Dang’s Weblog

Why are we supposed to care about the opinions of celebs about random things? X-Play just had a series of interviews with “celebs” (the Osborn girl? She’s a celeb?) about video games. Now, I suppose they have a right to an opinion about video games, as much as I do. But, why should I care? They all seem to like sports games, and disparage shooters as being “too violent” while making movies with extreme violence. However, shooters outsell just about everything else, so you decide. Anyway, not a deep blog today, just a bit of a rant on how celebs seemd to have taken over the world.

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There was just this weird Burger King commercial where there were all these people grilling next to the side of, otherwise empty, scenic roads. Apparently, we’re supposed to connect grilling in the wild (using a Webber grill, no less) with Burger King. Somehow. Decidedly odd.

Then, there’s this glasses commercial where the kid says “Cool! I get to choose two?”, refering to picking glasses. Now, no kid I’ve ever met wants glasses.

Then there’s the whole slew of “Don’t ever try what we’re doing in this commercial, or you’re surely die.” commercials. Car commercials do this a lot, with spin outs, and slides sideways, and huge plooms of dust, and so on. Apparently, the fact that their car slides a lot is supposed to make me want it.

Then there’s NetZero HiSpeed. They say “You can surf the net up to 5x faster”, but the small type says “Does not speed up data transfer or downloads”, so what’s faster?

Then, there’s the “Returning employee-leasees get this incredible lease, but you can’t get it, nyah nyah nyah” car commercials. It makes me want to say, “Why bother even trying to find out how much the bloody car costs, when the only price that’s low enough they can quote it on TV is the returning employee price.” Of course, the ones where that don’t say that also have enormous restrictions, they just put it into the tiny type.

In general, commercials suck because they can say anything they want, as long as they say “Just kidding, we lied” in small type at the bottom, usually with such bad contrast you can’t read it. Sometime, I admit I pause commercials in the Tivo to read the tiny type, just to see what kind of junk they’re trying to pull over on me.

Now, I can’t be the only person who completely discounts all quoted prices in TV adds. Not one of them is a price you can actually get, because, if nothing else, the stars won’t align right. I know this, others must know this too. So, why do they do it? It must work, and work often enough to be worth it. This means that people are even worse morons than I thought they were. I mean, if the people like me, who realize commercials are pure bunk, are just noise in the demographic, then the masses are truely asses, and not only in groups. Frankly, I’m scared.

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Futuremark (the makers of 3DMark2003) have confirmed that NVidia is cheating on the benchmark. In addition, they found a probability that ATI was cheating too, although not as badly (or they were just better at it). This calls into question all benchmarks on recent cards. How can I be sure that I can trust the benchmark numbers? All the benchmarks are well known, and obviously it’s worth it for the companies to cheat on the benchmarks. How are we to know how cards really perform? All the higher numbers really show is which company is a better cheater. What we need now is for benchmarkers to play actual games for some amount of time, and give average/best/worst scores for the various cards. That’s a much better benchmark.

This also calls into question all of the scores comparing various processors. It has seemed that various processors “liked” various games better. Did this really mean that the driver cheats on those games worked better on that processor? Suddenly, I can’t really evaluate how good any hardware is for gaming. This is very bad, and could potentially cause an industry wide backlash or even a class action lawsuit.

Take the recent release of the Matrox Paherlia, for example. It scored pretty bad against both the NVidia and ATI cards. But, what if Matrox just wasn’t cheating? The sores were 24% worse on the NVidia cards when Futuremark disabled the driver cheats. This is enough to make up the difference in many of the benchmarks, suddenly making the Parhelia a competative card in real games, rather than in benchmarks. But, no-one is buying the Parhelia, because it scored so low.

I’m personally not planning on buying a new graphics card for 4-6 months. Hopefully, this will be enough time for the benchmarkers to find a way to do non-cheating benchmarks, and enough for NVidia and ATI to remove the various cheats from their drivers, and maybe I’ll be able to actually decide what card to buy. The only problem is that I probably won’t be buying a card that has come out in that time, so all I’ll have to work with is likely old benchmarks, all of which have to be assumed invalid. I’m not sure what I’ll do. Maybe I can buy one of each card, and return the one that performs worse on the games I care about? I don’t know. All I can say is that my faith in the industry is shaken. At least with a console, I know what I’m getting…

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So, today I discovered that Washington (the state) inacted a law banning the sale of video games containing violence against cops to people under 17. Now, I’m fairly down with people being able to protect their kids from things, but this is a bit rediculous. I mean, why just against cops? Are they really claiming that playing these games causes kids to attack cops? That’s rediculous. I’ve wanted to do nasty things to cops before, but that’s always because they’re assholes, not because of video games. (Note, not all cops are assholes. Not all cops I’ve dealt with are assholes. However, all the cops I’ve wanted to do nasty things to were assholes.) The proper solution is to have proper training and screening for cops, and pay them decently, so that assholes don’t become cops, not to screen video games.

Now, I’m in the school that claims that kids are too sheltered in this country. I belive it’s up to the parents what your kids can see and do, but much of this is constrained by law. I really wish they wouldn’t legislate their morals onto my kids. But, there’s nothing I can do about laws in Washington, so I guess I should shut up about this. Besides, the last few attempts to ban video games were overturned by the courts, so maybe this one will be too.

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There was this chick on Jay Leno tonight, who was singing the national anthem at an NBA playoff game, when she forgot the lyrics. The coach came over and helped her. Anyway, I’d heard about it, but not yet seen any clips, and they showed the entire clip. It was extremely embarrassing, and I wasn’t even the one screwing up! Janette commented that it had the same effect on her, so it’s not just me. Why is it that we actually feel embarassment when we see other people in an embarassing situation? I have a theory.
See, embarassment is all in our head. Since embarassment only involves our perception of what others will think of us, an embarassing situation causes one of the different results: Either we get embarassed, or we laugh it off. Similarly, seeing someone else in an embarassing situation has one of two effects: Either we feel embarassed for them, or we laugh at them, probably depending on how mean we are, and whether or not we’re with a group. The reason is that, because embarassment is all in our head, we easily get into the head of the person actually getting embarassed, and get embarassed ourselves. Okay, not as deep as it sounded in my head when I was composing this, but at least it’s not about video games or computers…

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So, we bought a PS2 yesterday. One console, one network adaptor, one extra controller, one PS2 memory cartridge, one PS memory cartridge, one Final Fantasy Origins game, ~$320. However, I spend all day yesterday, and most of today playing, so it appears to be worth it. Now, we have to read reviews, and rent games, and spend tons of money. I imagine we’ll have to eventually get the hard drive, since some new (and interesting looking) games require it. Plus, you *can* rent PS2 games, while PC games are somewhat difficult to rent. One thing I definitely learned about the value of consoles verses computers: I took the PS2 out of the box, plugged in power and and controllers, plugged it into the TV, and off we went. No installing, nothing even remotely complicated. I can now understand the “computers as appliances” thing, although it’s not really for me.

So, now Janette is playing the Harry Potter game, and it’s rather interesting. Not really my type of game, but interesting none the less. I rented Tenchu, which is a ninja game. It should be interesting, but it’s Janette’s turn to play now. So, in addition to many computer related things, this blog is now going to containg PS2 related things. I guess it’s just gotten one step geekier. Maybe I should include more politics or philosophy to balance it?

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Okay, so I’m hooked on bit torrent. I was a bit skeptical at first. It seemed like getting critical mass wouldn’t work very well, but it’s great. I’ve downloaded huge files (500 odd MB per) in record time, without screwing up anyones download servers, even when the site originating the download was slashdotted. And, it’s free and open source. Now, if it’s big, my first response is “where’s the torrent?”. Today for example, Gentoo Games announced American Army for linux, on a bootable CD. They had ISOs. They didn’t have a torrent. I tried to download the actual ISO, and it was dragging like a dog with fleas on it’s balls. So, I searched the /. story for a torrent, found one, and downloaded the ISO at an average of 160K/s. That’s 1.3 megabits per second, for those of you who don’t do networking for a living, and the theoretical maximum of my cable modem is only 1.5. Pretty good. And, if you search a bit, you can find a torrent for just about anything you want to download. But we all know that none of us would download anything we don’t have absolute rights to use…
[Read more →]

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NVidia has apparently been caught cheating. The new FX5900 got really good scores on 3DMark, a synthetic benchmark that runs the same sequence of events. It beat the Radeon 9800 Pro by a lot, while it was really close on the actual game benchmarks. Apparently, this was because they modified their drivers specifically for this benchmark, taking advantage of the repeatability of the benchmark. Now, this isn’t new. ATI was caught lowering the detail level of Quake III to get better scores. This is interesting from several perspectives, but mostly academically, because I don’t plan an buying a card like this any time soon. First, apparently the crown of “Fastest Card” is so important that it’s worth cheating, and taking the risk that you’ll get caught. It also makes me wonder what cheating hasn’t gotten caught. Second, it shows how incredibly bloated the drivers for these cards are in Windows. I mean, putting in special case code for individual frames of an entire benchmark? That’s unbelievable, and must result in absolutely huge drivers. You could never get away with this if your drivers were open source. Third, how much developer time went into this? It must have cost NVidia an absolute fortune to pay developers to analyze the benchmarks frame by frame and put in the cheat code. Then again, maybe they have software to do it automatically. That’s, in a way, more disturbing, that they would have software designed to add cheat code to their drivers. Finally, this is additional proof, to me, that anyone who believes that people are basically good is deluding themselves. Given a reasonable chance that they’ll get away with it, anyone will cheat. And lets face it. Cheaters frequently prosper.

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Well, it looks like we’re going to get a PS2 rather than an X-box. The reason, as you know if you read Janette’s blog, is Final Fantasy Origins. I loved FF1, and it still remains my favorite role playing console game. And X-Play gave it 4 out of 5. At any rate, there’s very little that available on the X-box thats both really good and not available on either the PS2 or the PC, so it’s a small loss. One other bonus: the PS2 is now coming with a network adaptor, and we can actually play PS2 games online, because Sony doesn’t charge/lock down their online gameplay. Bonus! Of course, this does mean that we’ll have to run ethernet down to our stereo stack…

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The new $20 was announced today, and I’m relieved. I was afraid it would be pink or baby blue, or something like that. It turns out, it’s amost exactly like the current $20, just with shades of color, rainbow-like, across it. It’s not too bad. Still, I’m kindof sorry to see the all-green go.

The real problem is with paper money. If we had electronic money, then counterfitting as we know it is impossible. You only have to worry about digital counterfitters. So far, that hasn’t been a problem, as people are much more likely to steal real digital money (or credit cards, which is the same thing) than to attempt to create their own. Personally, I would love to do away with cash all-together. Yes, this makes all transactions traceable, but that can be gotten around, and I have less of problem with traceable transactions than I have with cash. I don’t buy *anything* with cash, other than fast food, so I obviously don’t have a problem with traceable transactions. Of course, as long as the contents of the purchase aren’t recored, then tracing that you bought something at place X isn’t really a problem, and there will be PayPal-like places that offer anonymization of purchases. So, all in all, I’d like to see a fully digital money system.

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