monsterpower HTS 1000 MKII

Posted on December 30th, 2003 in rant by skip

i finally decided to buy a monster power ac line conditioner the other day after reading these articles and asking around:

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/building_gaming_opteron_2003_Part1/page9.asp
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/2d_picture_quality_quicklook/page2.asp

and i wanted to simply say it makes the biggest difference i’ve ever seen. i plugged my home workstation and tv/amp/tivo etc into it and immediately could tell the picture was clearer on both the tv and monitor. i’ve never had any complaints about my home audio quality… but there was a serious improvement there too. i bought the least expensive model: HTS 1000 MKII

it was $89 from avstreet.com (use froogle) and can support up to 1875W of equipment, which means it’s getting my workstation, monitor, tv, amp, tivo and everything else nearby.

damn video card won’t go agp 8x

Posted on December 11th, 2003 in rant by skip

searched google and got this:

Besides how to u tell the difference as of revision, i had sent in my Radeon 9700 Pro, ATI found it defective so they sent me a new one but, still cant run AGP 8X, My Mobo is Asus P4S8X SIS 648 POS chipset. Do U know what dont hear anything about abit boards on here, good or bad, maybe they are the better board maker considering ASUS has been way too busy with releasing new boards and not Fixing the problems of the older ones by like making revisions and such.

install stuff with perl cpan

Posted on December 11th, 2003 in code by skip

forgot this command: perl -MCPAN -e shell

crap. now darwin can’t find my /System/Library/Perl/5.8.1/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE/perl.h

$ sudo find / -name perl.h
/System/Library/Perl/darwin/CORE/perl.h

hrm. $ cp -i /System/Library/Perl/darwin/CORE/* /System/Library/Perl/5.8.1/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE/
sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell

mmmmm all is good

why the mmorpg died

Posted on December 11th, 2003 in rant by skip

rant found on gamemethod.com that makes tons of sense, and an interview from wtfman.com:

The game development business model:
1) Come up with an innovative design, if that fails use the tested and true models.
2) Make sure to try to be different, new races, new graphics, new concepts.
3) Attract as many players as possible, even players from a non-MMOG background.
4) Make entering the world easy and acceptable, a good interface and tutorial.
5) Retain those newbies, and turn them into a constant revenue stream.
6) Bend over backwards and ruin the game to keep your customers.

Here’s an all too common scenario:

Community: “Hey, we just wanted to compliment you guys on the archery system, it’s great! On a side note that healing bug is terrible, its ruining gameplay, could you please fix it?”

One week goes by….

Two weeks go by…

Dev’s : “We are running a community poll, Do you think we need more colored robes?”

Another week goes by…

Dev’s: “The patch has the following fixes: We noticed players were having too much fun with archery, this caused an imbalance for players who did not have the archery skill, so we had to fuck up archery completely, we’re sorry. We also attempted to fix the healing bug…

Community: “Omfg, wtf”