Starcraft 2 and The Elder Scrolls

I have played two computer games this year (not counting Freecell) and only then since I got myself a newer faster computer, The first was Starcraft 2. While I enjoyed playing it, it was far too short and I found out is really only the first part of a trilogy. For the amount the game costs it was hardly value for money in terms of total playing time. Yes the cut scenes were nice but the total number of actual missions was less that the 30 of the older generation of games. It is supposed to be the first part of the trilogy focusing in the humans. When I had finished the games, it didn't take all that long, I felt unfulfilled. It may be better when you play online with and against others but I don't generally play those kinds of games.

In stark contrast is Skyrim The Elder Scrolls. By comparison this game is huge and has managed to suck up most of my days between Christmas and New Year, including some sessions up to 2am and I don't think that I am even half way through. Yes I am most of the way through the main quest and most of the thieves quests but there are so many sub quests you can accept and take.

Unlike many other games of the genre it only has health, stamina and magicka as the basic attributes. Instead there are a large number of perks divided between magic and fighting style perks like one handed fighting, destruction spells and so on. The levels of these are independent (to some extent) of your game level and your attribute levels. I went with one handed sword, bow, sneaking and lock-picking as my main focus. I have snuck around most places and am now high enough to be able to shot someone with an arrow, wait and do it again. I was interested in the magic spells side but since the very first training lesson at the magic academy had a bug I went my own way with that. You can have a sword in one hand and a spell 'in' the other and strike with both (one at a time unless you have dual skills, which I don't as yet).

You can also have a shout of power ready to use. These are necessary for the main quest but you can pick up lots of them if you get the right clues. Each one has three levels and there are a lot of them, that is a lot times three destinations you can find each with its own mini quest associated with it.

If you like first person fantasy style games this has to be the best I have played, you can even get married if you like and to the same sex if you are that way inclined.

The graphics are excellent and the interaction of the characters is rich sometimes just talking to someone will give you a new quest or there is a multi fork conversation stream to work through.  

As far as value for money goes this one is a winner. It is addictive and can induce sleep loss but it is fun.  

Blog Currents End of Year 2011

So it is the end of another year. As far as IT went it was a slowish year. The floods in Thailand reduced the hard drive availability and they are at record prices now. It was a year where disposable income was not all that easy to find for many.

As for my predictions because things were slower than expected things did not reach some of the marks I had predicted. Monitors reached 24 inch as the base standard but 27 inch models were easy to find and even larger ones. I met a number of people using dual monitor setups but this was not all that common, except in the IT profession. I went back to a single 27" fo0r myself, until I get a bigger computer table that is.

The SLR was still selling and a few more of the intermediate models appeared with intermediate lenses. That did not diminish the remaining focus on the point and shoot compact models however. The optical lens technology was pushed out a few numbers and 12x optical lens offerings were more common. CCD sensors are well into the 16 MP territory now with a few a lot higher than that. As expected low light shooting improved in some manufacturers for both SLR and compact cameras.

The 6 TB drive did not appear but 4 TB was available. USB 3 started to become more common on motherboards and there are plenty of USB thumb drives and portable drives. SATA 3 is also a lot more common these days so I managed to get those predictions correct. I underestimated the biggest thumb drive with the 2 TB model coming out while I predicted 1 TB.

As expected Blu-ray did not move much at all this year but HD downloads increased quite a bit. mkv, mp4 and a few other formats are providing 5.1 channel DTS sound and good quality for a 4GB (or less) file size. As expected apart from WD no media player appears from any of the big electronics manufacturers. I think that this is a HUGE mistake but that hasn't stopped them from making mistakes in the past.

AS expected 6-8 MB is now very common in PCs with 12 and 16 getting close to common sizes as well. Single core chips are all but gone with even mobile phones sporting dual core CPUs these days. 2 TB notebook drives also appeared this year as predicted. Not much above 4-6 core so far and yes the software needs to catch up with multi core technology.  

Printers and scanners hardly moved in technology this year with the multi-purpose units becoming very common now. Entry level prices for black and white laser models dropped to under $50 with colour laser models well under $200. Wireless connectivity did indeed becomes more common with even the lower prices models supporting wireless printing. The technology is still a little flakey but it works. Wireless also picked up as a common connectivity method with many of the younger generation not even connecting a fixed line at home unless they were after a fixed line Internet connection.

As expected Windows 7 did indeed take more of the operating system market with those who had gone for Vista kicking themselves for not waiting. I finally retired my last XP machine with the plan to use a virtual machine (not Microsoft's) if I need full XP compatibility. VMWare is the way to go is you want to move down that route.

As expected Windows & mobile did not take off. Not so much because the OS was no good but rather that Microsoft didn't get out there and had no real competitors for the Android devices. Those that did get a Win 7 mobile device had good things to say about it.

Surprisingly this year the tablet market did make it through to the end of 2011 even being the 'best' present for Christmas. Samsung did well but could have done better but for the Apple law suits to block the Galaxy 10.1. Some were successful and Samsung fought back and blocked the sale of the iPhone and iPad in some countries. A stupid set of actions from Apple and it will cost them in the medium term.

Arrrrgh, no HD Wii game machine this year, rumours of one next year but they have waited too long I think. Faith in print media generally fell this year with more people looking to blogs for their news. This has caused governments to focus more on this news delivery system with some politicians leveraging this technology.

As expected no major label really made any progress with digital distribution of media and the pirates did indeed continue to provide a dizzy array of items to the general public. Every new version of DRM was cracked almost immediately and more artists start selling their own materials directly. No real movement in media players Digital radio starting to make some headway but AM and FM are around for quite a while yet. No new battery technology appeared and of course no real standardized cable connections.

There were a number of patent fights and the usual stupid attempts to patent general domain stuff from the Americans. The rest of the world should simply no longer recognize a US patent. Malware and hacker attacks were well represented this year with Anonymous and associated groups hacking into all manner of sites and grabbing large amounts of personal data. Stuxnet 2 was identified. IPv6 did not really grab hold but it won't be long now.

So 2011 was a slow year and China did indeed slow down. I'll have some more on that in my New Year article.

So given the slow year I didn't do that poorly in my predictions for 2011.

I hope that 2012 is a great year for all the readers.

Blog Currents - 2011 - Dec, 21

Christmas time is getting closer and next week will be my end of year summary. This week however it is time to think about presents. Since presents can be for others or yourself I suggest that with the shortages due to the factory in Thailand being flood inundated it is not a good time to be buying a new hard drive. That being said when you read below what Seagate is doing as far as warranties perhaps now is a good time to get one.

I don't need a new digital camera, my older D200 and newer Lumix does all I need, but I do keep an eye on what is happening. The evolution of the new compact range with interchangeable lenses is an interesting one.  I read a recent review of the Nikon 1 V1 that comes with 5 lens options ranging from 10mm (27mm equivalent) out to 30-110mm (81-29mm7 equivalent). Except for the 10mm all lenses have the VR technology included. The camera has a 10Mp sensor which these days may not sound like much but is plenty for most people.

The newer cameras have some really nice features. In this case when you unlock the lens the power comes on and a second later you can take photos. It does video and has three automatic ISO ranges so that you can limit the range to the situation you are in, nice. There are lots of other technical aspects but one thing I have not seen before is the ability to shoot at 400 frames per second that is played back at a slower rate effectively giving you slow motion capture. The quality is more for YouTube than anything of a higher quality but it is a neat feature. I'm not recommending you rush out and get one of these I am using it as an example of where the more compact devices are moving. At over $800 with a 10mm lens it is also on the expensive side for a compact camera.

On replacements for my D200, i.e. an SLR the nicer cameras these days would be something like a Pentax K-5 or Nikon D7000. Any SLR upgrade however is usually driven by what older SLR lenses you use so Canon users stay with Canon, Pentax users with Pentax and so on. Staying in the human affordable range, and since I have Nikon lenses, I like the D7000. You would buy this over the similarly prices Canon EOS 60D because of the weather sealed alloy body versus the plastic one from Canon. If you want the articulating back panel display you will have to drop back to a Nikon D5100. The D7000 has a good ISO range up to 25,600, on-board retouching, 39 point AF array, 16.2 MP sensor, 1080p HD movie mode, dual card slots, 100% frame coverage, a 2016-pixel RGB TTL sensor and more. It is no D300S but as a D90 replacement it is not too far away either.

The biggest change for me this year was that I ordered most of my presents from online providers. This means that my usual last minute rush around the department stores for presents is not required and while the store owners will be less happy the post office need the boost as less and less people write letters to each other, on paper at least. Online shopping will never fully replace the in-store experience. People will still want to try on clothes, smell perfumes and touch fabrics. Reordering the same item is a different story completely. There is also a growing concept of going to a store to try and then order the item online at a cheaper price. Some stores have responded by instituting a try it on fee. I imagine that the cleverer people will buy one item then order the rest online.

Industry News

The story of the week for me was the one about the peer to peer (P2P) guys suing some big names for infringing on their technology to support cloud based architectures. No, I'm not making this up. Kazaa founder Kevin Bermeister and StreamCast and Morpheus founder Michael Weiss are filing in Texas against Google, Amazon, Dropbox and VMWare. They claim that some companies are infringing on technology such as distributed search engine technologies and content addressable storage. DOn;t you love it when the little guys get a chance at the big guys for a change.

Seagate is reducing the warranty periods for their Momentus and Barracuda hard drives down to one year with all currently at five years down to three. Their reason? "We're just being consistent with the industry" In some cases the reduction is from five to one year. Western Digital recentl dropped some of their warranties but not by as much. Basically they are using the industry to drop their protection coverage. The funds set aside to cover such claims can now be moved into other business areas like research and development.

From a recent advertisement in Australia. The following appeared in print below a picture of the Samsung Android based Galaxy 10.1 "This is the tablet Apple tried to stop."

In 1999 it was the Millennium Bug that was going to take out just about everything. In 2011 it is hackers. It turns out that some models of the Modicon Quantum PLC, used to control machinery in water plants and other industrial facilities, is hackable. It has a flaw that allows someone to take it over remotely. The manufacturers decided to hard code multiple accounts with fixed passwords into their associated devices like the Ethernet cards and then publish some of this information in their support manuals. Some of the information is encrypted but due to some weaknesses in the underlying VxWorks operating system they are easy to uncover. All in all not so clever. The devices are used in dams, refineries, waste treatment plants and other similar places. Unsurprisingly the problem is considered a national security threat in the US and the manufacturers are racing to close the loopholes.

Samsung versus Apple. The latest is a claim that Apple has violated a pair of patents relating to the way WCDMA 3G was implemented. Plus another two patents relating to smartphone utilities and even one that involves the display of emoticons. This time the place is Germany. On the up side for Apple France knocked back a ban of the iPhone 4S. The war continues.

Nokia executive Niels Munksgaard said recently that the younger generation are already sick of iPhones and they find Android phones to complicated and not very well protected. This, in his mind at least, leaves Nokia's offerings in the just right category. Yes I had to laugh at that one myself.

Paul Allen of Microsoft fame wants to build a very large plane that can be used to launch rockets into space. This will allow more stuff to be sent up into space, just what we need.

The latest Windows mobile operating system seems to have a problem. The wrong kind of person can shut down the messaging system by sending the right SMS or even a chat message. I am guessing that they might want to fix that.

My hero this week however is Steve Wozniak, yes the Apple guy. He suggested that if organizations allowed their workers to wear t-shirts to work or wear what they want to. This will help creativity. 

Have a great Christmas

Blog Currents - 2010 - Dec - 13

It's Christmas time again and in many countries it is a lot easier these days to simply order online for you presents and gifts. As usual I am in Australia for Christmas and I have already ordered a number of presents online. I just saw a colour laser printer from Samsung for $125 including delivery that might make a nice present for myself. Toys are a fraction of the store prices which shows just how much mark up there is here in Australia. Stores are starting to complain about mail ordering but when you are making 200 percent on a sale you have little room to play the hurt party.

In the modern age the real issue is with what to get someone who lives in a Western society? The children seem to have everything or too many toys as it is. They are better at mobile phone games than their parents, already have a DSI like gaming device of some kind and deciding what to get them is becoming increasingly more difficult.

In the IT and electronics world the situation is getting to the point where some parents are getting their young children an iPad or similar because they have everything else already. The one expensive present approach rather than the many smaller gifts. How you can justify giving a child a $600 plus present shows just how well the Western world is doing.

Thailand has embraced the idea of Christmas as well, well at least the stores have. It was not that long ago that Christmas passed by without a mention, now there are decorations and 'buy me' displays in most shopping centres. So iPad or Android tablet?  It depends where you live and if Apple has managed to keep an injunction on Samsung or not. Sure you can buy another brand of Android unit but the Samsung devices seem to be the better ones at the moment otherwise Apple would not be so afraid of them. No, my nieces will not be getting a tablet from me.  

Found a very useful utility for splitting audio files where you have an associated CUE file, e.g. for single DTS .WAV files. Medieval CUE Splitter. It is free and you can get it from here http://www.medieval.it/cuesplitter-pc/menu-id-71.html. It is fast, works great and did I mention it was freeware?

Now if I can figure out a really good and simple way to convert stereo tracks to DTS 5.1 sound.

On that note the one area of software that never seems to get any better or easier is media conversion. Yes there are a plethora of products out there, some for free and some professional. None of them is flexible enough to do the kinds of things I have every wanted to do. There are long complicated conversion methods using a series of steps with freeware apps but none are easy to use and there is always some problem at one of the stages. Worse there are as many conversion methodologies as there are task types.

In the professional world this is well recognised and you need to mortgage your home to get all the right software and VST plug-ins. One day it will all be easier.

Industry News

So which browser protect you the best from online attacks? I bet you think I'm going to say Firefox but no that one is the worst at the moment, sigh. According to a recent 102-page report, prepared by researchers from security firm Accuvant Google Chrome offers more protection against online attacks than any other mainstream browser. Surprised? The report compares all kinds of attacks based on the underlying assumption that buffer overflow bugs and other security vulnerabilities are certain in any complex piece of software. Chrome came out on top with IE close behind. Firefox came after that mostly because it doesn't have a security sandbox that shields vital parts of the Windows operating system from functions that parse JavaScript, images and other web content.

The report was commissioned by Google. The authors say that they had complete autonomy in deciding what metrics to use and what conclusions they made. This may indeed be true but bias is hard to eliminate when the people paying you are asking you to review their product. According to the report Chrome, IE, and Firefox are used by more than 93 percent of web users.

Proving yet again that online data is not safe Australia's Telstra customer self-service site has had to be shut down recently because they opened up their sensitive customer data to the whole world. Basically they allowed any Internet user to bypass the front-page security of the BigPond self-help site and access details of other users. The data available would have had an identity theft ring drooling. Details included telephone numbers, users’ names and addresses, bundle information, and according to some reports users’ login and password information. As soon as they were made aware Telstra closed the site down, accidentally interrupting BigPond users’ access to Webmail. To be fair the site is a cloud based one hosted by a third party, one about to be purchased by Oracle. The breach was potentially a large one because there were over 650,000 new bundle customers sold last year but according to Telstra only 60K will have to reset their passwords. Following Telstra's usual customer service policy it took a while to let customers know.

Apple has lost another court case this time in Australia. The High Court has refused Apple’s application for special leave to appeal in the ongoing Apple-Samsung case. This means the Galaxy Tab 10.1 will be on sale in Australia before Christmas. Samsung must however keep detailed records of sales of the device and application sales. The twist here is that by the time the case has been resolved both vendors will probably have new models out. Samsung already has units on the shelves (as of Dec 12th) List prices, i.e. the prices that only the non clever pay, are $AU579 for the 16 GB WiFi Galaxy 10.1 Tab, and $AU729 for the 3G version. Or in more realistic terms, less expensive than the iPad.

In other negative news for Apple, Motorola has been successful in getting an injunction against Apple sales in Germany based on patent violations. The injunction has cost Motorola €100m in bond money. This is in case the German court brings down a later ruling overriding the decision. Apple asked for €2bn which is somewhat ambitious. If you have forgotten Samsung now owns Motorola. Meanwhile Apple cannot sell their stuff in Germany. This is what happens when you indirectly annoy Motorola who has a gazillion patents in many, many areas that Apple has an interest in.

PC forecasts for 2012 have been downgraded because of the ongoing hard drive crisis and because demand has been dropping.  IHS has estimated a 3.8 million unit shortfall in PC shipments against their earlier estimates. Current HDD stocks are expected to run out early in 2012. On the plus side there is still a projected growth but there are slight price increases in the final products and even more rises predicted. This goes against the normal trend of prices coming down.  

In response Western Digital has ramped up production in Malaysia and has the flooded plant producing some units as well. Full production is not ex0pected in Thailand until after the middle of 2012. By the end of 2012 expect to be able to pick up inexpensive hard drives.

Blog Currents – 2011 Dec 7

It's fast. The new computer is all set up and it is fast to boot, fast to shutdown and applications run a lot faster than on my old machine. I also ripped my first few HD-DVD disks to back them up. I picked up an old Xbox 360 HD-DVD USB drive that I had ordered from the UK, plugged it in and a few seconds later I could read and play HD-DVDs on my computer.

I first tried a rather complex process of ripping the disk, demuxing it, recombining it and until the last step everything was going well. I was trying to convert the HD-DVD into MKV format. The first process took about 8 hours and did not work. Then I found MakeMKV. This application rips selected or all content from a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray directly into and MKV file that contains multiple audio streams and subtitles. It rips and converts a disk in about one hour. On the down side there is no way to reduce the size of the output or change any other options, it is a raw rip to an MKV file in full resolution. Movies sizes are around 25 GB or a little less so it is a lot of space for each disk. Guess I will need to buy a new empty hard drive. The problem is that with Thailand off the manufacturing circuit for a while prices have all gone up.

The best speed improvement has been on the game Starcraft 2. On my old machine it took many minutes to move between game loads, now it takes seconds. The graphics are really good and I can run the game's graphics settings at full resolution with all the extras turned on. SQLServer is working properly and I finally managed to work my way through some Microsoft Reporting Services examples.

I am still very happy with my Samsung Galaxy S2 a.k.a. my Android phone. The application range is just so good and having a couple of young nieces I soon find out what the favourite games are. I have been playing Stupid Zombies which is an exercise in angles as you try and shoot zombies by bouncing your bullets off different surfaces. I also downloaded a decibel meter and a spectrum analyzer to check noise levels and frequencies around my new computer. It has a high pitched noise when the SSD is accessed for some reason, perhaps they all do that. A little bit older and I probably won't hear it any more anyway :)

I also downloaded Classic Shell for my new Windows 7 machine. This adds the option of Alt-Start to bring up the familiar XP Start menu in addition to the Win 7 Start menu, it also gives you back some useful items that are missing from Windows 7 Start. It is Open Source so just do a search for it if you want that old familiar feeling back again.

Industry News

Europe has it in for the big guys, with the exception of Apple of course. The latest target is Google. The company is facing 400 pages of objections from the European Commission. The complaints have been collected from a range of other companies because Google is apparently abused its dominant position in the search engine market. One other complaint is that Google dropped the results position of rival services and unfairly lowered the "Quality Score" for sponsored links of competing services. Not sure if it is in the brief but Google also lowered the result position of sites against the global warming craze. For example Watts Up With That is the most popular site for 'skeptics' but you won't find it on the front page of many related searches. Goo9gle has also been playing the Apple game by imposing exclusivity agreements with advertisers which prevent them from displaying adverts from rival search services on their own sites.

Not surprisingly one of those bringing complaints is Ciao! owned by Microsoft. There are others. Earlier this year the US Federal Trade Commission also started its own antitrust investigation into Google's search and advertising practices. The US has a very poor track record when it comes to this kind of thing, Google is after all an American company. Expect this one to fall flat but the European one to be a lot more successful.

Ironically, or not, at the same time Google has applied for permission to takeover $12.5bn Motorola Mobility with a response from the EU due in January. This is about the same time the anti-trust situation should hit Google.

In other Google related news, this time Android, Table makers are suggesting that Google needs to work closely with them to drop prices so that they can hit harder at the Apple iPad market. In the UK for example the iPad still gets about 75 percent of the tablet sales. It doesn't seem to matter that Apple buyers are locked into the Apple dimension, for everything. One issue is that Google does not give automatic upgrades to their operating systems on the tablet platforms like they do on their Smartphones. Applications have no quality guarantee, then again you can get just about everything you could want for free so I consider this one just being picky.

Apple has failed in its bid to have Samsung tablets banned in the US. The problem with success is that Apple needed to show that it would be harmed more by Samsung continuing to sell products if its patents were being infringed than Samsung would be if its products were banned and it proved it wasn’t infringing on the patent. In other words Samsung would be hurt more by the ban so they get to sell their products pending the outcome of a court case. Not a very easy thing to do in Apple la la US land. Apple also lost recently in Australia where a ban on the Samsung 10.1 inch tablet was overturned.

Samsung has a new range of tiny Serial ATA solid state drives for the ultrabook range. Working with Intel the idea is to release a competitor to the Apple MacBook Air. There are four sizes 32, 64, 128, and 256GB and they add to the existing PM830 range. The smallest size is really aimed at providing caching support. The drives weight in at a tiny 8 grams and include 256-bit AES encryption. You get up to 500MB/sec for sequential reads and 260MB/sec for sequential writes. Not the fastest in the world but at this size who is really counting.

In related news the price of flash chips is starting to come down. The reason is an over-supply and slow markets in Europe and the USA. You may think the Thai floods have something to do with this but the prices were dropping anyway. The supplies of the current technologies will probably continue to be more than the market needs as fab plants ramp up for the production of higher yield 2Xnm and 1Xnm processes.

Just because it is cool. Scientists have been working on quantum entanglement between a pair of small synthetic diamonds, at room temperature. Yes not at some ridiculously low temperature. This could mean another step closer to a quantum computer. In this case they  generated motional entanglement between vibrational states of two spatially separated, millimeter-sized diamonds at room temperature. Just how they did this involved a lot of lights and mirrors. Why do we care? Well entangled objects can function as quantum on-off devices, or "qubits". On the negative side the entanglement lasts for only a few picoseconds so they still have a long way to go. Still it is cool.

The Swiss have ruled that that downloading pirated copies of films, music and video games for personal use will remain legal because it is of not detrimental to copyright owners. Using a Dutch survey they also concluded that the entertainment world does NOT lose money because of piracy a conclusion that will annoy the BSA to no end. According to the Swiss survey a third of Swiss citizens over the age of 15 download pirated content, but they don't spend any less money on entertainment than usual. There are changing patterns of sales e.g. a bit less on music and a bit more on games. If you didn't know it the UN labels Internet access a basic human right, like many one curtailed in more than a few countries. The Swiss have used this to limit any  filtering or blocking of websites because as it would damage freedom of speech and violate privacy protection laws. Would a number of other major Western and Asian nations be so open. The Swiss Federal Court has already ruled that tracking companies are not allowed to log IP addresses of file-sharers making it all but impossible to get to the average P2P user.

Looking for a new tablet, one using Android 4? Look no further than China where a sub $100 called the Ainol table, yes an unfortunate choice of name, has been released. Android 4.0 or  Ice Cream Sandwich is not yet available in current Western tablets. The new device has a 7 inch screen, 1GHz processor, WiFi, USB 2, HDMI, Micro SD and both front and rear cameras. It will do 1080p playback and has a capacitive touch screen. It will be available in Europe and the US under the Leader and OMG brand name which should make it a little easier to sell.