We could all learn something from this. Very inspiring and heartwarming.
Don’t let anything get in the way of your dreams.
Archive for January, 2009
An Autistic Kid Plays High School Basketball
Saturday, January 31st, 2009I Have 4GB Of RAM, So Why Does Windows Show Only 3GB?
Friday, January 30th, 2009I find your lack of faith in 32-bit systems disturbing.
I’m no expert in it either by the way. But I found a nice post on this common problem plaguing non-techies and the geeky.
Since the plummeting of prices of DDR2 RAM (last I checked, it’s $15 for a 1GB stick, $25 for 2GB), a lot of people have moved to using 4GB of RAM. I don’t recommend it, but it does makes running multiple applications superb! And Vista (64-bit) does seem more responsive than XP (32 bit) if given such a disgusting amount of RAM for it to feed on.
Problem statement:
I just bought a system with 4GB of physical RAM in it. The BIOS posts 4GB, but Windows tells me that I have anywhere from 2.75 – 3.5GB of RAM. Where is the rest of my RAM?Summary:
If you are running 32-bit Windows, you must live with it. You will not ever see all 4GB of RAM you’ve paid for.If you are running 64-bit Windows, you may have to live with it. Depending on your motherboard’s chipset, your system may support memory remapping. If so, you will be able to use all 4GB of RAM.
The way I understand it, it boils down to the ability of an operating system to provide address space. Addresses is akin to your home address. It describes the location of a piece of data. 32-bit systems can provide 2³² addresses, or 4,294,967,296 addresses. The problem arises when you have 4GB of RAM that requires addresses, but other hardware components require it too, most notably the graphics card. Graphics usually has its own memory for it to use (onboard graphics use a portion of your RAM, usually configured in BIOS), so it too requires addresses. So in the end, Windows will allocate a portion of address for graphics and other components, and give the rest to your RAM. So in the end, a 32-bit flavour of Windows will only see 2.7-3.5GB out of the 4GB.
Do note that this is a very simplistic explanation that may be a bit skewed. For a more detailed and technical reason, do click on the link below.
Two Terabyte Drive From WD
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
That’s not a misprint by the way.
Western Digital has recently launched the world’s first 2 terabyte drive. Consisting of 4 500GB platters, this baby will make you cry the moment it crashes. However, given WD’s reputation as the most reliable drive maker, I doubt it. But if you did decide to bite the bullet on this, be sure to get 2. Hell, get 3 and RAID-5 them!
Early benchmarks by HotHardware looks enticing. The drive does have above average performance. 90MB/s read and 80MB/s write, but with a 14ms seek time. So it’s best to use it as a storage drive and not the main OS drive.
Wonder if this will push the cost of current batch of harddrives down.
MSI WindBox Announced!
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009
This looks freaking awesome!
It latches on the back of your LCD monitor, assuming it has a “VESA wall-mount interface”. Probably some wall-mounting standard. It sports an Intel Atom (what else?) N270 1.6GHz CPU coupled with the (lacklustre) GMA 950 chipset. It has 1GB of ram soldered or a DDR2 SODIMM slot (Maximum of 1 GB only? Why?). There is also a SATA 2 connector, but no word on whether it’s for a 1.8″ or 2.5″ harddisk, and a mini-PCIe connector, for SSD madness. 3 USB ports, internal 10/100 LAN and WLAN b/g completes the connectivity options. For an added sweetness, there is also a 3-in-1 card reader.
The only bad thing I can foresee is the awful mess of wires for those geeks who are cable-management-challenged.
It will be great as a no-fuss 24/7 torrent box and/or a living room PC. I wouldn’t mind having one, depending on price.
[MSI Industrial PC Grand Launched WindBOX as Intel® Atom™ Solution for Low Power And Ultra Mini Size] via [Atom-powered MSI WindBOX nearly ready to ride your LCD]
Dumbest Microsoft Move Ever?
Monday, January 26th, 2009And it’s by Microsoft!
Even with the apparent demise of MSN Music, or maybe not, Microsoft has chosen to launch yet another music store, but aimed at the mobile market. Of course, with DRM. And a higher price tag.
It’s like a store for sadomasochists, where people get pleasure from buying tracks at a more expensive price which is locked to one phone.
When anyone can go to iTunes or Amazon for DRM-free tracks (Oh and by anyone, I mean those in the U.S. Too bad us Singaporeans still have to be contented with pirating our music to get DRM-free tracks.), and at a lower price point to boot, one has to wonder which genius at Microsoft decided “Hey, why don’t we offer to sell music to users’ mobiles, with DRM to lock it to that phone, and charge people higher than other retailers. What a winning idea!”. And then proceed to high-five others around the meeting room and bask in each other’s awesomeness.
PCPro has an interview with Hugh Griffiths, Head of Mobile at Microsoft UK. Some of the more hilarious parts:
At the moment, to be honest with you, we don’t have the functionality in-house to provide a mechanism for transferring between mobile phones and PC. We don’t have that functionality available.
…
If I buy these songs on your service – and they’re locked to my phone – what happens when I upgrade my phone in six months’ time?
Well, I think you know the answer to that.
Well played. I guess there are enough idiots in the world for corporations to exploit.
I’m one of them too.
[Q&A: Microsoft defends return to DRM] via [Microsoft introduces MSN Mobile Music]
Sales Numbers VS Return Of Investment
Sunday, January 25th, 2009Gamasutra has a nice news article on PC gaming recently. It correctly points out:
Its real-time collaboration Sins of a Solar Empire was one of 2008’s most impressive success stories; its 500,000 units may seem piddly at first glance compared to big console blockbusters, but its sub-$1 million budget puts that figure in a completely different light.
…
The lesson seems simple, but it’s often overlooked in our NPD-obsessed industry: return on investment is a lot more important than units sold, especially as budgets continue to balloon dangerously.
I think this is especially true. It doesn’t matter if the next GTA or some random EA game sold 6 billion copies but took 6 billion dollars to create. Most of the money will probably be spent on making the graphics look mildly awesome, but with minimal relevance to the gameplay. Another portion will be spent on devising useless DRM to inconvenience the legitimate customers while those who pirated it on the day it was released are able to play with ease. 6 billion units sold is massive but not enough to get a comfortable return, so developers and/or publishers will take the easy way out: cry “Piracy!” and proclaim that PC gaming is dead.
I find it absurd when Ubisoft can proclaim that selling 2.9 million units of Far Cry 2 is considered a “slow burner” and that 2.2 millions units of Prince Of Persia is a “slower take-off”. I wonder, just how much capital did those two games require?
I guess that’s why I prefer to read and support the indie developers. There’s just less arrogance around, especially when it comes to sales numbers and projection. And who doesn’t like to support the underdogs? While the big publishers are more contented to simply churn out sequels, and even canning projects that are deemed to have no sequel potential like some rabid Hollywood producer, indie developers tend to take more risks at innovating stale genres, provide interesting new gaming experiences or simply re-living the forgotten classic genres of gaming.
Rediscovering: Tropico
Friday, January 23rd, 2009
Tropico (first released in 2001) is basically a strategy management game. I am a huge fan of these type of games by the way. Tropico lets you become a dictator of a tropical island, managing each aspect of the island, from courting aid from US or Russia to providing jobs and housing for your citizens.
One thing which I like about Tropico is that (like how the tutorial emphasizes) you manage the “high level”, such as building houses, factories, creating jobs, but each citizen in Tropico possesses free will, so they can choose not to live in that house you built, or work in that factory you created. As in the real world, the way to entice them to do so is via money. You can set the wages of a job or cost of living, thus you are in a way really in control of the economy directly. Of course, you can’t set too high wages, else that factory will not be making profit. You can’t set the price of an apartment too high either, or no one will live there. Every citizen is also uniquely identifiable, with their own names, aspirations, thoughts, contentedness, etc. Such a system does make me care for my virtual citizenry more. However, if they call for elections, and the person running against you is wildly popular (you will lose the game if you’re voted out), you can simply commit election fraud, or, my personal favourite, have him meet an “accident”.
There are a bunch of pre-defined scenarios that you can play with its own set of win-lose conditions. However, like all my strategy sims, I like to play in sandbox mode with no time limits.
Sigh. They don’t make games like this anymore. (Still hotly awaiting Elemental!)
Mine is the Mucho Macho Edition, as pictured above. It contains the Paradise Island expansion pack and the official strategy guide.
I’m surprised that upon installation, Tropico ran fine on my machine, which is running Vista 64. I did not find much information on its compatibility with Vista when googling, but I did see some people having problems running the game on Vista. Lucky me, installation was a snap, and the game ran much, much faster than I remembered. Of course, back in 2002, I was running a Pentium 4 2.4GHz with a Geforce Ti4200. Now, it’s a Core 2 Duo E6750 with a Radeon 4850. If I didn’t feel any improvements, I should burn my gaming rig to the ground.
Time for some retro gaming.
Trying Out Copy-Paste On The iPhone
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009Clippy has been mentioned in popular sites now that I just had to try it out. It is currently in beta, only version 0.9 now, so it may not be properly stable. It adds two additional buttons to the virtual keyboard in the “numbers” section. You highlight the text to be copied by dragging your finger along the text, select “copy” (the copied text will be displayed beside the additional buttons), then locate the place where you would like to copy it to. It could be in another application, of course (except Safari Mobile as reported by lifehacker).
This gif image is created by yours truly using glickr.
I find that it is a very seamless implementation. I really like it. However, the highlighting seems to be permanently on for me. If I need to correct the middle part of a word (yes, I do make mistakes despite the excellent spell check), I would have to drag my finger to place the cursor there. Now, it automatically highlights the dragged portion, from where the cursor was to the destination. I am not sure if this is an intended design or a bug, so I have sent an email to the author of the app. According to him, this is an intended design.
Another minor annoyance I have with this is that in the SMS app, if you switch to the number mode in the keyboard, the placeholder where you write your message will be replaced by the copy and paste buttons. Not a super high priority flaw, but still an annoyance nonetheless.
For those of you with jailbroken iPhones, this is a worthy addition to your list of jailbroken apps. Right up there with SSH, PdaNet and BossPrefs. Install it via the iSpazio source in Cydia now!
Hello Obama, Goodbye Great Moments In Presidential Speeches
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009With a new president, too bad David Letterman had to retire one of the better ideas from his late night show.
Unused clips montage from the Late Show With David Letterman:
Weekend Sale From Impulse And GOG!
Saturday, January 17th, 2009Temptation is around this weekend.
First, Impulse is having a sale.
I wouldn’t mind picking up Gish or Kudos 2 (wait, I already have Kudos 2). However, the sale looks a bit more subdued than the previous one.
GOG.com is also enticing me with their weekend RPG discount.
Welcome mighty mages, brave warriors and skillful rangers. This weekend you’ll need the best weapon you can get, a sack full of magic potions and healing herbs, heavy armor and loads of free time. We’re starting the RPG weekend promotion on GOG.com!
To benefit from the RPG genre promotion you must follow these three easy steps:
- Step 1 – check the list of RPG games included in the promotion. You’ll find the list below.
- Step 2 – add to your cart the RPG games from the list that you want to buy and proceed to the payment screen.
- Step 3 – once you’re on the payment screen enter the following promo code: PROMO1. You’ll receive a 15% discount on every RPG game in your cart.
RPG games included in the promotion:
- Arx Fatalis
- Fallout
- Fallout 2
- Fallout Tactics
- Gothic
- Invictus: In the Shadow of Olympus
- Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader
- Sacred Gold
- Stonekeep
The promotion will last till Monday, January 19 till 23:59 EDT.
Hmm…
