Category: Computers

When was it the notion that video games needed to be work sparked to life in game developers minds? Remember back in the day when you could just tap up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-b-a-b-a-select-start and get 30 lives to beat the game you were into? When did game developers decide that cheat codes needed to go away? When did they decide to go on a crusade to make people play the game “right” and not cheat?

I paid for the frigging game. I own it. I should be able to get maximum playing enjoyment out of the game without having to beat every level perfectly, not missing any items, to unlock level “Whatever” or characher “Whoever.” Heck, electronics manufacturers even started tapping into players’ frustrations by selling “cheating tools” like Game Shark and Game Genii so that gaming customers could access all the features of a game they paid for. You can’t even find them anymore.

Game developers. take note. I don’t need a referee. I paid for the game. Don’t make we put hours of “work” into it just so I can see level “X”, or play the game with character “Y”, or drive car model “Z”. You’re pissing off the old school gamers who now have full time jobs, are married, and have kids. We don’t have time to play a game for hour sjust to unlock some game feature that should be available anyway. Either bring back cheat codes, or stop locking out game features all-together. Come on, tap into my demographic. You might just make some more money.

This is a very informative excerpt from the MacNN Forums about the Intel GMA 950 video card found in all Apple MacBooks. MacBook users, read this!

“Put simply, there are two types of “things” that go into video memory:

1) The frame buffers
2) Textures/Surfaces

The GMA950 has a maximum resolution of 2048×2048 pixels with 32bpp color depth. That means a single frame buffer can take up to 16MB.

It can also display two unique images simultaneously. In the case of the Macbook, this means the internal LCD panel and the external DVI connector. Taking this into account we’re up to 32MB — in practice this will never happen since there really aren’t any displays with that high a resolution on the market. However, Apple could be playing it safe and always reserve enough memory to handle all frame buffer sizes.

Similarly, Apple may be using the concept of having front and back buffers to provide smooth video. This means each display effectively has two frame buffers associated with it. As a result, now we’re up to the magic 64MB number.

In addition to frame buffers, there are typically off-screen areas that are used to cache bitmaps, individual characters of fonts, the contents of a window that is going to be blitted or blended, etc.

There are countless uses for off-screen memory. Importantly though, the GMA950 can only off load work from the CPU when it has this memory to use. It can only accelerate drawing and compositing within video memory.

In this case, it sounds like Apple has ensured that there is a minimum of 16MB of off-screen memory for this use. As a result, we get the 80MB number.

The important thing to realize about integrated graphics chips such as the GMA950 is that memory can be dynamically moved from the system to the video processor at will. This is done in 4KB chunks up to the maximum address space of 256MB.

We already know from IOReg that Apple has configured the GMA950 with a 256MB aperture.

And Apple themselves have effectively confirmed all of this with their knowledge base article:

Mac mini (Early 2006), MacBook, iMac (Mid 2006): About the Graphics Processor

In short, the 64MB number being thrown around is a minimum value not a maximum value.”

I just purchased the new Apple Airport Extreme wireless router, and the first word that comes to mind is “neato.” It’s hard to get really excited about a wireless router, because it doesn’t really do anything cool like transform into a robot or anything. To honest, the best thing you can say about a wireless router is that “you never think about it.” If you’re not thinking about it, that means it’s doing it’s job. Like many appliances in your life, you take them for granted until they stop doing what they’re supposed to be doing. (Which is what happened to me. My 4+ year old D-Link Wireless Router died over the weekend.)

The Airport Extreme’s very easy to set up (like just about all Apple products) and like most Apple products, you get it setup and it just WORKS. I’m writing this post using the router after about 15min of setup. (If I didn’t configure it on my old eMac it would have taken even less time.) The feature that really sold me on the Apple Airport Extreme is that it supports printer and drive sharing. Using the USB port found on the back of the router, you can connect either a printer or a USB drive enclosure. (Both, if you have a USB hub handy.) This is a great little piece of computer equipment. At $180 it’s a little pricey, but the ease of use, and feature set make it worth it.

From the ZDNet Article:

“Joanna Rutkowska has always been a big supporter of the Windows Vista security model. Until she stumbled upon a “very severe hole” in the design of UAC (User Account Control) and found out — from Microsoft officials — that the default no-admin setting isn’t even a security mechanism anymore…”

“[When] you try to run such a program, you get a UAC prompt and you have only two choices: either to agree to run this application as administrator or to disallow running it at all. That means that if you downloaded some freeware Tetris game, you will have to run its installer as administrator, giving it not only full access to all your file system and registry, but also allowing it to load kernel drivers! Why should a Tetris installer be allowed to load kernel drivers?”

This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Especially since Microsoft has had 3 operating systems with this dumb security model. There is no reason that Windows should require administrator access to install an application. This is one of the main issues involved with the security of Windows operating systems. In the Linux and Mac world, you login to your machine as a user – not an administrator. That way no program you run or install has administrator rights to the system. If you need to do something as an Administrator on the machine, the machine prompts you for the administrator username and password, does the required task, and then reverts your rights back to “user” privileges. (This is basically the “sudo” function found in Unix/Linux.) In Mac-land, for the most part, you don’t even need admin privileges to install an Application. You can just create an applications folder in your home directory and you’re good to go. This is why Unix based OSs will always be more secure than Windows. Until they change the very core of how Windows installs and runs applications you’ll always have to give applications rights you don’t really want them to have.

Scot Finnie, Windows expert for Computer World, has abandoned PCs and switched to Mac after reviewing each iteration of Windows Vista for the magazine.

“Bye-bye Windows! My three-month Macintosh trial has ended, but my permanent gig with the Mac is just getting started. Apple’s MacBook Pro and Mac OS X are now my computer and operating system of choice.

If you give the Mac three months, as I did, you won’t go back either. The hardest part is paying for it — everything after that gets easier and easier. Perhaps fittingly, it took me the full three-month trial period to pay off my expensive MacBook Pro. But the darn thing is worth every penny.”

Full article HERE.

Ok people, I know you’re not web designers, but let me share a couple secrets with you..

1) The purpose of a web page of any kind, even one on MySpace.com is to be read. Therefore, putting light grey text on a light grey background doesn’t work. (The same goes for putting text over a background image where the color of the text and the colors of the image intersect.) It’s ridiculous how many MySpace pages out there are simply unreadable because of background or color choice. You can’t tell me you don’t notice it. Have you ever tried to read your own MySpace page? You must have noticed that every other work blends into the background. Come on.

2) Somewhat related to #1, even with good color and background choices, a page can be made unreadable by another MySpacer mistake : the overloading of a page with plugins, slideshows, images, videos, and audio(music). If my dual-core Intel processor starts to choke simply by browsing to your MySpace page, you might want to thin out your content a little. Hell, I’ve come across several pages that by simply trying to scroll to a part of the page has a delay of 5-10 seconds or more on it. K.I.S.S. Really, less is more. Again, you can’t tell me you haven’t noticed. If my computer screeches to a halt, so does yours.

So there you have it. Another MySpace gripe. So why the hell am I even on the thing you ask? Well, it’s kind of a necessary evil. I’m a blog guy, as you can see since you’re reading this, but I have many a friend that only use MySpace. If I want to keep up with the happenings in their lives, it’s off to MySpace I go. Also, MySpace is really handy for contacting people you’ve been out of touch with for a while. That doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to complain about it’s crappy UI, and some of the ugly pages I’ve come across. 😉

I created a MySpace account today. Several of my friends have a MySpace account, and I realized if I want to be able to read their MySpace pages, I need an account. While I was in there I went ahead and filled out my profile, even though that’s not really required to look at other MySpace members’ pages. Let me just say that MySpace.com must have one of the most horrendous user experiences of any web service I’ve encountered. Aside from the fact that the site is just plain ugly, it’s UI is laid out very poorly, and is very user-unfriendly. Switching between your Home page, and viewing your profile requires that you use your browser’s back button. There is no link from your profile page, to any of your profile settings. Inviting people to be part of your network is a huge hassle. I spent probably 15 minutes just trying to figure out how to do it, and once I figured it out I thought that the process was bloated and inefficient. Also, the search engine used for searching for people on MySpace isn’t very powerful. You can search by name, and then can only narrow your search by geographic location. How about further narrowing your search by keyword? Or age? That would come in very handy. I found myself clicking through pages of search results for my friend April, because I didn’t know where she lives now, but new she was a couple of years older than me. Narrowing the search by age would have helped a lot. (I’d also like to note that in all my searches, probably 80% of all the people that came up were in the 14-21 year old age group.) I don’t like MySpace at all. For the most part I feel that it’s just the new web-trend for exhabitionist teenagers.

Geez, I’m getting crotchity and old. If I’m not careful I’ll be yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off my lawn…

As I’ve posted here before, my MacBook has been experiencing the Random Shutdown problem that many MacBook owners have reported. My MacBook has had it’s logic board replaced, and about 2 weeks ago, the random shutdowns began happening again. Apple recently released v1.1 of their SMC update, and they state that the update should help address the RSD issue.

“The SMC Update improves the MacBook’s internal monitoring system and addresses issues with unexpected shutdowns. This update is recommended for all MacBook systems, including those that received warranty repair.”

I installed the update the day they released it, and since then I have not experienced one RSD. So far, so good. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Get the Apple SMC Update HERE.