This is So Cool!

Starcraft AI Competition!

Lobbing Mortars from Hell

Was reading Phoronix today when I encountered this great quote about S3 graphics:

Personally, S3’s biggest recognition in my life was playing Heavy Gear 2 at a LAN. Some putz was putting mortars on us from way the Hell at the far end of the map with impunity. After allegations of cheating and threats of beating, we all found out his Savage4 didn’t support pretty much any way of rendering distance fog. He had an infinite viewline.

After further allegations of cheating and rigging, we found out that not only did he not intentionally arrange a corner case to get this screwup, there were no drivers from S3 that could fix it, and S3 had stopped making drivers for his card.

Maybe that’s why no one uses S3 video cards.

From Runescape to… This

Online games are bad. WOW sucks up tons of time and ruins lives. Maple Story and Runescape have caused my brother to dip into theft and credit card fraud to purchase premium items. But worst of all is Jeff Atwood’s discovery of a game called Civony which slowly descended into pornography to attract players. Witness the disturbling evolution here.

The Best Linux Games

A careful selection of the best games, given my 4 years using Linux.

OSS:
pingus
wormus
nexuiz
wesnoth
supertux
lincity
frozen bubbles
freeciv
freecol

Proprietary:
UT 2004
Neverwinter Nights
ETQW
sid meier alpha centauri
heroes of might and magic III

Windows Native on Wine
warcraft 3 (including all blizzard games)
aoe 2
medieval 2 total war
morrowind
spiderweb software games
baldur’s gate

Intel Atom Performance Comparison

Even since Intel released its Silverthorne project as the Atom, I have been salivating at finally picking up a small, cool, light desktop that is a cheap and versatile performer. Why do I need a power-guzzling Core 2 Duo when everyday tasks don’t need something more powerful than a Pentium III? I know because I have run XP on a 866 MHz P3 and thought the experience sufficient for the internet, music, office, and basic 4+ year old games(AOE2, Starcraft, Rise of Nations, Rome Total War). Since we passed the gigahertz threshold, I’ve been asking why the regular PC user needs anything more powerful? Sure, if you’re a gamer or a video ripping fanatic, you’ll need all the power you can get, but really for basic office tasks, is the Atom up to the task?

Since I do not own an Atom, I thought that the best way to do a comparison is to find which old CPU is the most comparable to the Atom. In terms of transistor count, the Athlon XP at 37.5 million and Willamette P4 at 42 million were good initial guesses for appropriate counterparts to the Atom, standing at 47 million. Benchmarks were few and far between, but I did dig up the following:

Tomshardware says that the Atom with HT passes PCMark05 with a score of 1478. Not bad. How does the Athlon XP compare? Well, the Athlon XP 1800+ with a score of 1497 came close. On the Intel side, the Celeron (Willamette edition) 2 GHz scoring 1449 was the closest comparison.

The verdict? Having owned an Athlon XP 1800+ and having played with a friend’s P4 @ 2 GHz, I can confidently say that all users with basic requirements (office, internet, email, music, basic video playback, and light gaming) can get by fine with an Atom CPU. Watch out, Intel. Don’t be caught cannibalizing your own products!

Now I am interested in whether the Atom is capable of playing 1080p x264 video, which is typical of most anime fansub encodes these days. If it can handle that, I’m sold on selling off my existing desktops and replacing them with Atom-based machines.

Wit and Spit

Brother was pretty amusing today. Some highlights:

When a package arrived from Amazon.com, he exclaimed that it must have been a bomb inside and that the delivery man was a terrorist.

Later, when we were watching Serenity, he cried out in the last fight scene with phrases from our UT2004 days. Memorable ones such as “Jayne is on a killing spree!”, “Doctor is out!”, and “Rampage!” made me laugh incessantly, clearly loving him in that sliver of a moment.

The next day, he wasn’t done yet, as in the course of the Orange Bowl game, I told him that the Kansas team name was “Jayhawks” and asked him if he knew what the name of the VT football team was. In his impertinence, he said in the same tone, “massacre, guns, Koreans!”

Emerson was right

I’ve spent far too much time these months with “the whore,” as I’ve taken to calling my computer. This is what it currently looks like: Desktop
As you can probably tell, I’m a huge fan of the Final Fantasy stories. Aeris is probably one of the best female leads ever created. She has a pure soul and a good heart and genuinely cares about her friends. She is not afraid to speak her thoughts but is not brash and abrasive. When you meet her, she carries a smile and is cheerful, which is what makes her so beautiful. Beauty if determined more often by one’s attitude rather than pure physical look (personal opinion). However, if you catch her alone in a quiet moment, a sad look can cross her face at times. Obviously, this is from the traumatic experiences of her early childhood and the knowledge that she is the last of her kind. With all that weight resting on this little one’s shoulders, it is amazing that she still marches onwards to her destiny. What a strength of will. I don’t know if my predilection for sad girls developed because of some unknown magic Aeris worked on me.

A lot has happened since my last post. A certain memorable event involved someone trying to steal my umbrella (which was broken btw) in Cory Hall. I had entered the bathroom and left my umbrella on top of a paper towel dispenser. Someone coming out of the bathroom took it and promptly ran out. I heard him run and went to check and saw that my umbrella was gone. I dashed after him and, thanks to all those weeks of high school PE, caught him before he could run out of the building. When I confronted him, he merely replied, “Oh, this was yours?” What was he thinking? I let him off easy. But then again, he was an Indian guy twice my height.

Finally I can stop Chen from badgering me about finding a place. Thanks to some business skills, I managed to secure an apartment in the same building that we had previously failed to obtain. Chinese skills certainly came in handy, as the landowner later told us that she chose us over another group of girls because I spoke Chinese and seemed like a nice guy. \o/ Wayne called me a cunning and manipulative businessman. Yang also impressed us with some timely humour that definitely balanced well with a more professional and reserved approach from the rest of us. Definitely play to your strength. Oh, currently there are three girls living in our apt. In the summer, one of them will move out, but Chen+Yang can’t move in there for summer school because one of the girls is still living there. Apparently, her bf will throw a fit if he found out she was living with other guys. Come on, how harmless can Chen+Yang be? This cracked me up. It was certainly different from a certain other person I know who has no qualms about these things ^_^.

So, now it’s finals week. It’s the time of gloom and doom and lowered heads and sad faces. However, make sure to keep up your spirits, everyone. Go out and run. Get plenty of sleep. I used this week to repay the sleep bank. Those few all-nighters definitely drained my reserves. To those of you who couldn’t find me online, I was very busy trying to stay afloat. At this rate, I might not even make it into grad school. =(

I’ve tried to keep this post relatively free of my thoughts and focus on what’s been happening. I’ve found that I could create some controversy with some posts here, so I’ll try to avoid that in the future. However, here’s a little tidbit: Just as the leaf falls and the flower petal flutters to the ground, so must all things come to an end. Whether they be in harmony or entropy I cannot say. =) Cryptic enough?