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

Very good article at the Washington Post today by Andrew Klavan

Myth # 1. Hollywood has no political agenda -- it's just out to make money.

Would that it were so. All through 2007, Hollywood sent American multiplexes the message: "We don't like the war on terror." All year, American moviegoers sent a message back to Hollywood: "We don't care." "Lions for Lambs," "In the Valley of Elah," "Redacted," "Rendition" -- movie after movie in which our film-land elites derided U.S. efforts to smack down Islamist terrorism bombed at the box office. Even the guys who ran Fannie Mae would have figured out that this was a losing economic strategy. But not Hollywood; 2008 gave us even more anti-war flops, such as "Stop-Loss" and "War, Inc." As ace film blogger John Nolte pointed out, only one war-on-terror film, the mediocre "Vantage Point," did good business. Why? Because it showed Americans as the good guys they are. If Hollywood were all about making money, it would do that a lot more often.

Read the whole thing here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/10/AR2008101002454.html

Apple has been granted a patent for the MacOS dock.

Read the whole thing here.

Besides the general idea of a userbar with "a plurality of item representations" that consolidates features like "launching and managing running applications," the patent focuses particularly on the Dock's magnification feature that makes icons bigger as you sweep by them with a cursor.

Some may recall this article that points out that not only have docks been seen in operating systems for decades but that Stardock has been doing docks since 1994.

Look familiar?  Apple has every right to protect their inventions. But their innovation with regards to the Mac dock is extremely narrow.  Stardock doesn't patent its software as a rule for philosophical reasons. But the lack of a patent doesn't mean Stardock hasn't been heavily involved in creating prior art.

I figured that Obama narrowly won the first debate.  The VP debate was largely a draw. But the second Presidential debate I have to say McCain won decisively.  Still not going to vote for him, but McCain answered questions, was specific, and seemed to know what he was doing.  Obama came across as someone who practiced debating but seemed like an empty suit.

I got a good game of GalCiv II v2.0 in over the weekend.  Here are 10 things the game still needs.

1. The trade routes need to increase more over time than they currently do.
2. Tourism should be worth still more than it does currently.
3. AI needs to be better about researching space mining techs.
4. AI needs more variance in what it researches.
5. AI needs to focus more on miniaturization techs.
6. Integrity fields should cost the same as reinforced hull points (not more)
7. The tech rates should slow down the rate of increase.
8. Defenses should be slightly cheaper to research than they currently are.
9. Need to update the credits to say (c) 2008
10. There should be more incentive to do leases than currently.

So there will be another beta soon...

Converting media files from one format to another is a pain in the rear often times. Lifehacker has a good article on this.

Check out the whole thing here.

Incidentally, I highly recommend Ulead Video Studio for dealing with HD.

Found this interesting retrospective on the SEGA Dreamcast.