You are looking at posts that were written in the month of January in the year 2007.
Posted on January 7th, 2007 by Tim.
Categories: Tim.
So I was listening to RHCP’s newest album in windows media player today (in MP3 form of course). The new UI in WMP11 shows a thumbnail of the album cover above the “now playing” list on the right. I noticed, however, that when I hover the mouse over the album cover, it moves the thumbnail over and gives me the details of the album, including Title, Artist, and Genre. At the bottom of this info, however, there is a “Buy” button. The tooltip text for the button says “Click to go to an online store that offers this content for sale.” It’s almost assumed that I’ve pirated the music or something. I haven’t tested this with an actual CD, so I don’t know if it displays the same text regardless of whether I have the actual CD in the drive or not. It would be interesting to test, but I don’t think I even own any music CDs anymore.
Posted on January 6th, 2007 by Tim.
Categories: Games, Tim.
So I ordered Rainbow Six: Vegas last week just because GoGamer.com had it on sale for $35 or so. (Why so cheap? Looks like it’s the australian version.) I had high hopes since I’ve been a pretty big fan of the series, and I buy pretty much everything that Ubisoft makes. The game certainly wasn’t what I was expecting, but surprised me in a good way.
Opening the case, my first impression was very good. R6:Vegas is distributed on a single DVD, which was a welcome sigh of relief. The last game I installed was Flight Sim X, which comes on 2 (!) DVDs. Installation was painless, and the game automatically patched itself to the latest version on the second time I played (Strangely, it did not patch itself for the first play, however). My one gripe about the installer is that it told me my CPU was insufficient for the game. I own a Core 2 E6600, at 2.4 Ghz, while the installer states the game requires a 3.0 Ghz CPU. When fully installed, the game takes up 6 gigs, so make sure you have plenty of room free before installing. Game launch is very fast, at about 15 seconds on my machine. Strangely, though, the game lacks the ability to skip past the opening videos (though thankfully, they’re pretty short).
Initially, performance was a tad bit sluggish running at 1600×1200, probably around 20-30 fps. Knocking the resolution down to 1280×960, turning off HDR rendering, and disabling v-sync got my framerate back above 60 FPS. Even at these low settings, however, the graphics are beautiful, showing off all the features of the Unreal Engine 3. All the 3d models are beautifully done, and the levels are realistic and well designed. The lighting effects used in the game give all the environments a somewhat ethereal feel; everything seems to have a faint glow about it. The night vision and thermal vision effects are very cool, and are actually pretty useful.
From a gameplay perspective, Vegas takes a big departure from previous R6 games. No absolute health is given, but a general sense of how hit you are is given by how blury the screen is, which goes away after a few seconds. Too many hits at one time, and you’re down. Teammates can get knocked down, but are revived by using some sort of “stim pack” on them. You can hold onto two primary weapons at once, two types of grenades, and one pistol. In addition, Vegas is the first R6 game where you can pick up weapons of fallen enemies. Finally, one of the biggest changes is that combat now revolves around a cover system, very much like Gears of War. In fact, the entire game is eerily like Gears of War. (And both are based on Unreal Engine 3… coincidence?)
The AI in Vegas, for both enemies and allies, is outstanding. There was never a time when I got frustrated at my allies making a dumb move like walking into the open to get slaughtered. Instead, allies and enemies are aware of where incoming fire is coming from, and will move around the environment. Teammates can be given orders through a very intuitive system, similar to that of Ghost Recon 3. Pressing spacebar will send your teammates scurrying for cover wherever you happen to be pointing to. This lets you choreograph some very intricate manuevers, like advancing down two sides of an open courtyard at once. The intelligence of your allies however, is balanced out by that of the enemies. Terrorists in Vegas don’t stand still, and will intelligently use cover to try to flank you if left unchecked. In fact, one of the worst things you can do is stand still. The enemy AI is very noticable outside of story mode, in the “Terrorist Hunt” misison, where you attempt to take out a vast amount of terrorists spread accross a large, intricate map. If you decide not to use a silencer, the terrorists will hear you, and will track you down. Several times I found myself trapped in a pincer between two enemy groups, one of which had tracked me down and come up behind me. The eerily well coordinated attack had me wondering “Did they plan this???”
All in all, R6:Vegas is my favorite game in the series, and one of the best games of 2006, right up there with Gears of War. Beautiful graphics, beautiful gameplay, beuatiful AI. In fact, my only complaint is that the game is too short. At 6 or so missions, I beat the game in just over two days. Luckily, Vegas includes a “Realistic” difficulty, which will probably be enough challenge to keep me playing for a few more weeks at least.
Posted on January 5th, 2007 by Tim.
Categories: General/Misc..
Scott Adams recently wrote about whether humans are “designed” to eat meat or not. He argues:
Meat-eaters point out that we have sharp teeth and we can digest meat just like typical carnivores. Therefore we are natural meat-eaters. The counter argument is that true carnivores – a lion for example – can eat huge quantities of meat without any bad health implications. When humans eat a lot of meat, our arteries clog, we have heart attacks, and we die. Every person is different, but on average, too much meat in a human diet is unhealthy. And “too much meat” happens pretty quickly. That’s not much of a design.
To summarize, he states that because humans can only eat small amounts of meat and remain healthy, thus humans are not “designed” to be meat eaters. On the flip side, however, it is quite difficult for humans to maintain a strict vegan diet and maintain good health. Complete protiens generally only exist naturally in animal sources (with a few exceptions, such as soy). When any single protien is missing from a meal, amino acid processing comes to a complete halt. This means that incomplete protiens must always be supplemented (in the same meal) to be properly used by the body.
In addition, a vegan diet is completely incapable of providing proper levels of vitamin B12. Vegans are also at risk of deficiency in calcium, iron, vitamin D, selenium, phosphorous, and zinc. Without an extremely careful diet and supplementation, a healthy vegan diet is not possible.
Since we can neither survive fully on meat, nor fully on vegetables, it seems undeniable that humans are designed to be omnivores.
Posted on January 3rd, 2007 by Tim.
Categories: General/Misc..
Every other day, Slashdot has a story about DRM. Most of the stories follow the same basic outline. Foo has DRM, ergo, Foo is bad (where Foo is Microsoft/Vista/etc.) In some cases, the choices that companies make about DRM causes me to scratch my head and wonder what they were thinking (WiFi music sharing on a certain mp3 player?). However, for the most part, DRM simply doesn’t matter.
The biggest noisemaker has been the new DRM features in Windows Vista. Ask a vocal DRM opposer why Linux is better than Vista and they’ll tell you that “Linux is better because it doesn’t have DRM. Vista restricts what you can do with your LEGAL music, but Linux lets you do whatever you want”. The details vary, but this is the basic idea reiterated over and over. The implication here is that Vista takes away some feature that is available in Linux, or some previous version of Windows. Obviously, this is simply not true. Vista has all the features available previously, but also has the ability to present content that has been encrypted with DRM technology. Vista does nothing to stop music or movie piracy. Vista can still play MP3s/OGG/DIVX/XVID, and does nothing to prevent pirates from putting that content onto bittorrent.
Even so, I still believe that DRM doesn’t matter. The first reason why DRM doesn’t matter is because in the end, customers will speak with their wallets. They will buy the product that they get the most value out of. If customers decide that restrictive DRM represents a significant decrease in utility to them, they will buy something else. The RIAA may blame its declining sales on piracy, but they cannot forget that every economic good has substitutes. When customers get fed up with restrictive DRM, they’ll spend their money elsewhere.
The second reason DRM doesn’t matter is because it’s fundamentally flawed from a technical perspective. From a cryptographic standpoint, DRM is the equivalent of handing over the ciphertext and the decryption key, and asking the program not to decrypt the data. This system absolutely relies on secrecy and obscurity. And as any security expert will tell you, obscurity is not security. This is also the reason why Linux will never be “capable” of DRM: an open system is incapable of maintaining obscurity.