Hardware Compare

I made a new site: Hardware Compare

Currently has 84 graphics cards listed, and you can pick any two cards and compare their specifications and some theoretical performance benchmarks.

Long time no update

OMG! I just climbed out from under my rock and realised I have not updated this since last year... You would not believe that I'd been abducted by aliens. Whenever will they invent electricity!.

I am so busy with an awfully big adventure, selling my soul to Google, just generally being a pain to society in general, my day is full to overflowing from the second I am woken by murderous Teletubbies to well after sun-down. I am plotting and planning. life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get.

I swear on the bones of my ancestors I will make more of an effort to blog more often until the nice men in the white coats come back. No, really! Don't hold your breath though, you're likely to turn blue..

(Fine, so I stole that from The Lazy Bloggers Post Generator)

I might end up using this to post all my site updates across all my various millions of different sites... or something. I just don't have that much to say, it seems. :D

Piracy and respect

I just finished writing a lengthy rant about piracy and respect. I'd rather link to it than repost it in multiple places, so there you go :)

Reproduction Rant

[RANT]Many people have said that 2 of the most important human needs/desires are survival and reproduction. I saw a quote like that again today. It pisses me off that they just assume everyone wants to reproduce. Who gave them any right to tell ME that I have a NEED to reproduce? They don't know me. What the hell makes them think I want to plod around like a whale for 9 months to bring another person into the world when there are already millions of orphans that could do with a decent home? That's just insulting. I have more important things to care about than trying to increase the world's population, thank you very much. If they'd grow beyond their monkey instincts, maybe they'd come up with a better reason to reproduce besides the lame excuse of "it's a basic human need". And if not, I hope they'll find something better to do. The world has enough unwanted children already.[/RANT]

The last one alive

When I used to go to the mall with my friends from school (read: people I follow around but I'm not really close to), even though the mall was packed with people, I'd get this feeling of desolation, like a cold emptiness, almost like I was the only person there alive. Later when I'd go with real friends, I didn't notice that emptiness so much, more like it was further away, not surrounding me. I just listened to "The last one alive" by VAST, and it kinda reminded me of this, so I wrote it down.

Snaaake

I found a snake in the kitchen earlier. It was thin, long and light brown. Thankfully, it was not a baby cobra (I've had a close encounter with a 3m long yellow cobra that looked really upset with me, and that was not fun). MikEms and I caught it in a cooler bag and took it outside. It was very cute and cuddly. Wait, what'd I just say? Errr...
well, it was kinda slippery to the touch. I couldn't resist (well, I had to "encourage" it to go into the bag and all that). After that, we went back out a little while later again and found a pissed off scorpion running about with its tail up. Yay. This place is a zoo. Bats, spiders, scorpions, snakes, geckos, masses of random insects and the occasional frog. Woohoo.

What more do we need?

These are some random thoughts I had today that ended up not being so random after all:

People make the world complex when it'd be better off simple. There are only 2 rules needed: don't hurt anyone (physically or mentally), and don't screw anyone over (whether they are aware of it or not). Everything that is wrong should be able to fit either category, and if it doesn't, it's probably not wrong (exceptions should only be made if the people directly involved decide so).

If someone hurts a person or screws with them, let the people who were affected by his actions decide what to do with him. And if that decision will affect more people, they should have their say in the matter as well.

Simple is good. Complex is unnecessary and causes trouble. Trying to organize simple things ruins them. Examples: faith is restricted by being organized into religions, learning is restricted by being organized into schools, love is restricted by being organized into relationships. All of which are controlled by fear and expectations ("you'll go to hell if you don't believe in X", "you're a failure if you don't achieve X", "you don't love me if you do/think/say/whatever X"). They don't always say it in those exact words, but it being implied is enough.

Society and the economy are just abstract concepts, and if people stopped thinking about them, they would cease to exist.

I don't want kids. Bite me.

At some point I randomly stumbled across a webring of sites made by people who chose not to have children of their own. They call themselves "child-free" instead of "childless", because they don't actually want kids. One of the pages on one of the sites is called "The Shame of Not Wanting Children" (written by Carolyn Ray). Anyway, it's really good, it's this whole statement-response type thing. Basically, I had this weird urge to copy and paste the statements and write my own personal responses to them. Since I have a blog, I figured I might as well post it here :P


    You must have been an unhappy child.
    That's why you don't want to live with children.
    You should see a psychologist and find out what's wrong with you.
It wasn't overly happy, but that ain't the reason. I was about 12 when I remember first thinking that I never want to have kids. Probably in response to someone else saying that they do want kids one day. OK, so I wasn't happy then. But I'm happy now. And I still don't want kids.

    You're only thinking about the bad parts.
    If you were a more positive person, you'd want to live with children.
I'm a negative person? Really? Well, since I'm so negative, the kid will have a pessimistic mother who only looks at the bad side of everything. How much fun is that? I'm actually quite positive though. So there goes that reason.

    Why do you hate children so much?
I love children with a good gravy. Seriously though, I like dogs and cats, and puppies and kittens, but I don't want pets.
 
    It's just what adults do. You grow up, you get married, you have children.
And I'm a very normal adult. Not. I know of too many horrible parents to think having kids "just because it's what adults do" is anywhere near a good enough reason.

    You only have a limited amount of time — later you might regret your decision not to have children,
    and then it will be too late! You're better off having them now while you can.
Adoption FTW. Regret is a waste of time.

    Society would be much better off if more talented people like you had children.
Society would be much better off if more people who LIKED KIDS had children, and less people who DIDN'T like them did.

    You'd be a great parent! Are you just going to let your ability go to waste?
No, I wouldn't be a great parent. I do have some ability in that area, but not enough to justify bringing a kid into the world who has to put up with my shortcomings. I'm better off using my abilities elsewhere.

    People throughout history have chosen to have children, so there must be some value in it.
    Otherwise, they wouldn't do it. Are you saying that these people are all wrong,
    that you know something they don't?
YES! STOOPID PEOPLE! MORONS! I KNOW EVERYTHING! .... C'mon that was a stupid argument to begin with :P  Sure, some people want kids. Good for them. I don't want kids. Good for me. I'd like to have [insert random thing here], but am I trying to convince you that you SHOULD want it as well?

    But it is natural to want to nurture something!
    Look at how you take care of your [whatever]
     — don't you think you're trying to make up for not having children?
"OMG PLZ PLZ GIMME SOMETHING TO NURTURE OMG PLZ PLZ AAAAAHHH!!!!" ... No. It's not like that. The things I nurture are things I chose specifically for some kind of reason. Like, I either enjoy doing it, or it accomplishes something. Why would I want to have more things I have to take care of? Then I wouldn't be able to give everything enough attention.

    If you're worried about having to be the primary caregiver,
    then it doesn't mean you can't have children!
    What you need is a husband who is willing to stay home with them.
Seriously, kids deserve better than a mother who doesn't want to spend time with them.

    Reproduction is a natural human activity, so human happiness requires reproduction.
It does? Then why am I happy now without it?

    All human beings need to give selflessly to someone else;
    children give us the opportunity to exercise selflessness.
If humans have this need to give selflessly, why is there so much greed in the world? Personally, I do actually need to give semi-selflessly to other people. It's only semi-selfless, because I actually get something out of it. It makes me feel good. Putting up with noise, drool, interruptions and things like that doesn't make me feel good. I'm selfish like that. BITE ME!!!!!!  BTW, Mother Teresa didn't have kids. She was pretty generous.

    Having a child is a unique experience. There's no substitute!
Yeah, there's nothing quite like it. Just because it's unique doesn't mean everyone has to try it. And unlike bungee jumping, if you find it isn't for you once you've taken the plunge, you can't just piss your pants and swear to never do it again. You're stuck with the bungical cord. Pun intended.

    That's an awfully selfish attitude, isn't it?
Why? .... Seriously.... why is that selfish? It's my life, I can do or not do what I want, as long as it doesn't infringe on anyone else's rights. And as far as I know, nobody has a right to expect me to have children. So, .... why? Wouldn't it be selfish of someone to expect me to have children because THEY want me to? Isn't that even more selfish?

    Children are a blessing. How can you reject this great gift?
If I gave you a pet monkey as a gift and insisted you keep it, would that be a blessing? What about an elephant? Even if you like monkeys and elephants? A gift is only a blessing if you wanted it anyway.


The original article is here

The state of gaming in 2006

I'm totally unimpressed with the state of gaming these past few years. Allow me to explain.

I've been playing FPS type games since Wolfenstein. No, not Wolfenstein 3D, the original one that could fit on a floppy. I've seen Doom 1 & 2 come and go, all the various Quakes, Half-Life 1 and all of its mods. It was great back then. When you got a game, you were pretty much assured it'd run on your PC, and you didn't have to worry about the fact that next year the sequel will be out and nobody else will be playing it anymore. I never even spared a thought about any of that. Sure, Doom 1 was a bit slow on the old 386, but it ran fine overall and graphically looked the same no matter what you played it on.

Back in the day, if someone made a custom map for Quake or HL1, and they did a messy job of it so that it ran sluggishly on low-end computers, people blamed the person who made the map for his sloppy work. Nowadays if someone makes a game that runs slowly on an older system, and that person should dare complain, people laugh at them and mock them for not upgrading "when they should have", as if you can't be a "gamer" at all unless you get a new uber-PC every year.

Let me use my favourite example. Doom 3. I think that's pretty much when all of this madness started in the first place. I remember a leaked demo of Doom 3 being showed off at a LAN back in 2001 or somewhere around there... the guy had a Geforce 2 card or something, and was getting about one frame per second. That's all fine and dandy, Doom 3 was still a long way from release. When I got to play the full version, I had an XP2000+ with a Radeon 9500 and 384MB of RAM. It ran like utter crap on my system, even on very tweaked, ultra-low settings. That's to be expected, right? Then how about this: Unreal Tournament 2004, on high detail, reasonable resolution, runs very smooth, and get this: it LOOKS ten times better than Doom 3 did on those low settings I used.

Who cares? Exactly my point! Nobody cares! The gaming industry has turned "gamers" into upgrade-whores, drooling over the fancy graphics of new games every year, spending ludicrous amounts of cash on new hardware every year. Who's winning? Not the gamers. Not the people who would choose fun games that last long over fancy graphics. They're losing out. It's made me sick to the point that I don't even WANT to be called a 'gamer' anymore. I don't want to have anything to do with all these new games anymore. I know none of them will last long - sequels are basically like advertisements for new hardware masquerading as games. New features? Improvements? Oh, sure, sometimes they do add those. Half-Life 2 was quite clever about that. The updated graphics and physics actually served a point in HL2. Maybe Valve still cares.

I'm not even going to start ranting about Crysis, because all I've seen are movie clips and screenshots. So far it looks like Far Cry, just with 'better' graphics that will probably crawl on every system that currently exists. Quad-SLI might stand a chance though, but who knows.

The saddest part of all of this is, it seems that 'gamers' nowadays even enjoy seeing their current uber-hardware get raped badly by new games, they still drool and go "Oooh! I'm SO gonna upgrade for that!". I remember when F.E.A.R. was still pretty new, one hardware reviewer said something along the lines of: "This game pretty much rapes all high-end cards, but that's the way we like it!". Why? I played the F.E.A.R. demo, it didn't look all that different graphics-wise from HL2 if you ask me, and HL2 runs a helluva lot faster in general. Sloppy code? Perhaps. More like they made it run slowly on purpose so that the game would be more popular - because everyone gets a kick out of seeing their expensive hardware suffer these days.

Every time a new game comes out I think to myself: "Games really don't need to ever look better than this. They can stop now. Really.". UT2004, does it really need to look better than that? UT2004 actually had crisper textures than MOST newer games today even have. Go, start 'em all up one by one and go look at the walls up close. See what I mean? Who needs a million polygons when one well-made texture will make it look awesome without sacrificing all that much speed.

Wouldn't it be great if you set a new game's graphics settings down, they look more like last year's games high settings, instead of looking worse than something from 5 years ago? C'mon - even Quake 3 on high looks better than Doom 3 on low.

But they won't do that, will they? It's more profitable to make it look awesome only on high settings, to be sure that as few people as possible will be satisfied running it on lower detail. They WANT you to upgrade. They probably get paid by nVidia or ATI to "convince" people to upgrade more often. Ever see those nVidia logos that show up in most games these days? Do you think the people who made the game would put that in there if they didn't get anything out of it?

Still not convinced that they make games run slowly on purpose? Fine. Go upgrade now. Get 4 GeForce 7900GTX's or whatever. Then cry in 6 months time and buy 4 of whatever the hell else is the next thing to drool over. See if I care. I'll just keep on playing GTA: San Andreas, a game that looks good, runs well, and is one of the most fun games I've played in years. I hope some game designer out there is taking notes.

Attack of the furries

more kittens!!!!! the mother cat was in labour for 3 hours, one by one kitties popped out until there were 5 of them. 3 more black ones and 2 with white spots. all this happened on mike's bed... at least we managed to get towels under her before most of the mess came. we moved them into the garage now, in a cosy box.

they look like rats... sooooo tiny. the first kitten (the 4 month old one called Ninja) was sitting by watching the whole ordeal. hopefully we can find somebody to take the mother and all the kittens before we go back home... otherwise mike's mother will probably take them to the SPCA :(

for those who don't know, the mother cat is a stray that happened upon this house along with her spotted stray boyfriend... one thing led to another, and a single kitten was born 4 months ago... we don't have money to get strays spayed, and SPCA's tend to be overloaded with unwanted animals, so they usually kill them after a week :( taking cats 1200km on a plane doesn't sound like a workable plan either :P

who wants a cat? how about 3?? :P