A cricket bat! Twelve years, and four psychiatrists! Four? I kept biting them! Why? They said you weren't real.
Saturday, April 27
XCOM Thingy
You remember how there was that XCOM shooter under development, and how relieved we all were when that faded into the background and we got a new real XCOM strategy game instead? (Even if I haven't had a chance to play it yet, I was as relieved as anyone.)
Well, it seems the shooter didn't go away, it quietly soldiered on towards a launch this year, and - here's the thing - judging by the trailer, there's a chance, just a chance, that it might not suck.
I always thought, based on all the info 2K Marin had released about the XCOM shooter (Which is now third person, instead of a FPS, to better manage squad ops.), that it would be a very good game - but it would not be a XCOM game. I still think that it will be a very good game, but carrying, at the very least, a misleading brand as long as they keep it under XCOM.
(Firaxis XCOM' tactical battle game is also misleading, but in different ways.)
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, April 27 2013 07:08 AM (v+lXl)
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Based on this trailer, however, it could just as easily be based on "Redneck Rampage".
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, April 27 2013 07:22 AM (+rSRq)
The latest trailer does not show much, but the material that 2K Marin had shown earlier (As in, before Firaxis' XCOM game was announced.) looked pretty good.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, April 27 2013 09:55 AM (v+lXl)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, April 27 2013 02:56 PM (PiXy!)
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I hate to do this, Pixy, but there's recently been a spam incursion upon The Pond. Four or five in the past day or so.
I really like the trailer, and if the game is anything as drama-making as it, it'll be great stuff. But it won't be X-COM.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, April 27 2013 05:05 PM (9jITs)
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I'm happy with it not being X-COM, as long as it's good.
I'll keep an eye out for your interlopers. If they reappear, don't delete them, just let me know, and I'll nuke them from orbit adjust the training data for the Bayesian filters.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, April 27 2013 10:02 PM (PiXy!)
By the way, in the original XCOM one of the alien ship types was called a "Harvester" IIRC and it included an operating theater where they were dissecting a cow. (I fell off my chair laughing the first time I saw that. Cattle Mutilators!)
Does the modern XCOM include that visual joke?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, May 01 2013 08:24 AM (+rSRq)
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Pixy, either you did something that worked, or the spamholes got scared, but I've not seen hide nor hair of 'em since I mentioned it before... either way, keep up the good work! You're my hero, in a bloggy sort of way.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, May 01 2013 11:15 AM (9jITs)
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Steven - yeah, I remember that. Don't know if it's in the new version; there's some things you can get away with at 320x200 that you can't at 2560x1600...
Wonderduck - I didn't do anything, but I'll gladly take credit.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 01 2013 12:19 PM (PiXy!)
By the way, in the original XCOM one of the alien ship types was called a "Harvester" IIRC and it included an operating theater where they were dissecting a cow. (I fell off my chair laughing the first time I saw that. Cattle Mutilators!)
Well...The ship is now called an 'Abductor' (Though 'Supply Ships' are sometimes assigned to collecting specimens.). There is nothing inside the ship - but if you find a landed UFO collecting specimens, you will find mutilated cattles immediately next to the ship, along with pods to store the 'samples'.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, May 05 2013 01:44 PM (2hFbi)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, April 25 2013 02:27 PM (+rSRq)
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On the other hand, my house now smells as though someone cleaned thoroughly after a nice family dinner. Neither is true, but it smells that way.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 25 2013 02:35 PM (PiXy!)
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How on earth did Bleach help? Did one of the unending soliloquies of smack-talk from some supernumerary in anticipation of a tediously paced fight so numb your nervous system that the pain was thereby reduced?
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Friday, April 26 2013 12:03 AM (F7DdT)
Start8 from Stardock turns Windows 8 into a fairly sensible (if artistically inept) update to Windows 7. It makes the start screen, charms bar, and hot corners go away. If that's what you want - each item is independently configurable.
And it gives you back a nice, clean, functional - and very configurable - start menu.
For just $4.99 it turns Windows 8 back from a screaming heap of garbage into a practical, useful operating system. Highly recommended if you find yourself in a situation where that might apply.
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Sounds like Brad Wardell has himself another winner.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, April 24 2013 03:08 PM (+rSRq)
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Yep. There are a number of competitors, including the free Classic Shell, but I know who Stardock are and their Windows add-ons have never caused me problems. (I used ObjectDesktop in the Vista days, and still use Fences.)
Five bucks converts the Windows 8 non-touch experience from constant aggravation to genuinely pleasant. This is what HP and other OEMs should be bundling with their hardware, not the egregious Norton.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, April 24 2013 03:44 PM (PiXy!)
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Also, it highlights the fact that Microsoft's work on the Windows 8 core is perfectly good - it's a solid improvement on 7 in many areas. It's the remarkably ill-conceived intrusion of the tablet interface onto non-tablet systems that causes all the problems.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, April 24 2013 03:47 PM (PiXy!)
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I've been able to recommend Win8 to people thanks to Start8. When I built my new computer several months ago, I was able to pick up Win8Pro for something like $40. Win8, IMO, is actually a much better OS than Win7 after you fix the stupid tablet interface.
Posted by: Ben at Thursday, April 25 2013 11:09 AM (/Mdmg)
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Yes, Start8 is very good. Stardock also has a program (that I haven't tried) called ModernMix, which allows you to run Metro apps in separate windows.
Posted by: David Lewis at Thursday, April 25 2013 11:29 AM (BHGNI)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, April 25 2013 01:59 PM (+rSRq)
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My immediate observations are that the task manager and file copy dialog are better organised and provide more useful information. It's also supposed to boot more quickly and run more effectively on 4+ core processors, but I haven't timed the one and can't judge the other.
On the other hand, even with Start8 to fix the worst problems, Aero's gone. The Flat UI movement has set design back nearly 20 years. (Okay, it's alittlebetter than Windows 95.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 25 2013 02:33 PM (PiXy!)
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Other things: internal events on timers fire less frequently whenever possible. This allows the CPU to sleep longer and more often, conserving power. Not necessarily useful for a desktop but supposed to increase battery life for laptops.
Microsoft had a blog, b8, during the beta, where they talked extensively about the new features.
Frankly, I mostly prefer the new flatter UI. Every time I go onto a Win7 system now, it feels overly garish.
Posted by: RickC at Friday, April 26 2013 10:45 AM (WQ6Vb)
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Hmm. I've set my Windows 7 borders to a translucent grey (or blue-grey) tint; I can certainly see how bolder colours might seem garish. Windows 8 seems to automatically pastelise everything.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, April 26 2013 12:53 PM (PiXy!)
(Pixy, is there a way for me to change the displayed link text so it's not the URL, when using the link inserter?)
I'm not sure if this will work or if Anandtech has hotlink protection. If it doesn't work, please edit my comment to remove it? is the specific thing I was trying to find. I don't know if anyone's tested how well this works but in theory it could cut power usage a good amount.
Posted by: RickC at Saturday, April 27 2013 01:22 AM (A9FNw)
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Huh, inserting the picture with an img tag by using the HTML link in the editor worked in the preview...but the image vanished when I posted. Also, in Chrome, the Edit button just takes me back to the blog home.
Posted by: RickC at Saturday, April 27 2013 01:24 AM (A9FNw)
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And ugh, I forgot to mention--I wanted to include the second pic on that page, "Platform Activity Alignment."
Posted by: RickC at Saturday, April 27 2013 01:24 AM (A9FNw)
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Thanks. As we get more and more cores in portable devices, being able to intelligently sleepify some or all of those cores becomes more and more important. I spend most of my time at my desktop, connected to servers running 24x7... But it matters there too - a 64-core server is rarely going to need all 64 cores at once, and the smarter it is about sleepivation, the lower our hosting bill.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, April 27 2013 02:01 AM (PiXy!)
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Particularly when we have three racks full of such servers.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, April 27 2013 02:02 AM (PiXy!)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Sasami
Apart from the Windows 8 stuff - you shouldn't have to fight your operating system, much less your user interface - Sasami is pretty good for the price. Definitely needs more memory - it ships with 2GB, and it has integrated graphics which eats a good chunk of that right away, about 400MB by default, and I'm running Chrome (which can easily eat over 1GB), PyCharm (which can use several hundred MB on even modest projects), and Xshell (which can also use several hundred MB if you have lots of sessions with lots of history). So right away I'm using all the memory and then some.
So I'm thinking I'll add another 4GB, and give it the old SSD out of Lina (my Linux box; it has a 300GB Intel 320, but I have a new Samsung 840 Pro to replace that).
That should do for starters.
Also, according to the manual it does have USB 3, which is great news. My experience with USB 3 thus far consists of plugging drives in and having them work perfectly at speeds well over 100MB/s. That's not something you want to give up.
Also also, the GPU apparently delivers 80GFLOPS, not 48. Still a long way short of any decent desktop card, though - my faithful passively-cooled 4850 is my benchmark card, at exactly 1TFLOP, and my 7950 is nearly triple that. It should be just fine for playing Terraria or Starbound, but forget KSP - that runs slow even on the 4850 when I launch a complex rocket.
Battery life looks to be in the 5 hour+ range for normal active use (neither leaving it idle nor pounding on it constantly), which is fine for such a cheap notebook. The only essential upgrade then is the memory, which right now is kind of expensive - the DRAM spot market is going through one of its seasonal conniption fits, with prices up about 60% since the start of the year. 4GB of RAM will cost me nearly $40! (I can remember paying $500 for 4MB of RAM, for my Amiga 3000.)
Oh, and it comes with a trial version of Norton Anti-virus. I downloaded Start8 to give me back my start menu. Norton deleted it. I deleted Norton. Problem solved.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Windows 8 Sucks
There are some good bits. The Task Manager is a solid improvement. And the file copy activity dialog is what it always should have been. Those are a couple of minor items, though. Overall, it sucks.
Needlessly, because there's a perfectly functional operating system underneath; they've simply layered a whole bunch of crapware and crippling and blatantly idiotic configuration choices on top and broken it.
I give it zero out of ten, as in, there is zero reason to use it. If you want to run Windows, stick with 7; if you want a touch-enabled device, use Android.
It might be redeemable with something like Classic Shell; I'll find out. Of course, again, there is no reason why you should need to do that, but if you're stuck with a Windows 8 laptop (like me) and (unlike me) no spare Windows 7 keys, there's potentially a way to fix the most egregious of Microsoft's fuckups.
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I thought I read that it was possible to ignore all the new wizbang tablet GUI and to revert to something like the classic XP Explorer. Is that true?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, April 23 2013 09:36 PM (+rSRq)
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With a third-party utility, yes. But you can't configure the OS that way without installing something - they've even removed configuration options that were there in Vista and Windows 7.
Looks like they've created a cottage industry in apps to fix their mistakes. There's a new version expected later this year - somewhere between a service pack and a full release - that's expected to fix the worst problems. The president of Microsoft's Windows division was very publicly fired let by mutual decision late last year, not long after the launch, so I'm hopeful there's less politics involved in backtracking on some of the worst misfeatures.
It wouldn't take that much work to turn it into a solid update to Windows 7 with an optional tablet UI. In fact it's mostly a question of just giving choice back to the users about which features they want.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 23 2013 10:19 PM (PiXy!)
Your mileage may vary. Barooina brand Puppy Chow may not contain actual puppies. Do not taunt happy fun Kerbal.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Sunday, April 21
Age Of Miracles And Wonders And Budget Notebooks
I bought a Windows 8 computer today - an HP Pavilion DM1-4306AU.
Looks like this.
One the one hand, it's woefully underpowered - a mere dual-core 1.4GHz, only 80 graphics shaders delivering a pathetic 48GFLOPS, just 2GB of RAM, and only 320GB of disk. The screen is a tiny 11.6" at a lowly 1366x768.
On the other hand, I haven't bought a new notebook in more than three years, haven't tried Windows 8 at all, and it cost $298 at the local hi-fi store.
And for a little perspective, it has four times the memory and four times the clock speed of the amazing Digital AlphaServer 8400 TurboLaser that I ran an entire phone company on back in 1995. It's not so long ago that this would have been a dream machine; it has 8 times the memory, 4 times the bandwidth, and 16 times the CPU performance of my SGI O2 - and that cost $25,000.
I don't think it has USB 3, or even gigabit ethernet (Update: Looks like it has gigabit ethernet but not USB 3; the higher-spec but more expensive US version has both.) but it's small, light, has a decent screen (if rather sensitive to viewing angle), is surprisingly responsive (I played with it in the store), and supports up to 8GB of RAM and a full-size notebook drive.
Now all it needs is a name. (Interim name is Sasami.)
Posted by: Kayle at Tuesday, April 23 2013 04:14 AM (M7tH0)
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The Start Menu was crippled in Vista anyway, when they removed the expanding capability and constrained it to a small, scrolling rectangle. I assert that the new Start Screen is a net improvement over the Vista/7 menu.
You can reorder things, make them appear or hide by default, and so on, and the hit box is MUCH larger than on the old menu. Plus, if you don't like it you can mostly ignore it by pinning shortcuts to the taskbar or desktop.
Posted by: RickC at Tuesday, April 23 2013 08:32 AM (WQ6Vb)
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The touchscreen-oriented not-Start screen has proven to be much less useful to me than any previous iteration, in part because I upgraded, which meant that 90% of my existing applications had to be found again and pinned, and also that the not-Start screen was cluttered with everything that it managed to find in folders that had applications, including dozens of Readme files and uninstallers. It was a very poor upgrade experience, especially when combined with the number of incompatible apps and drivers that made the machine unstable. It took me a week to get back to more-or-less where I was, and it's still a pain to try to fit everything onto the not-Start screen without having to scroll horizontally using the mouse or touchpad. (why upgrade from Win7 at all? To test the OS before too many people started using it at the office)
I have the same "meh" response to the OSX Dock, which has gotten progressively gaudier and less useful over the years. Long ago I bought a license for Overflow and have never regretted it.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, April 23 2013 09:11 AM (fpXGN)
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Yeah, the shortcomings of Windows 8 for desktop use are why I haven't upgraded, but for a tiny notebook like this, it looks like it might be more palatable (even without a touch screen).
We'll soon see. I still have my eye on that Toshiba Kirabook, but better to spend $300 now to test the waters (and worst case, reinstall with Linux) thnt to drop $2000 on a shiny toy I never use. (Looking at you, iPad.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 23 2013 11:30 AM (PiXy!)
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"The shortcomings of Windows 8 for desktop use," as far as I can tell, consist almost entirely of "I don't like the fact that it's different."
See also Vista, XP, 95. I don't know if anyone complained about Windows 3 looking different, but I bet it did.
FWIW I haven't tried doing an upgrade, only clean installs, and I admit I did have to re-pin a handful of shortcuts but after that I am in the desktop all day long and other than the theme changing, it's just not that different.
Posted by: RickC at Tuesday, April 23 2013 12:33 PM (WQ6Vb)
RickC: The loss of the Start Menu is a pretty big annoyance (a start menu replacement fixes that, fortunately), but otherwise I mostly agree, but there are a lot of new annoyances.
I'm probably rare in that every laptop I've owned had touch and stylus support; Windows 8 is better at touch than Windows 7, but it's still a pretty lousy touch platform.
Posted by: Kayle at Tuesday, April 23 2013 04:05 PM (M7tH0)
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RickC - the problem is, for a normal desktop (non-touch) with a good sized screen, the whole Metro/Modern interface is a distraction, an annoyance. It serves no purpose. I always want to be on the desktop doing desktop things; anything that takes me out of the desktop needs to die. From 95 through to 7, Microsoft never broke the normal workflow they way they have with 8.
Once you've slapped the Start Screen down, it does seem relatively functional, albeit a cheap downmarket clone of Windows 7. But then, why bother with Windows 8 at all?
Now, if you have a touch-enabled device, everything changes. Windows 7 is not touch-friendly. Half of Windows 8 is. Which is better... Maybe?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 23 2013 04:26 PM (PiXy!)
Windows 8 does have Hyper-V (if your hardware has EPT) and also makes a dandy network Hyper-V administration system--a lot cheaper than a Windows Server 2012 license.
Touch is improved outside of the Metro box but Windows 8 is still not a good touch UI. I don't believe anyone has yet built a UI good for keyboard, mouse, pen, and touch all at the same time; Microsoft's schizophrenic solution isn't a good solution.
Posted by: Kayle at Wednesday, April 24 2013 11:42 AM (5q4P3)
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Wow that was strange. I just wrote an extremely
long comment but after I clicked submit my comment didn't show up. Grrrr... well I'm not writing all that over again.
Regardless, just wanted to say great blog!
Posted by: Nolan at Saturday, April 27 2013 12:32 AM (tuLJl)
Toshiba's Kirabook: It's a 13.3" Windows 8 (but let's not hold that against it) ultrabook, with a Core i5 or i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, 256GB SSD, a 2560x1440 display, and weighs 2.6lbs (or 2.9lbs with the touch screen option). That makes it a Macbook Pro competitor that's lighter than the Macbook Air. It's not cheap - starting at $1599 for the i5 model without touchscreen - but if you're sick of bargain-bin 1366x768 displays, it may be quite literally a sight for sore eyes.
Australia's NBN to roll out gigabit speeds. The NBN rollout has been pathetically, miserably slow; they don't even have a plan to deploy it where I live yet. But at least the speeds where it has been deployed are good. And if it actually rolls out at 1Gbps on schedule, I will move to it rather than waiting for it to come to me. (I work from home most of the time now, so fast and reliable internet access matters more than location.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, April 21 2013 12:17 AM (+rSRq)
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By the way, I'd like to comment on the utter lack of spam around here these days. Whatever you did that last time to the filter was miraculous. Very well done!
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, April 21 2013 10:08 AM (+rSRq)
