Let the ass kissing comence

The new CEO of Linden Labs just reported on his first week in-world on the Linden Blog.  Yada-yadda-yadda. As one would expect, the replies from residents were very typical.  It were as if we just elected a new president, and everyone is ass-kissing him up BIG TIME, as well as the long winded jaded users who want him to focus on this, and fix that, and work the other thing.  Who really reads all that shit people post?

I really doubt much will change or improve better than if we didn’t have a CEO. The majority of the problems we have are technical issues that the CTO deals with, not the CEO.  CEOs are just figure heads that only deal with public and make statements to them to rally them up when things seem stale and boring, or to calm down when there’s a controversy.  A lot like what the president of the USA does, or any high public office does.

He is also culpable of everything that has gone wrong, and will go wrong at Linden Labs.  I think this is why Phillip left his CEO position to avoid more flack and stress from being in that position so he can focus on getting the real work done, and not deal in lip service anymore.  Plus he won’t be responsible if they have to do anything drastic like massive layoffs and downsizing.. which doesn’t seem likely, but that’s common occurance for when a new CEO takes the helm of a company.

Things that bug me about my EEE PC 900

Tapping on the touchpad often causes a double tap. It’s really annoying when you’re trying to put a checkmark on a field, for it to remove the check the moment you put it there. There is a sensitivity setting in the touchpad drivers but it STILL occurs.

Another problem is I hate the mouse buttons. They are difficult to click, and some times they don’t actually “click” on anything even when I do hear/feel it make a click noise. Often it’s just easier to just hit ENTER to launch a shortcut icon.

Going into sleep mode, and leaving it there for hours results in a locked up PC. It will not wake up from the prolonged sleep, causing it to go into a coma. You’re forced to hold down the power button for 6+ seconds to force a power down, and reboot. Some times the wakeup sequence takes longer than it would for it to just reboot.

SSD performance is poor. It still boots windows moderately fast compared to a normal hard drive, but all other functions, once you’re in Windows, launches just as slow (or slower) than a normal HDD. HD Tach reports <40mb/s which his piss poor even for an old 2gb IDE hard drive from 10 years ago.

Battery life is great, even under Windows XP, but the battery icon in the system tray doesn’t give a whole lot of info. It would be nice if the hovering tool tip would show more than just % of remaining power. Other laptops will also give an estimate ETA (hours/minutes) of battery time left. And why does it only show in 10% increments, until it’s under 10%?

I wish laptops came with a power drain mode, where I can set it to fully deplete the battery before I charge it again. Rather than rebooting the PC a hundred+ times to fully drain the battery. This will allow me to prolong the life of the battery, and reduce the risk of battery memory.

Second Life performance is poor, but it’s enough to get on and I.M. for a few hours. Don’t try to explore SL with it, you won’t see much even if you’re are able to move around. This is to be expected with integrated Intel graphics with shared memory. I need too upgrade it to 2gb of RAM, which should help performance.

New PC!

Well it’s my very first laptop. The Asus EEE PC 900 which is a so-called “ultra portable” that is small, light (about 2lbs) and contains no moving parts (aside form the keyboard).  Like the Mac Book Air, it has no optical drive, nor a typical hard drive.  It uses a solid state hard drive (SSD) to store data and to boot from. Which is ironic since it COMES with a recovery DVD, yet it has no optical drive at all. It has a total of 20gb of storage (one 4gb drive to boot from, and 14gb for extra storage) 1gb RAM, 9inch widescreen (1024×600), a few USB ports, SD card slot, VGA, RJ-45, and Wifi.

It comes with Linux that’s very Windows XP-ish style that Asus created to a point.  You don’t really have a desktop, you just have a tabbed window that’s broken down into “internet” “work” “games” and so forth.  Anyone familiarized with Windows XP will have no problem using this.  All the apps you’ll never need (well nearly) are pre-installed.  Comes with Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, as well as many KDE apps.  Even it’s “File management” app looks spookingly familaure to Windows Explorer.  It even refers to external storage devices with a drive letter.  But it is linux under the hood, so you don’t see a C: drive.

If you have a USB CD drive, you can install Windows XP on this with no problems.  It is afterall a full PC with normal BIOS you can  get into by press F1 when it boots up.  You can also buy this with Window XP already preinstalled, but it comes with a smaller SSD storage.  Not sure why this is, but both units cost the same price, so the smaller SSD must be offsetting the cost of purchasing a WinXP license.

I can’t get Second Life to run on this little Lappy.  I’ve been able to run SL Linux port on Ubuntu with no problems, but It seems this OS that the EEE PC uses isn’t’ in 32bit color mode.  Not sure if I can change it to 32bit color mode, and if I did it might degrade it’s performace, since it’s a very low powered Celeron M 900mhz machine.  The video is apparently some Intel chipset, but THAT should be enough for minimum system requirements for SL.  So, I may need to install Windows XP to make this a little easier, since I know my way around windows more than this.  But this little OS is stripped down comared to even Ubuntu, which at least lets me change video modes and settings.  I’m not even sure how to get into the linux console and screw around on the command line.

Despite it not being in 32-bit color mode, video playback is actually not to shabby.  Playing back a Dvix (or Xvid) movie I downloaded off bit torrent, looks fine.  Best with the power plugged in so the CPU is in full swing.

So I will try installing Windows XP to see if I can get SL to work.  I could also try a different flavor of Linux (maybe ubuntu) and see how that works out.  The lappy came with another CD that holds drivers for all the hardware for Windows XP.  So they really don’t mind if you install Windows XP on your own.

Death to Panther

Lindens made a post that they are planing on dropping support for OS X “Panther” that was released back in 2002. Keep in mind this was back before Macs switched over to Intel. “Tiger” and now “Leopard” had followed the Intel switch. LL will simply stop testing to see if the SL viewer will function on Panther, and no longer support it in their SDK. Many Mac software producers have already dropped support for Panther also, so it’s logical for LL to do the same since they see only 0.25% of all their users are running Panther.

Which is still 15,000 users, if you believe there are over 6 million users (which the login screen no longer displays, lol). But on any given day there’s about 50,000 users online, so that makes it only 125 users! So yeah fuck those 125 Mac users Running on old G3’s!

As most people know as a stereotype, Mac users tend to buy up whatever is new that Apple makes. So if there’s a new Mac laptop, people come in droves and form lines over night (or a week) to buy them. So it’s a no-brainier for these users to instantly upgrade to a newer version of their OS, even if they have to pay for it. And if thier hardware is too old to run the new OS, then they buy a new Mac. Apple has always been known to orphan their users when they come out with something new. So this is old hat for Mac users anyway, and they don’t seem to mind acting like zombified sheep buying everything Steve Jobs shits out of his ass.

Not so for PC users, since we are STILL rooted, even after about 20 years, on Intel’s old 80386 CPU. This is mostly due to boring cooperations who bought up so much WinTel hardware, and prefer the stats quo. They don’t want fix something that isn’t broken (or break it more than it already is), and since so many office workers use Windows machines they get the same thing for home use. Thus this is how Microsoft has such a huge marketshare, especially when you consider people are STILL using Windows 95 to this day (maybe even DOS, and Windows 3.1x for some esoteric reason)

So when I read they were about to drop Panther support, because it came out SO long ago, the first thing I thought of was that Windows XP should be dropped too, since it came out in 2001. Of course this will not occur since the majority of users STILL use windows XP! Duh, why would Linden Labs kill off the majority of their user base? Though it would cut down 99% of the noobtards that login.

But if you look the system requirements for Second Life, they still support Windows 2000 (which came out in 1999), which I don’t think even Microsoft supports anymore. But Win2k is actually a really GOOD little OS, it has a much smaller foot print than Windows XP (w2k installs under 1 gig), a LOT more stable, runs just about everything XP runs, and uses the exact same drivers as XP. Linden Labs would probably support Windows 95, 98, and M.E. if they were based on Windows NT (as 2000, XP and vista are).

Also you should know that LL officially supported Windows Vista was only just this past FEBRUARY! Seems LL is slow on supporting, and dropping, on many OSes. Thanks Gawd that most of the Linux support is open source. I have a 2nd PC with Ubuntu installed, and it works fine, but it’s a slow PC. I’m considering to dabble on the OS X scene eventually, and play with it.

Sometimes it’s more fun to be OS agnostic… Assuming that’s the correct term in this case. >shrug<

Grand Theft Achevements

I’m seeing 90% of my online friends on XBL who also have GTA4 and some of the achevements I found really odd in how my friends even got it, when it clearly shows they haven’t advanced much into the game based on the achevements they already have. The main one is the one where you survive five minutes with a six star wanted level. Early in the game you can’t really get more than three star wanted level anyway. Until I found the helecopters!

All you gotta do is find the choppers on the 2nd island (south east end), jack one of the helicopters, and fly over towards the 3rd island. The moment you’re over the 3rd island (you’re not supposed to be there yet) you’ll get an instant SIX star wanted level. woot! All you gotta do is fly around for 5 mins and you’ll get the achevement. It’s really easy, just take a lap around all the island’s coast lines, and that should take about 5 minutes. It’s not to hard to out run the police helicopters while you’re just stalling for more time. But after you’re done, and you wanna land, you’ll be in a world of shit.

One of the things they did to make GTA4 more realistic are how the Paint ‘n Sprays (PnS) work. First of all you can’t use them till you’re introduced to them in the game. Also once you use one, three hours will pass. People standing around won’t be there anymore when you pull out; even vehicles parked near by will be gone or changed. This is a lot more realistic than the instant paint job and the police who were chancing you before suddenly act stupid and lose track of you pulling into the garage. In fact if the police DO see you pull into the PnS, the door won’t close. You can only use the PnS when the cops don’t see you going into it. I learned that the hard way when I had the six star wanted level, and you’re totally swarmed by cop cars shooting at you. I’m not really sure it’s possible to run away from a six star wanted level because that “zone” on the map that encompasses you never seems to slide away from you as you move away from it, as it does with lower wanted levels. One of the achievements is to slip out of a four star wanted level, with out using a PnS apparently.

I also picked up Bully and it’s not bad so far, and I don’t seem to be having problems running it on my older Xbox 360. There was an update to the game the moment I popped it into my 360, so I assume they fixed those problems.

I’m also planning on getting those cool little EEE PC made by Asus. But the model I want is the 900 series that has a bigger 8.9 inch display, more ram, and a bigger SSD, as well as a newer touch pad that works a lot like the iPhone finger gestures. And it comes with either Windows XP or a custom version of Linux. Unfortunately the 900 series won’t be out for a couple more months for the States. And it might be powerful enough to run Second Life, since I have ran SL on desktop PCs with somewhat lesser hardware as the EEE PC has. It’s just a matter if it’s video is decent enough. I’ve not read all the specs on the newer EEE PC; it may even have a faster CPU then the older models.