I have some advice for all those people thinking about getting a solid state hard drive: Don't do it until AFTER you have at least gone to 64-bit Vista and gotten your memory up to 8 GIGS.

Since the days of Windows 3.0 (or OS/2 2.0) the mantra has been "add more RAM" when it comes to improving system performance.  But a few years ago, people started to quit saying that because, well, power users realized they had bumped up against the 4 gigabyte (really 3 gigabyte) limit of 32-bit Windows XP/Vista.

That's when we started looking for other ways to improve performance. For example, if our 32-bit OS could only see 3 gigs or so and a typical Vista set up is using say 1.5 gigs when doing serious work, that doesn't leave a lot for disk caching.

In days gone by, my 8 megabyte Windows 3.1 or OS/2 box would have at least 25% of those 8 gigs dedicated to disk caching (SmartDrv or OS/2's cache).  I remember having a 4 gig disk cache when I went to 16 megabytes of system RAM.

And yet here we are in 2008, because of the limitations of a 32-bit OS, we find ourselves with very little memory available for things like disk caching. So what do we do? We discover the benefits of having the hard drive be RAM instead of addressing the underlying problem - we need more RAM.

So I upgrade my Thinkpad T400 to 8 gigs and the results are shocking. Despite the machine being far slower than my monster desktop machine at work, its performance feels about the same when it comes to loading things because there's so much memory available for caching.  Right now, as I type this, Windows says it's using 2.6 GIGS for the disk cache.  I've gotten rid of the swap file entirely and the system is just wonderful.

An SSD would be nice to be sure but they're extremely expensive (I know, I have 3 on various machines) and the performance gain is never as much as people hope outside of booting up which most power users rarely do.

Migrating to 64-bit Windows has been one of the most exciting things I've done with regards to PC tech since Windows 2000 came out. 

One last point about 64-bit computing, the faster we get to it, the better off we all will be.  Right now, PC games are up against the 2-gig limit per process of 32-bit Windows.  It's a big problem (all those wonderful high resolution textures use a lot of RAM).  Going to 64-bit will revolutionize games and many other applications and let's face it, memory is pretty cheap compared to the alternatives.

Watching Obama absolutely crush McCain in the third debate. It's just so painful. 

Republicans decided to have a "moderate" old maverick. They got their wish.

Like most companies, Stardock puts together an internal business plan for setting up goals and objectives for the company for the forthcoming year (Stardock's fiscal year begins its execution phase every October 1).  As part of this business plan is an appendix that acts as a critical analysis of what Stardock customers can expect to see and what challenges the company faces to better satisfy customer expectations. 

For this year, it has been decided to make this appendix available to the public. The Stardock 2008 customer report goes over some of the successes Stardock has experienced but also looks at the failings with a considerable amount of criticism in areas that the company needs to improve on.

The contents include:

• Impulse digital distribution status report
• The status on Stardock game projects
• Stardock's position on "DRM" and copy protection explained
• An update on the Gamer's Bill of Rights
• The status of Object Desktop
• A look at the dock technology now used by Dell and others.
• The results of the 2008 customer survey report (VERY interesting results)

If you're interested in the inner workings of a consumer PC software company, you may find this document to be very interesting.

URL: https://www.stardock.com/media/stardockcustomerreport-2008.pdf

The first Demigod ad has gone to press. 

As someone who has been a fan boy of Gas Powered Games since Chris Taylor founded it 10 years ago, I am getting a very good feeling about the direction Demigod is taking.  I feel almost (okay completely) evil in that what is available to the beta testers is such a subset of what's actually available internally.  But Beta 2 which is due out in a few weeks aims to begin changing that.

Demigod is going to be a challenge to market because it's not a typical real-time-strategy game and it's not really an action RPG either. It's a blend.  People who like Defense of the Ancients (DotA) will likely understand the game the best but even there, it's not DotA either, it's its own thing.

But one thing is for sure, Demigod won't be lacking in promotion. With any luck, Demigod will be one of those games that is actively played for years to come.

The Thinkpad T400 laptop from Lenovo is brand new. It's a great laptop - best I've owned so far though it's a little glitchy right now with docking stations.

The gotcha I've had is that it only has two DIMM slots (two memory slots). It requires DDR3 memory too.  But this week, Crucial has started selling 4 GB memory DIMMS (so I can now get 8 gigs).  So I have the order in and hopefully this week I'll be able to upgrade.

I realize this seems incredibly geeky but I'm very excited about going up to 8 gigs. Vista 64 has performed marvelously and having a ton of free RAM for caching is likely to have a significant performance benefit.

Stay tuned.

I really can't wait until this election comes and GOES.

I'm a conservative and I make no bones about it. I keep up on politics and foreign affairs as a hobby all the time. But every 4 years, suddenly lay people who barely pay attention suddenly become political experts ready to insult the intelligence of those who disagree with them.

It's particularly annoying reading Digg, a site I usually like but is populated by left-wingers who, if asked, say that Digg is dominated by left-wingers because Digg attracts intelligent people and intelligent people tend to be liberal (despite ample evidence to the contrary gathered over the years but I digress).

I just want to be able to read tech news or whatever without having some arm-chair political analysis by "some guy" who is clueless about economics or foreign policy.

If people hold different political philosophies and opinions from you, it's not because they're necessarily ignorant or racist or stupid. 

Sometimes people can look at the same data and come to a different conclusion. A little respect for other people's intelligence can go a long way.

Nothing bugs me more than when people insist that their opinions are the same as facts.

As someone who wouldn't be caught dead voting for either Obama or McCain, I am just shocked at the patronizing and arrogance directed towards other individuals purely because their political philosophies are different.

I won't vote for McCain because I don't like his political positions. But I certainly think he's "worthy" of leading the country. Similarly, while I won't vote for Obama, I don't think he's some sort of terrorist. But I think there's plenty of legitimate concern that the man has surrounded himself by people (Ayers, Wright, etc.) who overtly hate our society as it is and whose motto is "change" without defining very explicitly what he hopes to change. It certainly makes me nervous.

But I think both people are decent people and that people support these men not out of ignorance but because they believe that these men represent the way they think the United States should be administered.

If you're for Obama, you probably are unhappy with Bush's foreign policy decisions, you believe that it isn't fair that some people make so much more money than other people, and think that the federal government should ensure a basic standard of living for its citizens.

If you're for McCain, you probably support, to a certain degree, Bush's foreign policy including the invasion of Iraq. You probably believe that it is not the government's business how much people make and that generally, the federal government should try not to be involved in people's daily lives.

I hold the latter position but won't support McCain because he doesn't really have a political ideology other than getting elected (Campaign Finance Reform, poor undertanding of economics, etc.). He might make a good secretary of defense but not a very good President.

But nothing pisses me off more than seeing people showing such naked intolerance for the opinions of other individuals. Thinking Obama would be a terrible President does not make someone ignorant or evil or stupid or racist.

Backof house (future back yard)

 
Where the house will eventually be (rocks)

So it's official, the successor Windows Vista is Windows 7.

Windows 7 is designed to be all the things Windows Vista wasn't including:

1. It's faster. MUCH faster.
2. It's cleaner. The UI has been cleaned up a lot.
3. It's easier to use. A lot of the functionality is more streamlined
4. It's richer. The ribbon seen in Office becomes part of the OS allowing app developers to have a standardized way of taking their apps to the next generation UI (I love the ribbon).
5. The UAC is...a little bit better.  I still think Microsoft should have a setting to allow signed applications to be always okay'd by users if they want.
6. It apparently has a new Start menu and taskbar.
7. The included applets are modernized
8. It may come with native VHD (virtual hard disks) support
9. Better system tray handling

That's all well and good but I have a few other things I'd like to see added to the list:

• Make it 64-bit only. PLLEEASE!
• Give us better and cleaner access to manage the junk that loads on boot-up. (Stardock TweakWindows 7 will certainly do this otherwise)
• Make it a LOT easier to share drives over the Internet

Let me talk about 64-bit a little bit.  A lot of people don't realize just how much effort developers have to go through to support 64-bit and 32-bit.  It's a mess.  Windows 7 is a great opportunity to cut the umbilical cord on legacy 32-bit.  Most modern PCs are already 64-bit. They're just running a 32-bit OS which is a shame. Drivers, desktop enhancements, and all kinds of other things have to do special versions for 64-bit because most people run 32-bit OSes on their 64-bit hardware.

Memory is incredibly cheap and yet we're still stuck with a 2 gig limit on program memory use (a pain for game developers trying to have lots of rich textures).  My next PC is going to have 16 gigs on it minimum.

Moreover, the handle issue of 32-bit NT OSes pretty much goes away at 64-bit.  It's just a vastly more robust experience.

I'm typing this on a Thinkpad T400 which is running Vista 64 and the experience has been phenomenal (and it only has 4 gigs but I end up with an extra gig of disk caching).

Consider the performance ramifications of a system that has massive amounts of memory. You leave your PC on long enough and you could end up with massive amounts of it stored in a huge disk cache.  Windows is using 2GB for caching my system right now and the performance difference is noticeable - very noticeable. If I could get 8GB for this machine, I would.

So hopefully, we'll see Windows 7 get a lot more 64-bit users.

Played a lot of GalCiv II v2.0 today.  Other than the issue that the lighting is not working right on my Thinkpad T400 (there's no shadows on planets) it's working pretty well.  The ThinkPad T400 ATI display driver randomly crashes when I play games which is a bit of a bummer too but that's not game related.

One feature that I've concluded we should put in is to let people set the pacing of research any time they want within game.  In a single player game, if I want techs to come faster, I should be able to do that. It's not cheating as it affects all players equally. 

I figure we can set it to be 0.25 to 5 of whatever setting players have set at the start of the game and it resets each game.

Another thing I've concluded is that 2.0 isn't the end of the line. I know whenever I play it I'll have the debugger open making tweaks for each game.

Gotta check these out.

http://www.airbedandbreakfast.com/capnmccains

http://www.airbedandbreakfast.com/obamaos