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That was more than five years ago, and while the consoles have been frozen in time, the evolution of the PC in terms of hardware, has proceeded as relentlessly as ever. The vast majority of games these days are published for both the consoles and the PC, and for us PC gamers it manifests itself in some perks and some drawbacks.

The Perks:

The biggest perk of playing games that are also published for consoles is that since the consoles don’t have nearly as much oomph, yet get priority from developers these days means that you don’t need to upgrade your computer as feverishly as you used to. My current computer is ticking in at about a year and a half in age, and while it was a bit of a beast when I built it, it still has no problems whatsoever in running the latest games at high resolutions with all the bells and whistles. This is because the developers are forced to adapt their games to fiveplus-year-old hardware.

Running the latest and greatest games such as Rage, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and so on at resolutions greater than what the consoles can output is no problem. Had this been 2003, my computer would have struggled with then-current games if it was the same relative age. These days, not so much a problem. I doubt I’ll have to make any major upgrades to this machine for the next year.

The Drawbacks:

One of the drawbacks is precisely the same thing as above. Since consoles are less meaty, games have to be squeezed into them. This in turns mean us PC gamers have lost that feverish development pace where each year games pushed the technological envelope even further. Yes, Rage is pretty despite all it’s glitches – but it’s not up the standard I would’ve expected from iD Softwares latest game engine. Why? Because it’s aimed at consoles, with limited texture memory and limited processing power. It might look really pretty on a 360 but on a PC it looks a bit underwhelming. I wasn’t impressed. Crysis for the PC was amazing, and Crysis 2 (which had to be shoehorned into consoles unlike its predecessor) was a big flop for me. In my not-so-humble opinion the first Crysis was much prettier, and performed better. Deus Ex looks pretty much the same on both consoles and the PC, but consoles can’t manage much of the finer details such as high FSAA and texture detail as the PC can, and is somewhat hampered by the puppety-looking characters.

Another and much bigger drawback is that consoles limit the nature of games. Have you ever seen a RTS on a console? No. Basically consoles only need arcade-style games such as racers, or they work with shooters. The more subtle and refined types of games are lacking. Even shooters get dumber and dumber since consoles are limited in their controls and storage space. Add to this, my experience is that the majority of console gamers are spastic teenagers hopped up on caffeine, and generally PC gamers are a bit more refined even though we of course also suffer from the occasional twitchy teenager shouting obscenities in Team Fortress 2. But generally speaking my experience is that PC Gamers appreciate a more mature gaming experience. A while back Crytek (developers of Far Cry and Crysis/Crysis 2) whined about this. Consoles are holding PC gaming back. I agree.

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So, that was my thoughts on that. And yeah, I expect to take some flak for what I’ve written. But they’re my opinions. I don’t expect everyone to agree with them.

For the last six months or so I’ve used Skype to keep in touch with friends and family far away. It’s been less than excellent. Skype wastes ludicrous amounts of computing resources to do something fairly simple. On my little notebook, it drains the battery within an hour, and it uses 80% of the CPU to do what exactly? Nobody knows, because Skype is a large lump of proprietary crap. I highly doubt it needs 80% of a dual-core CPU to simply transmit low-level audio and webcam.

Skype constantly complains about things as well. My notebook is about 7 months old, so it’s not exactly sluggish. It’s connected to a very fast LAN, admittedly over 802.11G which gives it a meager 54 mbit/s but I still think that’s plenty enough. Yet still it complains about my network being slow, and pixellates video to the point where you’re unable to visually distinguish whether you’re talking to a person or a stack of Lego-blocks. It whines about your computer being “slow” and compresses audio so the person you’re talking to sounds more like a whale on downers than a human being.

Computers have come a long way. But Skype insists on wasting resources and being stupid and inefficient. And now Microsoft will pour their horseshit all over it and completely bollocks it up just like they did the MSN client years ago.

*sigh*

It’s even worse on my desktop. Quad-core, tons of RAM, but since I run Linux the client is three versions behind and is less reliable than a puppy on crack. And again, since Microsoft bought it, support for platforms other than Winblows will of course be de-prioritized more than they already are. In short, it sucks.

I need an alternative. Something that doesn’t jerk me around, consume vast resources of computing power, and works equally well on all platforms.

Such as this completely ancient Commodore Business Machines 5.25″ floppy drive. DUAL DISKS BABY!

That’s just the drives. It’s housed in some kind of metal contraption which connects to the terminal/computer. I didn’t photograph that thing. I also found the monitor for the $WHATEVERTHING and it looked basically like a 1950s style television set. No photos of that either.

Y’all need some spare parts for your Amiga 500? I gots them right here. A pile of junked Amiga 500s, no clue if they’re salvageable.

Photos below wasn’t from the storage room, but rather a HP ProBook with a snapped hinge. Quite impressive. I wonder how $USER managed to do that?

Earlier today I got news that they’ve added one of my all-time favorite games, and it didn’t take long for me to shell out the five smackers it cost. One of the nice things about GOG is that they adapt/port games to work on modern systems, and this was something I really looked forward to since in the past DK2 has proven somewhat finicky to get going on anything except a 1999-era computer. Those old machines (Voodoo graphics!) are starting to get VERY difficult procuring these days.

So I bought it from GOG and gave it a spin.

Of course it’s the same old game, so here’s some plus and minus with the GOG-version:

+ Installs really smoothly using their own installer.
+ Quick download and you get some bonus materials with the game, in this case a manual, a reference guide and a level editor.
+ Instant gratification, game starts almost immediately on a modern system.
+ Runs fine under Windows 7, in my case a 64-bit install. Can probably get it going under Wine too, with some coaxing.

- Still kind of funky settings-wise. I couldn’t get hardware-accelerated graphics going.
- Game is quite unstable. Less unstable than vanilla DK2, but still crashes quite often and randomly.

Totally worth five dollars, despite the oddities.

A while back everyone was gaga over Spotify. In case you haven’t heard about it, it’s a service where you can subscribe to an account and then they stream music to your computer. It’s quite simple, and even though I am critical of it for various reasons it was lauded as a solution to piracy and for most people it provides a perfectly decent experience.

However, as of writing this, there is still no decent similar solution for us movieholics. We’re still mostly banished to the (in my eyes) quaint practice of buying plastic discs or downloading or movies from the Pirate Bay. The practice of buying plastic discs has in my eyes become extremely old-fashioned, and the concept of going to a movie-store to RENT said plastic discs is to me virtually a medieval practice. Downloading them illegally isn’t a particularly appetizing prospect either, but at least it’s somewhat progressive and with the technological times.

See, the thing is – piracy has EVERYTHING that I feel a streaming on-demand video service should have. The problem with downloading a movie off of TPB is that you have to be really clued-in to understand what quality your download holds, as well as being somewhat literate in the technology.

If there was a decent streaming on-demand service that fulfilled my expectations I would subscribe to it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately there isn’t, and probably never will be since that would require abandoning many of the cornerstones embedded in the mentality of the average VP for the movie-maffia.

So what would be required?

1. No DRM or being chained-down. I’m sorry, but there simply is no wiggle-room here. Every time I see some new service pop up, this is the cardinal sin they always perform. I want to be able to stream my movies to any device, any time. Services expect me to use a certain operating system, a certain webbrowser, certain combinations of this-and-that and frankly, it’s horseshit. I rarely use Windows, and I don’t want to be tied to Windows, Internet Explorer and shit like that. I want to watch the movie on my Linux-desktop, or my laptop, or my HTPC (running Linux) or on whatever device I may have in the future.

2. This kinda ties together with the above, but it HAS to work on any device. My desktop computer, my laptop, my mediaplayer. Whatever. If you expect me to be tied down to my desktop computer, or shuffling around plugging a computer into my TV or whatever, then you will be left in the dust.

4. Again, this kinda ties in with #1 above. It needs to work on any operating system and software combination. Windows, MacOS, Linux, etc. If you limit me to one certain combination, then you’re history.

5. The quality has to be the same or similar to the best non-streaming (i.e. disc) format available through traditional channels. If the movie is available on Bluray, then the quality on-demand should be the same or visually impossible to distinguish. No extremely compressed crap Flash movies. This also goes for audio. DTS or Dolby Digital with at least 5.1 sound for movies that have been mastered with it. No stereo, no Dolby Pro Logic. Only if the movie doesn’t have a multitrack soundtrack is stereo or similar acceptable.

6. The same day a movie is released on DVD/Bluray it is available for streaming on-demand. None of this staggering releases bullshit, keeping movies intentionally away from on-demand services to not cut into disc-sales. If it’s in the shop, it should be on-line. No exceptions.

7. Anything and everything that is available on DVD/Bluray needs to be available or at the very least you should plan to be able to provide it. “Thousands of movies” might sound impressive but if 99% of those movies are either extremely obscure or in the public domain because they’re 70 years or older then you’ll fail again.

8. Decently priced. I will not pay for your hookers, limos and cocaine. I don’t mind paying a reasonable price for it if you manage to fulfill my requirements, but if you don’t – then don’t expect me to pay out of my nose for it.

Will any service that fulfills my wishes ever appear? I seriously doubt it. The industry behind filmed entertainment is way too narrowminded, greedy and unprogressive and seem happy to make enemies out of their potential customers instead, so I doubt anything like this will ever appear.

The latest round in Microsoft-bullying are the patents they claim to have that infringes on among other things Linux. Of course, they haven’t given even the slightest hint as to what these patents mights be, and if you ask me they’re non-existant. However, by threatening legal actions they’ve managed to get various companies to sign agreements to not make Microsoft too angry. Or else….

Yeah, that “or else” is Microsoft threatening with these supposed patents.

COME ON PEOPLE, THIS IS ABSURD.

Imagine that you were out taking a walk. Up comes some asshole, saying he knows certain things about you and unless you pay him a large amount of money each money he will squeal these secrets to your mom or your significant other, or whatever. When asked what these things are, he refuses to tell you but assures you it will destroy your life as you know it. Unless you pay him off, regularly and without question.

What would you do? Of course you would tell him to go fuck himself. Only you know all the secrets to your life, and you probably have a pretty good idea about who knows what. So having some random jackass showing up and claiming this bullshit would of course only make you invite him to go die in a fire. Since he also refuses to elaborate on what he knows, it just further proves he’s full of crap anyways. So you tell him to crawl up his own ass and go merrily along living your life.

But for some completely inexplicable reason this doesn’t happen in the software world when Microsoft does the same thing. Why do companies cave in to Microsofts bullshit? It just baffles me.

It has yet to blow me away, although I’ve gotten somewhat used to it. The main problems with Unity if you ask me is that it’s fairly unstable and removes a lot of usability that I was used to in proper Gnome. I’m not quite certain why Unity is a good choice on a proper desktop – I can see some advantages on a netbook but as a proper desktop environment it has a long way to go.

Primarily I find it annoying because it interferes with how I use my computer. It’s quite obvious that Mark (Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and leader of the Ubuntu-project) really likes MacOS X, and Unity takes a lot of inspiration from MacOS X. My biggest niggle is that it dumbs things down unnecessarily, and removes and confuses a lot of things.

Such as the Unity-launcher. I don’t know if it wants to be a dock or a menu or whatever. There is no way of customizing it, it tends to get in the way a lot, and even though it autohides it still feels very clumsy and not particularly though-through. Adding items to it is confusing since there’s no integration with most of the rest of the OS. You can’t just drag anything on there. Using Nautilus to manage files has become a pain since the launcher only shows one icon for each application, which has multiplied the amount of clicking and dragging before finding the proper Nautilus-window. I usually have about five-six windows of Nautilus, handling files. Previously this was easy since each window had it’s own entry. Now, each window shares the same icon. Very annoying.

Also, there’s no way of adding quick launchers. I used to have a set of launchers back on Gnome for various often-used folders. This is no more. Now I have to open my home folder and then open a bunch of windows out of it instead of quickly and effortlessly going to my commonly used folders.

One thing I do like though is that Unity provides a somewhat decent application launcher. Previously I used Gnome Do, which was replaced by Synapse and now the Unity launcher has made Synapse obsolete. I like how I can get a similar experience simply by hitting the Super-button on my keyboard. However, it’s not nearly as powerful as it should be. For example, I can type in the name of a folder, but it only displays a few files inside that folder – not the folder itself. I want to be able to open folders quickly, and had this worked fine then my previous complaint about the launcher clustering application windows under one name would’ve been nullified.

But like I said, Unity removes a lot of functionality. For example, we now have a pseudo-Mac like menubar at the top of the screen. This mostly wastes screen real estate and is occasionally the home for application menus, again in a pseudo-Mac like fashion. I’m not a fan. Most of the time it just wastes space and currently there’s hardly anything that can be put there. Gone is the possibility to have system-meters to quickly gauge the system load and memory use, something I really liked under Gnome. A third-party weather app can be added, but it tends to disappear every so often.

And yes, there are lots of bugs. I’m one of the many people who suffer the jerky window-movements. Basically everything flies along, but whenever I try to move around a window, that movement is jerkier than Kathryn Hepburn on bad acid. This is most likely a bug in Compiz. I have and ATI/AMD graphics-card, but have read about people with Nvidia-cards who suffer it as well. Numerous other minor bugs abound, such as Compiz using a lot of CPU when it shouldn’t, various visual defects occuring when you least want them and just generally weird behavior.

Unity could be great. But from a usability as well as technological standpoint it can’t be considered more than a rough beta, and it shouldn’t have been put into production this soon. Canonical and the devs behind Unity need to put a lot of work into it, and add back functionality that was removed.

Opened it up and it was covered with thick dust inside. Capacitors had started to swell, fans were trying to plow through the dust-clogged frames. Essentially this thing was a huge firehazard waiting to happen. It had been stuck in a bedroom-corner (we asked) somewhere for most of it’s 7+ year life and finally it couldn’t breathe any longer. Complete write-off, it was essentially DOA and there wasn’t much we could do to save it. Even the harddrive sounded like it was grinding gears.

Yeah, crappy photos. My old phone got some kind of zap due to the strong sunlight that was shining in on my workspace.