Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Getcher Linux Drivers Here! -- 7:18 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Greg Koah-Hartman announced on the Linux kernel mailing list that kernel coders are offering to develop Linux drivers for free. All the ask for is a spec for the device and an engineer to contact if there are problems. This is definitely a step in the right direction. I'm sure some in the FSF camp will scream bloody murder about their willingness to deal with NDAs. However, as so often happens when FSFers scream bloody murder, I don't care.

Pondering the Imponderable -- 7:15 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The curse of The Haus strikes again. This time, our furnace decided to stop working last night--right at the coldest part of the winter so far. Thankfully, the problem seems to be limited to a relay. I was about ready to get the WCG clients running on my boxen just for the extra CPU heat.

XP vs. Vista -- 7:09 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Tom's Hardware posted a bunch of benchmarks comparing Windows XP to Windows Vista. I wasn't terribly surprised to see that Vista adds a good amount of overhead, slowing the whole system down. OpenGL-based games and graphics programs in particular suffer tremendously because Vista dropped support for OpenGL. If that translates into greater stability and security, that might be a worthwhile trade-off. If not, it just means that you get to spend more of those CPU cycles to accomplish no work.

As an interesting aside, AMD and Intel are coming out with ever-faster dual-core and quad-core CPUs, but what do we do with that extra power? As of this point, the only answer seems to be operating system overhead. I'm sure someone will scream "What about the games!" but even games don't make use of the multi-threading that multi-core CPUs need to run at peak efficiency. I'll ask it again: where's the cool software?

J.t.Qbe comments: I was laughing to see the Circuit City ad on Sunday, where they advertised a laptop with Vista...and a full 512MB of RAM. From what I've heard, that's enough to run Vista...who needs applications?

I'll admit, I bought XP in March when I built my new computer primarily to play Oblivion, but that's the end of the line. From what I've heard about Vista and its "features", I won't be going there. My next commercial OS will be OSX.

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Levelord Interview -- 12:17 pm CST, Update by The Master

Ritualistic has an interview with the Levelord, discussing Ritual's new direction, and the fate of SiN. Sadly, it appears SiN is dead for now, but hopefully they'll either revisit it someday, or give the IP to someone to develop it.

No Old News

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