, meaner, modular and bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla.

Whenever I see Microsoft using this technique I somehow wonder if I’m the only sane person in a world gone mad. Am I the only one who has this sneaking suspicion that everything Microsoft produces is intentionally broken, so that they can use this sales-pitch to stay in business? Of course, it’s in a corporations least interest to actually sell products that never wear out, and Microsoft is doing exactly this in the software industry. But it amazes me how everyone has been criticizing their products for seemingly eons, yet when Microsoft shakes The New And Improved Product in their face they can’t open their wallets fast enough.

Why?

Because the Next Version Will Be Perfect.

And so on, and so forth unto infinity. Everyone keeps Bill Gates bank-account well and inflated, while using products that are defective by design.

One of the things that upgrading my computer brought with it was the capability to once again play games. Describing me as a casual gamer is very spot-on, with some weighting on the casual since it’s much rarer to find me gaming these days than before. There’s very few games who catch my interest, and I have a tendency to lose that interest quickly. Ask any of my friends who’s the first one to bail out of multiplayer-games and most of them will point at me.

None the less, I looked forward to being able to try a few of the current games. I have a very loose grasp of what’s current, but I knew that Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 were high up on the list. I also remembered that Bioshock had gotten good reviews and decided to try it as well.

Bioshock was in my opinion very impressive. UT3 is pretty much what could be expected. Crysis on the other hand is without a doubt the biggest disappointment in many years.

Sure, I’ll give praise where praise is due. Visually Crysis is spectacular. The graphics-engine is nothing short of amazing. It will require a quite powerful machine, but if you have one then it will deliver. If you want to impress your friends, Crysis will do nicely. Sound is also pretty good, but it can’t match the visual Wow-factor.

Everything else however, is in my opinion pathetically poor.

The story starts off good enough. In a not too distant future you as a member of an elite search & rescue operation gets sent to a tropical paradise to extract a few archeologists who’ve gotten run over by North Korean army. You discover after a while that something isn’t right, and the archeological dig turns out to be something else. In fact, it turns out to be some kind of alien machine-civilization thingamajig that runs amok and you alone stand between it and the rest of the earth.

The first part of the game is quite cool. Your suit has various neat functions, such as increasing your speed, making you less vulnerable to gunfire, making you stronger or even turning you invisible. Each function has advantages and drawbacks. For example, when in Strong-mode you’re incredibly slow, and in Speed-mode you’re vulnerable to gunfire. When you’re invisible you can’t fire your gun or your cloak will disappear. And so on, and so forth.

Utilizing these functions to outwit and outgun the Korean military is fun. Sneaking around the bushes using a sniper-rifle to pick off targets is fun.

But as soon as the alien crap starts everything that makes the game fun disappears, and instead it mutates into a beautiful but boring twitch-shooter. All the things that made the game impressive in the first part simply become irrelevant. The excellent AI that powers the Korean soldiers disappear, since the aliens will mindlessly attack until you kill them. Whichever mode your suit is in doesn’t matter, and the only thing that matters is how many bullets you can fire at whatever is attacking you. It becomes boring and repetitive, and whatever shred of story exists simply fades into the background.

A good single-player game needs a good story. Fabulous visuals are no compensation for a thin storyline, and Crysis is an excellent example of this. It starts off great, but it doesn’t take long for whatever sanity to completely disappear.

Adding insult to injury it’s ridiculously difficult. I played the game on “Normal” difficulty, and quickly found that I’d have to getting used to trying up to ten-fifteen times before managing something. Some parts of the game are so amazingly difficult that it boggles my mind. Sure, there’s probably tons of Counter-Strike junkies who will get a huge kick out of this, but I’m tired of games who punish my persistence by slapping me in the face all the time. Half-Life 2 was a good example of how difficulty should be set - it provided a challenge, not a chore. After a while Crysis became a chore, it became work. Just plough trough it and maybe it ends some time.

I’m disappointed. I really wanted to like this game. I liked Far Cry, even though it also descended into silliness and provided a half-assed ending. Crysis is even worse. Some things in the story just doesn’t make any sense. Why the hell did Prophet go off on his own, and how the heck did he manage to survive a NUCLEAR MISSILE? The cutscenes become boring after a while, since most of the plot is so amazingly dumb. The gung-ho admiral in charge of the aircraft carrier is a walking cliché. He does something that everyone including the player KNOWS is wrong, and after that the game gets turned into a search-for-the-key-then-defeat-the-end-boss nonsense. The ending itself isn’t an ending. It’s just a cut, while Crytek assembles the addon/sequel. You’re playing the game and then BAM, credits roll.

There’s tons of minor annoyances as well. Why do you get a gun that won’t function until later in the game? There’s no explanation, no nothing. It just doesn’t work until after a certain point, and even then it’s no fun. At this stage Crysis has all the thoughtfulness of an 80’s arcade-shooter. You have to find the “weak points” and finding them simply consists of either shooting wildly or dying. Considering the ludicrous difficulty, the latter is something you’ll do often. Enjoy that quick-load button, you’re gonna get really friendly with it.

No, the first part of the game was fun, and it was fun using the suit and admiring the visuals. After a certain point it just becomes a monotonous shoot-em-up that would make the original Doom seem like a masterfully crafted play.

Bioshock on the other hand was awesome in my opinion. It does everything right that Crysis does wrong, and is equally spectacular in the visuals department since it uses the Unreal3-engine. It’s an entertaining plot, with intrigue and drama and a plot-twist. Add to this the heavy influences of roleplaying that Bioshock has.

So in summary this game is essentially Paris Hilton. It’s pretty to look at and fun to goof off with, but after the first few minutes the prettiness wears off and the conversation becomes stale and monotonous.

I really shouldn’t be sitting here blogging about Linux, but instead get my lazy ass into the kitchen and doing the damn dishes. I’m excellent at procrastinating, so sue me.

Last night I had bit of a hard time falling asleep, and as is fairly common these days my brain goes into a maelstrom of thoughts. One that slightly coherent thought was “I should blog about Hardy” and then my mind fell back into chaos for another twenty minutes before I finally fell under the spell of morpheus.

So, what are my thoughts on the upcoming version of Ubuntu? Mostly they can be summed up with “more of the good stuff, less of the bad stuff”.

I’ve been running Hardy as my current desktop since upgrading my machine. Right after the upgrade I modified my current Gutsy-install to work with the new hardware, but I think I broke something in it and it started acting funky after a while. It didn’t want to play nice with my new graphics-card (BFG Geforce 9600GT) since it’s so new that Nvidia still haven’t gotten their Linux-drivers for it out of beta. This meant I had to install the driver the manual way, and also meant surgically removing some bits of Gutsy that otherwise would’ve conflicted with the new driver. I suppose that somewhere along the line my wild flailing broke something, and after a quick backup I decided to start fresh.

The Gutsy live-cd wouldn’t play nice either, and I felt that it was kind of bass-ackwards to install Gutsy just to upgrade it in a month or so. Thus, I went for the then-current Alpha6 of Hardy. Since then it’s gone into beta, so if you download it now it will be of that quality from the start and then get updated as you go along.

Installation went fine, it used the VESA-driver for the live-cd portion. I also went for the 64-bit version since I now have a CPU capable of those extensions. I had heard that there would be some issues, but I forged ahead boldly and decided that I’d have to figure out those issues as I went along. What does not kill you instead makes you stronger, right?

After some minor tweaking it was up and running. Still no Ubuntu-support for the 9600GT so I installed the drivers manually from Nvidia. Pretty simple for me, but newbies will definitely get confused by this.

Let’s break down my experience of Hardy. Remember that I installed Alpha6 of it, and I’ve applied updates for it since then so now my installation is “beta-quality”.

* GDM would consume a lot of CPU (a lot, as in 100% of one of my four cores) after logging in, and generally the system would become jerky and somewhat unresponsive. Logging out and back in solved this, but it was definitely an irritation. It has now disappeared after several updates.

* PulseAudio would sometimes lock up and die. This would bring Rhythmbox down as well. Restarting the PA-daemon would solve this until it crashed once again. This is no longer an issue and PulseAudio plays well.

* Unlike Feisty and Gutsy my Soundblaster Audigy2 ZS is now capable of genuine 5.1 Dolby Digital-surround. For some reason this never worked under Feisty and Gutsy (but did under Edgy!) and I could never figure out why.

* Some of my regular apps aren’t supported under the 64-bit arch, but I simply compiled them from source instead. This might change in the future.

* Setting up evdev for complete support of my Logitech MX1000 proved to be futile. Apparently a lot of things regarding hotplug and evdev has changed since Gutsy, and most of it is unfortunately poorly documented. Previously I had set up my mouse with a pretty arcane mix of evdev and xbindkeys but this wouldn’t play well under Hardy. Instead I discovered btnx which is a lot smoother to set up. Again, I had to compile this from source since there was no native 64-bit binary in the repos. A nice side-effect of this was that I didn’t have to mess around with my xorg.conf since btnx has a GUI, albeit somewhat obtuse.

* Flash actually worked out of the box. I had previously heard horror-stories about having to install a 32-bit Firefox in order to get Flash working since Adobe doesn’t provide a 64-bit version of Flash. This worked out of the box, no funky installs needed or anything. I haven’t investigated why, if Adobe decided to release a 64-bit version of Flash (highly doubtful) or if Canonical/Ubuntu does some impressive voodoo to get it all working (much more likely).

* Firefox 3 is faaaaast. At first I found it confusing and annoying, and most of my extensions wouldn’t work. Beta 4 of FF3 is included in the current Hardy, and it’s actually quite nice now that I’ve gotten used to it. Some extensions I like worked, others could be hacked to fool them into working. Some that got hacked made FF3 kinda funky and had to be uninstalled. Never the less, FF3 is very, very fast compared to FF2 .

* For whatever reasons Conky refuses to read sensor-readings from LM-sensors. Even though they’re set up correctly and reporting values Conky refuses to display them. I have no idea why, Conky doesn’t give any errors or anything. This led to me doing a bit of soul-searching and ultimately deciding that I didn’t like Conky any more, since it didn’t give me any information I couldn’t find out through a terminal (which I always keep open) and also it forces me to minimize whatever windows I have open. So bye-bye Conky, it was fun while it lasted.

* Gnome 2.22 is a much nicer experience due to myriads of minor touch-ups. The file/open/save/whetever dialogs are much nicer. Click on a picture and it automatically displays a thumbnail of that picture, rather than forcing you to remember a filename. Panels slide into view after login, and when dragging icons they are now completely alpha-transparent so you can actually see where you’re dragging and dropping them. Nautilus now detects the contents of memory-cards and give well-meaning suggestions as to what to do with it. There are no huge differences, but there’s several minor and they make Gnome so much nicer to work with.

* Compiz Fusion 0.7.whatever is included and there’s a few new neat effects to dazzle your friends with. Some of them are pure eyecandy, some of them are quite useful, a lot of them are both or neither. It’s all up to you to decide what you want to enable.

* Several minor touches such as a prettier login-screen and a slightly fresher default theme help to make Hardy a bit more polished. First I thought it was a bit sad that the brand-new theme got delayed until Ubuntu 8.10 but since I’ve never used the default Ubuntu theme it was a pretty minor point.

* Installing the Konica-Minolta color-laser we have was a bit less painful than before. It pretty much autodetected, but I had to install the m2300w package in order to get the proper driver, since it defaulted to text-only. Other things that get plugged into the computer is detected automagically and work just fine, this includes my Wacom-tablet.

* For whatever reason the splashscreen doesn’t work. This is no longer true, at least not for me. The other night I decided to see if it had changed (since among several updates then was included an update to usplash), enabled splash and rebooted. Lo and behold, it worked.

—

Hardy gets released on April 24th and I think it will be interesting. I’m not going to proclaim any huge revolutionary inroads to the world of Windows, but I think Ubuntu is a pretty solid distribution. Sure, there were some issues with the Alpha6, but they’ve all disappeared with the updates and as far as I’m concerned my Hardy-installation is solid.

One thing though that constantly irks me with Linux is the sound-support. It’s nice seeing Hardy dropping the ancient ESD in favor of PulseAudio, but I still think that sound-support under Linux could use some serious cleaning-up. It’s a bit confusing with two different architectures (ALSA and the now obsolete OSS) providing the base, and then on top of that have to wonder about sound-daemons and sinks and such. Yeah, yeah, I know I’m essentially talking out of my ass since I’m not a developer and have no deep insights into the inner workings of the OS, but as a user I find it somewhat confusing - and I’m not a greenhorn! PulseAudio is neat, providing drop-in replacement for ESD (the Enlightened Sound Daemon, which hasn’t been developed since frickin’ 2001, so it was about time that it got shelved!) and also adding some neat tricks such as the ability to send sound over a network to another computer running PulseAudio.

If there’s any questions about Hardy I will do my best to try to answer them, but remember that I’m just a user and not a developer or in any way a part of the creation-process.

UPDATE 080331: I added a point of contention.