Logbook: Computers
Stick this in your “cloud” and smoke it.
Everywhere you look these days you hear about that newfangled cloud thing…. and most people ask what the hell is the cloud. I tell them its a pile of shit buzzword. Watching TV you see the Microsoft commercials about the cloud and how you can access your stuff at home… Or your job… or the moon whatever the fuck.. Here’s and example of said “cloud”
For those whom have had there head buried in the sand or are quite possibly dead… this innovation is as old at the internet it self(of current not arpanet you silly ass).. its called network storage. Introduced in the 1980s
Network-attached storage Connects to Local Area Network via: Hard Drives via one of:
Common manufacturers HP
NetApp
Dell
Cisco
Netgear
CTERA
Sun MicrosystemsIntroduced 1980’s
Yes this amazing new cloud of bullshit buzzwords yay!
And this.. hmm this is not “cloud” like .. the fact these people are accessing there pc at home tells me …. Remote desktop .. YAY MORE OLD TECH CALLED CLOUD! Mind you the guy says “I just brought up our PC at home” yeah… that’s safe.. you’re flying to who the hell knows where and your leaving a PC on 24/7 while your away from the house, when the PC overheats and sets the house on fire – Your house will be a cloud! YAY CLOUD!!
This should be called the windows FartCloud technology
It’s the Cloud! ZOMG!
Microsoft’s idea of the cloud is pretty much rebranding old technology and calling it new.. Some of the other cloud innovations here are just blatantly scary , Such as software as a service .. that’s pretty much a baaaaaaaaaaaaad thing.. Your Office software you bought.. You know the 365 one … You don’t own it. at least the could portion.. also when Office 366 comes out.. and they shut down 365 … Forced upgrade… since your only paying for a service. your stuck in an upgrade cycle for money … Also you will have zero expectations of privacy .. Your account gets hacked? your shit is good as stolen.
What companies are banking on is that you buy into the cloud without any research thinking “Hey this is cool wizbang tech!”
When it comes down to office level this is going to be a nightmare.. as to finding your document or having documents that are not supposed to be public leaking out to the public, since the information would be on the “cloud” it maybe a passworded folder and you give it out and someone cleans out the office bank account because the boss left the banking information in the “Cloud”.
Better yet.. this is all on the internet.. the office connection goes down and productivity goes to zero since no one can access the files..
All these “cloud” services are going to open a black hole when some random company hosting your cloud goes out of business and you cant access your data anymore. not to mention there will likely be a monthly/yearly price to pay for this rather than paying a one time costs.. Its Like renting a car that you have no control over and only can do simple things on like turn on the lights and honk the horn yet your paying a cost X infinity , rather than a one time license cost. These companies will at first seem cheaper than buying software outright but when you figure that over a period of months or even years . the “cloud” costs will greatly exceed the software costs.
And I’ve said it many times… the cloud is just rehashed shit with rainbow farts and ponies with glitter just to stuplify the average user into thinking he is getting something better than it really is.
The risks building a company around the cloud is just insanely risky … From buying ultra cheap terminals that can only access the cloud, to having to build a connection that can handle massive amount of data throughput. if you have a company of 100 people all using the fartcloud you need 100 networked computers that has a zero lag time connection to manipulate data. if you have a crowd-sourced project with lag you will have 50 people fixing one problem and not realized that the other 50 just did the same thing and wasted about an hours of productivity due to each person wasting 30 seconds fixing a problem that was fixed by 1 person.
The idea of the cloud is just totally not a good idea in its current form since corporations are not looking at this as a productivity tool but more as a subscription for cash run.. since they have to sell nothing and get a fuckton of money.
In the end I really hope people understand what the cloud is and its not anything new nor is it worth it in any means of the word.
Mini review: Racing games (agravations in racing games)
As a Semi fan of racing games I tend to pick up a racing game or a kart game now and than. I used to pick up every need for speed game in the past but as the quality of the programming slipped into oblivion I stopped picking up those games. Need for speed was fun in the terms of you could Race your cars around Smash things and generally just play the way you wanted .. After hot pursuit 1 they tended to close alot of doors with the game. Gone was Car editing and adding your own cars. Things really went downhill with Porsche unleashed. Signs of bad programing and shoddy programing were starting to appear than in hot pursuit 2 it seems EA just gave up the ship and decided that shit was good enough to send out, Sure it looked like a Need for speed game but it stunk badly in ways that just piss people off to no end.
My thing with racing games is if the AI is good the game is good, with poor AI the game severely takes a hit. the AI in Hot Pursuit 2 was an abortion. The developers seemed to never thought through the whole process and shortcutted the AI massively in some areas. Since the game had stats at the end of each race it showed how poorly the AI was done. If you raced as an Enzo Ferrari you’d thing you’d leave a ford Fiesta in the next area code, not so much, there was a chance that fiesta would win against you – since the game once the opponent got off the mini-map would engage nothing short of the enterprises transporter and rubber band to just outside of the mini-map. At the end of the race it would create some pretty funny statistics such as.
Enzo: top speed 202MPH – Average speed 168 MPH
Fiesta: top speed 72MPH – Average speed 142MPH
WTF? Not only has that car just broken laws of physics but it manages to do something impossible unless the car managed to actually teleport to another dimension and have Time/space/speed laws revoked, If you did not run the perfect race it would also give the computer opponent A chance to win since the AI was magically rubberbanded to behind you. Using that kind of trick in programming a racing sim should be a HUGE NO NO. Even though that the need for speed series borders on not being a racing sim these days, More over it plays like a quarter eater you find at an arcade.
You don’t need a game that has shortcomings that affect the outcome of the game due to poor programming versus the outcome based on your driving. with the advent of consoles I know programmers are under pressure to port games to each system as fast as they can but the quality takes a tremendous hit. The console specific games tend not to suffer as much as games that are whored around. Most Mario karts always have a sound racing game, Gran Turismo has a sound racing game. Even Test Drive unlimited had a sound racing game since it was based around the PC than ported down to the console level, there is one exception that should be noted- burnout paradise was a “racing” game that was on every system just about without much problems but they thought round some of the issues and made the game based on fun.
As more companies take to the “Open World” concept of racing it comes to mind that the open world needs to be open. With burn-out paradise the openness just was not there, Test drive unlimited had a extremely open world but a poorly implemented system where aggravation would set in trying to find your friends in the game even though you were actually on top of there car but due to the server running multiple sessions you’d spend 20minutes trying to get into the same play area.
Originally I was going to say something about one racing game but i changed my mind to a critique rather than a one game review.
The state of gaming.
Ever had one of those days where you look at something and say hmm. Well, I’ve been doing that for about a few months. For awhile Now I’ve been wanting to spread out my gaming more than just between the WII and the PC. Both platforms in my opinion are suffering from bad development and bad companies. Well, After long thought and wondering if I’d be better off with a Bluray Drive for my PC or Some other upgrade I finally decided against both and went with the black sheep of the decisions.
Review: The Sims 3 & the state of EA games
I’ve written about EA games in the past and every now and than I will pick up a game from EA just to see where they are at as far as quality. I purchased the Sims 3 On sale after Christmas, since in January there are not many A level games around this time that appeal to my gaming sense.
Out of the box the sims 3 is very familiar in terms of game play. Its one of the few games that EA was smart enough not to change the core game play unlike any EA sports game.
Most EA sports game needlessly complicate the fuck out of the controls. I bought NHL 2009 out of the bargin bin for $4.99 for one reason on the box it listed “Play with classic controls”. After installing the game I played the game for about a week. The game itself is barely passable, but the game itself has some very poor coding. for one you can not play widescreen, you are stuck with standard 4:3 resolutions. If you try to change the control options theres no real way to customize the controls.
The sims 3 after playing for awhile is almost refreshing in the sence of quality from EA. But there are a few glaring things. In order to patch the game you’re almost forced to install EA’s Download Manager. The EA download Manager is pretty much a useless version of steam. Steam is Extremely well thought out but the EA download manager just feels like its an advertising program more than a game content client.
Manual patching for the Sims 3 is possible though but its incredibly aggravating. Since you can’t Patch to the current version from the retail disk without some hunting around. Since the EA support site does not have the patches on the site you have to go look around for patches, As i’ve found the patches. You can’t patch directly to the latest release version and have to download a few patches to get to the point of the patch you want to be at.
The game however is an improvement over the sims 2, although when I play the sims its not exactly in the sense of playing the sims its more like How to drive your sim mad in 3 easy steps. Theres less micromanagement in the sims3, unlike 2 where you cant just let it run all night to see what chaos comes about. to me its like an ant farm you give it a shake once in a while to see what the hell happens.
I think the most annoying fact of the sims 3 is it feels unfinished out of the box, and i didnt figure out why till I actually read the insert that came with the game. EA gives you 10$ to buy random stuff at the sim store, truthfully i find this annoying. its worse than a DLC. Why would you go online to buy a chair for a game or some other virtual furniture the prices are a little high in terms of value per dollar, most stuff is 75cents or a dollar but still, The online store should be a place to buy items and not to finish a game that is missing items.
as for the sims its ok with a few glaring issues that bug me. Patches/Unfinished feel out of the box / and no way to let the sims run on there own for a long period of time.
EA … Its not in the game anymore and the PC and the $$$$$ (for .99 cents you can buy the letter z in this post)
EA for years has been known for abysmal games of poor quality, although they have improved in some matters but, its really false positive in my mind.
Sure there are a handful of good games from EA as of recently – Crysis, burnout paradise,the sims 3(I guess) *orange box doesn’t count because its a repackage from steam
bing? bing.. Its just uhh.. yeah..
Microsoft has been flapping there PR mouth over there new search engine bing. After the failed livesearch and another companies shit fest of a search engine. It seems like Microsoft has learned a thing or two about search engines but, not much. It was more like “lets just rip off another popular search engine. ” Microsoft has been smearing there new Bing.com everywhere, Hulu is running ads , likely there is ads on TV . but, it appears that bing will be not ignored like cuil was, Microsoft will likely force bing down our throats every way possible. Just to give an idea how microsoft will pull is.
- Windows update will force some update as “critical” to internet explorer forcing bing to the front
- Update MSN clients to have bing built in
- Windows 7 will likely have it forced on the desktop
- Come out with some goofy firefox plugin (maybe already done mystery plugin for firefox had come out *cute stealth install too*)
hemantm writes “A routine security update for a Microsoft Windows component installed on tens of millions of computers has quietly installed an extra add-on for an untold number of users surfing the Web with Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser.”
Looking into the name bing the first definition that comes up on dictionary.com is
bing
As funny as that is , Bing is almost an identical ripoff of Google.
here’s the same same search in google .
the result pages look almost EXACTLY the same. Microsoft has made an attempt to make a search engine but, its a blatant ripoff of Google. Playing around with Bing it seems alright but, again looking at the search engine there’s no fucking difference. The supposed Smart search engine that bing is just tries to give you the same results. Yes there are features in this search engine but Google already does 99.99% of bings search results.
Do we need another Google? NO, if Microsoft actually made something unique it would be one thing, At least cuil made an attempt at being unique. In order to do something better with the search engine Microsoft should try something different than work from there with a dynamic interface that takes opinions from users.
But my vote on this search engine is no , its a shamefully blatent ripoff of google. Its insulting, microsoft has billions of dollars yet they can’t come up with there own search engine?
Retail Zombies riiiiiiiiiise!
just when you thought circuit city was down and out there website is back up .
the only thing that’s weird is
Systemax Inc., a leading multi-channel retailer of computers, electronics, and industrial products, has purchased the Circuit City brand, trademark, website and other assets. The purchased assets include the customer records of the original Circuit City.
As part of our “Customer First” initiative, and respect for your privacy, you can opt-out of having your personally identifiable information transferred to the new Circuit City. Personally identifiable information may include name, address, email, phone, and purchase history. However, it DOES NOT include credit card data or other personal financial information; this information will not be transferred to us at all. If you opt-out prior to June 9th, your personal information will be purged and you will no longer receive email communications from Circuit City.
although they do include and opt-out form for the data retained by the new company. but if you opt out, they will expell your data from the site.
compusa was also bought by the same company. the funny thing i’ve notice is they have a twitter feed on the compusa page. I personally don’t like twitter due to its retard factor of dumbing things down to 140 letters. Media has attached themselves to twitter like its the best thing since sliced bread.
Chuck Keep it on the air!
I don’t watch too much TV but, the one show I have been following is Chuck . At first I watched a few episodes but, the series proceeded I really began to like the show. The show has a serious but not to serious side and plot that you can follow without having to watch the whole series. After a two season run the fate of the show is up in the air.
the amount of meta-humor in the show is halarious, In Chuck versus Santa Claus Big mikes cousin is Al powell , to movie buffs that would be none other than Al Powell from die hard.
another episode mades a reference in one of chucks flashes to the “great outdoors” with the ol 96’er
With the show in the great unknown of being canceled out not , I really hope they keep the show on the air , this show is too good to be canceled.
Logitech MX 1100 (review)
After dealing with so many logitech G7’s , I’d finally given up on them as logitech has sent me a Logitech MX1100.
After almost a month of using this mouse its a fairly good mouse , it has more buttons than you know what to do with (10 buttons). The most noticable thing is the grip on the mouse it forms to your hand fairly well compaired to the g7 , A handshake would best explain it as it conforms to your hand.
As for mouse speeds its right up there with the G7, Maybe a tiny bit slower but barely noticable. My only peeve with the mouse is when you use the mouse from an idle state after leaving the mouse for awhile and you first move it after an extended period of time its slow to come alive, its like you shake it awake literly. but, after that the mouse works extremely well.
For now I’ll give this mouse a thumbs up but we will see down the road if the mouse will follow the same path as the G7 …
Samsung 2333HD color profile
The only annoyance I’ve found with the monitor is the color profile.
“this monitor profile “samsung – natural color pro 1.0 ICM” appears to be defective”
Changing the color profile to sRGB profile will stop progreams from giving an error