ext3 and stuff

SO
I am now the proud new owner of a 1TB hard disk. The reasons for this are long and complicated, especially as I don’t actually NEED more space, but I shan’t bore you with them.

ANYWAY I found a couple of interesting things out about using the ext3 filesystem and drive space. When I formatted the drive, it was showing a capacity of 916.9GiB and about 870GiB free. A 1TB disk is about 931GiB, so I felt I was robbed of 60GiB! This is a nontrivial amount. ext3 is responsible for this ‘lost’ space. I believe this information is true for ext4 as well. I am using ext3 as I need occasional access from Windows, and there exists a fairly good ext3 driver here, but 99% of access will be from Linux, and ntfs-3g is noticably slower than ext3, I find.

There are two factors explaining my missing space:

1) The filesystem reserves about 5% of the space for various reasons that are important to /, /tmp and /var (because the OS can fall over if these run out of space), and I think it handles fragmentation too, but my disk’s usage scenario is basically static storage, so reserving this space is pretty much unnecessary. And 5% of 1TB is pretty significant.

You can alter this on an existing formatted partition using:
# tune2fs -m 0 /dev/YOUR_PARTITION

(where 0 is percentage to reserve)

2) The filesystem by default allocates a large number of inodes¹ per unit of storage space (I think it uses one inode per 4 KiB, but the documentation isn’t exactly rich with info). This is sensible because you don’t want to run out of space for your inodes, because you won’t be able to save any more files even though you might have a lot of free space. But how many you REALLY need depends on the average size of a file that will be stored on the disk. On an OS partition you will probably have a lot of fairly small files (utility programs, scripts, config files, temporary files, etc) and will need a lot of inodes. But on a backup/file storage disk, your average size is going to be much bigger, and all that inode reserved space is space you can’t use for data. To change this you can set the -T option when formatting, I don’t think there is any way to do it without reformatting. I used ‘-T largefile’, which I THINK equals 1 inode for every 1MiB of storage. You could also use largefile4 for 1 inode per 4MiB of storage space. Don’t use largefile for /home or any other OS partition, but you probably want it for disks which will purely store DATA (i.e. music, CD/DVD images, big digital camera photos, etc. And if you will also use it to back up a lot of documents or other files smaller than 1MiB, you could always tar up a bunch of them together).

You can set largefile as follows:
running this WILL reformat your partition, i.e. you will lose your data

# mkfs.ext3 -T largefile /dev/YOUR_PARTITION
(and adding “-m 0″ here would do the same as the above command)

And with that, I had 931GiB free of 931GiB. yay.

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1. roughly: the filesystem has a space for your files, but it also needs to be able to look up WHERE a file is, as well as keeping track of things like date/time created, access, etc. and the size of the file, permissions, and so on, i.e. the ‘metadata’ about the file. An inode stores the information about a file which it is necessary for the filesystem to know. And there needs to be a big index of these on the filesystem.

voting… OR NOT

there is a thing on the BBC site about voting! The topic is: should voting be mandatory.

Being the terrible non-voter that I am, this subject often riles me a bit.

People say:
1) “if you don’t vote you have no right to complain”. this is like saying: if the sea is blue the moon is made of cheese. You are allowed to say it, but it doesn’t use the traditional meaning of ‘if’, which requires some kind of logical implication between the first and second statement.

1b) If I didn’t actively support the election of the people in charge, I have every right to complain! It’s not my fault they are in charge. I didn’t vote for them. Unless you’re insinuating that the purpose of voting is to exclude people from being elected, which would be equally wrong. In an ideal world, anyone who voted for the party in power should also receive all the complaints they do, since it’s the voter who put the party there.

2) “People have died for the right to vote!”… Let’s totally ignore that this is referring to WW2 and is usually used by Americans who seem to neglect they only became involved in the war after they were actually attacked and thus are one of the few countries who CAN’T pull the heroic knights of justice and freedom card. Let’s also overlook that no war has ever been fought over the concept of voting, more over the concept of either “I want their land” or “oh fuck we’re going to get killed”. Now, let’s assume that people had died for my right to eat rice pudding, my right to use Emacs instead of Vi¹ , or even my right to paaaaaaaaaar-taaaaaaaaaaaaaay; would that actually obligate me to do any of those things? Uh no, of course not. At the end of the day other people are responsible for their own and only their own actions; I am not responsible for theirs, nor are they responsible for mine, and people who are long dead cannot, and should not be able to, obligate me to do anything.

3) “Voting blah blah blah an exam”. An exam huh, who decides what the right answer is? An IQ test might be okay though o.o

I have never voted and don’t intend to (in the near future) because:

1) My vote’s weight is tiny. It simply doesn’t justify getting out of bed for. A large election’s outcome will be independent of my individual vote. In a very small election, being on any side is enough to make a statement, but in a large vote, you’re ost in the noise. A lot of people reject this argument with a counter-point starting with ‘if nobody voted..’. Well, yeah, but you’ve made a fairly glaringly obvious fallacy in assuming that I am everybody.

2) I am not aware that there are actually any politicians whom I desire to support, which is kind of a deal breaker. I could vote for the person whom I dislike least that has a credible chance of winning, but that just sends the message that I approve of him/her. It is very difficult: on one side you have Gordon Brown, whose government has done a less than stellar job in things I care about (my main concern is the lack of accountability the police is subjected to when doing things that just plain aren’t right), and on the other is David Cameron whose cabinet consists of pretentious people from rich families who studied useless and poncy subjects at Oxford, who seem like exactly the kind of people who shouldn’t be allowed near anything important. No one else has any chance of winning so there’s no point voting for anyone else. I could go out and spoil a ballot paper, but that’s kind of like going to Sainsbury’s with the intention of not buying something.

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1. Ha ha, just kidding, no one would die for this.

ghosts n stuff

OMG MY MOTHER.
she is becoming a little bit TOO interested in ghosts and stuff. The supposed poltergeist at her work is getting mentioned more and the more she investigates things the more convinced she becomes. Today she professed an interest in going to a spiritualist church. This is very, very bad. We have had other incidents that have possibly lead to this:

At Christmas my grandfather (dad’s side) told a story about how he was once invited to a spiritualist seance (this would be about 1950 or so in a smallish village) that had something to do with contacting the spirit of a deceased young girl. He (my grandfather) at the time owned a shop and the person who invited him said that the girl used to like jelly babies (is she related to me, I wonder), so bring a packet along. And so they started the seance and it was very dark and stuff, and the person told my grandfather to hold out a jelly baby in his hand. And guess what! Yes, it vanished off his hand. Now apparently at the time this rather convinced my previously sceptical grandfather that there was something in it, although after he told the story he suffixed it with “I’m not so sure anymore though”. Now, okay, I have two problems with this:
1) it’s dark, so who knows WHAT happened. The very fact it WAS dark, i.e. that he intentionally removed transparency, is pretty much fatal to any suggestion that the whole thing could be plausible.
2) it’s a little bit coincidental the girl took the jelly baby that the man just happened to think she might want? It looks like the person in charge planned it in advance and set it up.

Then we have my gran (mum’s side). My grandfather (i.e. mum’s father) died, uh, I don’t know, 6 years ago. It gets interesting in that every so often, my gran claims to have seen him. This is surprisingly common! Not that I can explain this to my gran, but it just doesn’t MEAN anything. When you have lived with someone for 50 years and then they are suddenly no longer there your brain doesn’t suddenly adapt to the new situation, it EXPECTS them to be there and sometimes it will identify a pattern of events that they would usually appear in, and it will INSERT them there if given the right provocation. Plus my gran is on a tonne of medication.

And the final thing, mum also knows a friend whose husband when they were on holiday in some old country cottage woke up one night to the experience of a veiled woman trying to smother him. This is a surprisingly common experience, it’s called sleep paralysis and is often accompanied by hallucinations. It’s what happens when you wake up a bit and become aware of your real physical surroundings but your mind is still dreaming in some way. As I understand it, somewhere in the deep layers of sleep you lose voluntary control of your muscles [I can't find a reference for this at the moment, but the hand-wavy argument for this is that if you didn't, you'd sleepwalk and act out your dreams], and it seems possible to regain some degree of consciousness before you have your muscle control back, hence the paralysis¹. This has never happened to me (that I’ve remembered), but I have woken up on a couple of occasions while still dreaming. It was very upsetting at the time because there was the feeling of being trapped in some kind of state I was vaguely aware wasn’t RIGHT and I didn’t know how to stop it. In the end I figured out I was still dreaming and I sort of had to make a conscious mental effort to wake myself up before I could then go back to sleep. I’m pretty sure this is a slightly different result of the same process.

The point to all this is that you can’t trust what your brain is telling you at the best of times. We tend to feel that our senses are infallible, but we don’t have much idea how the brain actually works, or in what ways it can go wrong. The brain is extremely resistant to any kind of reverse engineering to figure out what it’s actually doing; we trust that it works because it seems to most of the time, but we have never verified that it works in exceptional circumstances like the paranormal. People who claim to have experienced something have just extrapolated that since it works usually, it must be working for the paranormal too. Thus, claiming that “I saw this so it HAPPENED” isn’t really the route to a convincing argument unless it can be verified by other people or unless you can reproduce it. If something happens you need to figure out how you can objectively verify it really happened, and work out how to make it happen again. Without that, all you have is an anecdote. There is no shortage of people who claim to have some paranormal awareness and there is no shortage of supposedly haunted locations, but the fact that none of them has ever turned anything up of note when subjected to rigorous investigation implies that most if not all of it is wishful thinking. You’re welcome to believe in it if you want, but you kind of sacrifice your right to a legitimate opinion on anything whatsoever by showing a tendency towards complete avoidance of analytical thought.

Related: I found this interview interesting. Unfortunately part 3 is for some reason blocked in the UK but it’s still worth watching. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xswt8B8-UTM

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1. Paralysis can also occur if your partner forgets to untie/unlock you before you go to sleep. This is an unrelated phenomenon.

Assassin’s Creed

(surely it should be Assassins’?)

GAME REVIEW:
Assassin’s Creed (PC – Windows)

If there was an award for brilliant, fluid game design focussing on seamlessly integrating the player into a richly detailed virtual world, it would go to Half-Life. If there was an award for completely ignoring those things, it would go to Assassin’s Creed.

Do you remember at school when you had a friend (loose word) who was obsessed by consoles and Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy (and Red Alert 2) and he would never STFU about how awesome the cutscenes/FMVs were? I’m sure he would love Assassin’s Creed because it is just one long cutscene after another, each of which you HAVE to watch because there is no skip button. The supportive argument to this is that if you were able to skip them you wouldn’t get the story, but the story is cheesy Hollywoodesque pseudoscientific nonsense; so you have to endure THAT as well as the feeling of “but I want to play the game now”. The frequency at which the game relinquishes control of your character from you, or just pulls you out of the game-environment somehow is high enough to be a REALLY BIG COMPLAINT. [note: although I'm generally against cutscenes I have no problem with them in RPGs (but AC isn't an RPG), which benefit from strong story elements, although I don't think they're truly necessary except for patching over technical limitations in the interests of epicness (see Dragon Age)]

The game, on the rare occasions you are allowed to play it, is pretty dull though. It looks beautiful and its animation system is impressive to say the least, but game mechanics are boring and it focusses more on giving you sensational visuals instead of making you feel that you’re actually responsible for them. Your character will conduct a lot of fancy and elegant sword moves, but it is all a result of you just pressing mouse1 as fast as possible. He can climb up buildings like a man endorsed by Pritt Stick, but really all you’re doing is pressing w. Imagine if Guitar Hero gave you perfect feedback for holding down one button, it would be boring. Beyond basic movement, the control system is a bizarre layout of modes and modifier keys, the arrangement of which bears no obvious intuitive relationship with that big array of plastic keys lying beneath your fingers (it’s a lot like trying to use Vi for the first time), and even when you do start to remember what order to press things in, character movement still feels unresponsive, as if you are controlling a drunk lump of lead.

Now we have the fact it’s a console port which seems to have lead to further sources of woe: there appears to be no anti-aliasing (?) for some reason. The game is viewable ONLY in widescreen which means unless you have a widescreen monitor you will have a third of your screen permanently black (19 inch monitor? NOT ANY MORE!), and… save games. It’s generally polite to allow the player to trigger the save procedure somehow. That means that when they next start the game they don’t have to watch the same 4 minute cutscene AGAIN. The menu is horrible and exiting the game takes you through no less than three different menu screens; the developers’ apparent lack of consideration for how having to select ‘exit’ three times might annoy a user pretty much summarises my opinion of Assassin’s Creed game design as a whole.

In conclusion: Assassin’s Creed is a lot like Sky TV: you are promised the world only to find you spend 9/10ths of your time sitting through car adverts and when you do finally reach the promised land you find you’ve seen it before and it’s only there for 5 minutes before there’s another set of car adverts at which point even though you realise they have clearly distributed the adverts in the programme such that they occur as close to the beginning as reasonably possible meaning that you might get 20 minutes of uninterrupted TV after the advert, you think “I’m not really that interested any more” and turn off the TV [...and breathe...]. AC is an impressive character animation engine and there’s probably a 2 or 3 star film in there somewhere, but as a game it’s pretty dire. 1/5

pidgin pidgeon pigeon

one of my mother’s obsessions is birds (flying things, not attractive women). She bought a bird table (again, a table for flying things, not women). Today, mum put out half a loaf of stale and moulding bread. As I was eating my lunch today, a pigeon came and landed on the bird table. Because pigeons lack such useful things as arms, to break off some bread it was forced to move its head in a violent gesture so the weight of the slice resulted in the bread tearing and some bread remaining in its beak. I watched as it proceeded to pick up each slice one by one and sequentially throw them all from their carefully arranged position on the bird table into a randomly scattered mess on the ground below. It was so absurd I could not stop laughing.

as you may have noticed by now, I am a little obsessed about the temperatures of my computer components. My case has four fans (one back, top, front and side). I don’t actually have the front one connected; it tends to lower the MB temp and the hard disks’ temps but they don’t really get hot anyway:

[me@fedora ~]$ hddtemp /dev/sd[a-z]
/dev/sda: MAXTOR STM3250310AS: 28°C
/dev/sdb: Maxtor 6L200P0: 28°C
[me@fedora ~]$ sensors | grep temp1
temp1: +26.0°C (low = +127.0°C, high = +127.0°C) sensor = thermistor

with the front fan I could take those three readings down to 24-25 or so, but what’s the point?

The side one mostly affects the graphics card and power supply (it’s at the bottom of my case); I used to have it as an exhaust because I used to have my computer tower up against my desk and sucking in air from the wood never really had much effect for some unfathomable reason. But with my new card, I didn’t immediately plug the side fan back in. Yet I noticed, the side fan hole was sucking in quite a lot of air. I put a piece of paper over it, and it stuck! OMG!. yes. From this I deduced that the fan on my new card is SRSLY powerful, and that connecting up the case fan as an exhaust would be counter-productive, because it would be expelling the same air that the graphics card fan was trying to blow onto its heatsink. So I switched it to an intake fan, but I also moved my computer to THE OTHER side of my desk. ALSO I attached the fan to my motherboard (not the PSU) so its speed is controlled by the motherboard (I think I can override it in software too, which will make more sense as I can then set it based on the graphics card temperature, not the motherboard temperature, but these will likely correlate.)

Anyway, I also wrote a better fan control for my graphics card (well it’s better logic, it’s not a better control. I need to figure out how to talk to the drivers directly and not rely on flakey interfaces through other programs, at least on Windows. I haven’t got anywhere on Linux, but I have spent hours looking through source code for nvidia-settings and nvclock [which doesn't work on my card, I patched it and I can write into the hardware register that controls fanspeed, but the driver overwrites it on its next tick] and it looks like easily controllable driver-level fan control is coming in a future driver release), and now I am getting about 45-50 degrees in STALKER (1280×1024, high/max settings) and 60 degrees C max in Furmark (1024×768 windowed 16xMSAA extreme burn mode, blah blah). Idle temperature 35-40 depending on ambient (actually in a morning when it’s still 16-17 C the card is more like 30-32, but 38-40 is more reasonable for about 22 C). PRETTY GOOD, NO? With about £7 of extra cooling [the top and back fans came with the case].

My CPU core temps idle at about 30-35 (at about 22 C ambient) and max at about 45 during ‘real’ usage (haven’t stress tested, don’t care). So I am highly content. At least I will be when I figure out the nvidia driver.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

game review: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

upon starting S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the first thing you will notice is that the game is 1) hard and 2) confusing. As you progress, this doesn’t seem to change very much. As you play a bit more, you might also notice it is 3) Russian. OH YES.

A sexy russian helicopter as seen through binoculars with sexy russian dragunov style range markings

STALKER is set in post apocalyptic surroundings of Chernobyl after a fictional second distaster. The general populace consists of wild dogs, mutated pigs and men in balaclavas and anoraks. Some of them like you, some of them are indifferent to you and some of them want to kill you for no discernable reason. There is a storyline but it might as well be presented in Russian for all the insight it gives. Superficially, STALKER has RPG elements but these turn out to be pretty shallow and really it’s just a non-linear shooter in the same vein as Far Cry. So let’s run through this again; it’s a non-linear RPG-shooter in a post apocalyptic world but its RPG elements are lacking and its FPS elements are extremely difficult and its storyline isn’t very insightful. At this point you would be forgiven for thinking I was describing Fallout 3, but no!, STALKER is actually very good.

this is a man who expects rain

The game is very unforgiving: the environment has a lot of hidden dangers that you often don’t see until they affect you and gun fights are H.A.R.D. Ammunition is scarce, your gun jams fairly often and you can only take a few bullets before you see ‘GAME OVER’ printed in red letters over your corpse, and the enemies can shoot straight (you can’t, though). Even worse, even if a bullet doesn’t kill you, there’s still a chance that you’ll bleed to death a few seconds later unless you can bring up your inventory and apply a bandage. The inventory is not hugely easy (fast) to use which tends to mean you don’t use it during gunfights. This is the in-game equivalent of getting shot while you were distracted trying to dig a first aid kit out of your backpack. Further, you can only have 3 weapons equipped at once; a knife, a sidearm (pistol) and a primary weapon (shotgun/rifle/etc). If you run out of bullets in your AK-47 you either have to reload or switch to your pistol, you can’t just pull out another rifle unless you want to navigate your inventory. Which you don’t.

this is a man who doesn't

The AI is pretty good; if you are crouched behind some cover (and this is how you will spend most of your time when in gunfights) they won’t just run at you, they’ll try to circle around you. Whether it is because the enemies really have tactics or whether they just like to meander I don’t know and it isn’t really important, you’ll often feel that they’re flanking you and YOU’LL OFTEN BE RIGHT. In fights in less open environments you will be ducking in and out of cover and often lose track of where the enemies are, and will feel that they are hunting you.

Overall STALKER is incredibly frustrating and not an entirely convincing social world (less so than Fallout3) but it is pretty awesome nontheless. It is out on a budget range now and you can get it for about £5, and you totally should if your computer can run it and if like me you’re a bit promiscuous when faced with semi-realistic shooters. It is a lot more interesting than follow-the-coridoors-and-kill-the-monsters-in-the-room type shooters.  8/10? yes okay, 8.

please note I am playing on hard mode, but not impossible mode. The game is probably a lot easier on the first (there are four) difficulty mode.

brr

SO my new grpahics card came today. It is a Gainward GTS250 512MB Green Edition (i.e. slightly underclocked). It cost £75.00 including delivery. It is not a measurable improvement over my old card, but I don’t think there is a lot of point upgrading so it is the most sensible way of replacing it RIGHT NOW.

I am happy with it. It underclocks itself a lot when you’re just on the desktop, so it runs pretty cool. It is currently idling at 37 degrees C with a fan speed of 40% (ambient temperature ~21). This is a lot better than my 8800GTX which would run more like 64 degrees C fan speed 60%. This morning before the heating was on it was as low as 32 though, and this evening it peaked at about 44. STILL GOOD THOUGH.

The default fan speed is 35%, but it seems reluctant to push that up. I played STALKER for 15 minutes earlier and the temperature was about 65-69 degrees, maybe it suddenly ramps up the fan at 70 or 80, I don’t know, but it seems like it would be preferable to keep it a bit cooler. SO I used RivaTuner to set up a more intelligent fan response and it now runs STALKER at about 50 degrees, max 56. I still get shot all the time though. I need to do something similar for Linux, but it should just take a few lines if I utilise the power of… other people’s programs.

bah

continuing the bad luck with computers this house has recently had…
my graphics card is borked
Yes, my not-so-trusty 8800GTX has finally (after a whole 16 months) started to die. I started to notice this a few weeks ago: blue pixels appeared on my screen in dark areas. They looked like stuck pixels BUT THEY WEREN’T. I first noticed when I went from openSUSE 11.1 -> 11.2 and I just thought “hm, drivers” (they persist in Fedora too but I am not sure if they’re the same drivers). Then last week I tried to do some Windows gaming (King’s Bounty: The Legend) and promptly gave up because it always froze within a few seconds of starting a game. HMM, I put that down to software. Then yesterday I tried to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (a chrimbo present from my mother) and it kept freezing and eventually gave me a Blue Screen of Death. I started to get suspicious around this point, because a BSODs are rare and now usually imply some kind of hardware problem (although a bad driver could also cause it). I reinstalled Windows and it seemed to work okay then for the evening until I installed VirtualBox, then it went wrong,t hen I uninstalled VirtualBox, thenm it worked leading me to incorrectly identify VB as the cause of my problems. HOWEVER, this was probably coincidence. Then I installed Dragon Age this morning and it started doing pretty much the same thing. However, I noticed that it seemed to run okay at 1024×768 and below, but 1280×1024 almost instantly invoked problems. Except, I was also getting a lot of small black flickery blocks on any resolution. I discovered the Windows logs (under control panel -> administrative settings) and it was spamming the logs with messages about the nvidia driver. I tried the card in my sister’s computer and it instantly gave hideously corrupted results in DA, then seemed to run happily, then crashed. COULD still be drivers though. I try my sister’s old card (7600GT) and an 8600GT we have (in another computer) in my computer (same drivers), and I AM UNABLE TO REPRODUCE *any* problems. No crashes, no blue dots on Linux, no black flickery blocks in any games (I got them in CivIV on Linux too). EVERYTHING IS FINE.
AND NOW I COME TO THINK OF IT, back when I was playing Arma 2 I used to get some strange bright blue pixels and occasional graphics distortions.

So I am going to guess that some areas of its memory are broken. The problems probably become more noticable at higher resolutions because they use more of its memory so it will run into problems faster. This is probably because it runs so hot. It used to run at 60-65 degrees C at idle which is insane; if you look on forums this is about average and everyone says “don’t worry, it’s made to withstand it!”. Erm, is it? I really cannot express how much I hate the overclocking community. They expect to spend a stupid amount of money on third party COOLING equipment and they expect to go through hardware pretty fast, so crappy companies like Nvidia can get away with releasing their high end cards even though they can’t really handle the amount of heat they generate. Really we should start a blacklist and refuse to buy graphics cards that idle at more than 45 degrees because the amount of heat they produce is RIDICULOUS. The state of graphics cards in general is bad, because there are only two companies that produce high performance cards. One of them has just made the card that failed, but I can’t buy from the other one because their Linux support is terrible. And I might add that my sister’s new card (which is from the OTHER company) runs at about the same temperature as mine did, which is worrying. This is all very annoying. Monopolies are bad.

anyway I’m probably going to buy a GTS 250 green edition (Palit or Gainward) as a replacement. The green editions are made to consume less power, which hopefully means they run cooler. I think they are slightly underclocked too, but, meh, reliability and cost beat performance. They are about £80, which is not so bad. Now I just have to find somewhere with free delivery and a 2 year guarantee o.o

in other news: STALKER seems pretty good. It’s very dark. It’s set in Russia, around Chernobyl. Everyone is Russian. Russians are serious. Very grim. You’d be grim too if you were living in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland. ZeroPunctuation doesn’t like realism in games, but I do (he’s talking about the second one, though).

In other other news: I can’t get enough of the new Devin Townsend album.

hey fatty

microsoft has had a fair number of stupid ideas but this one is by far the worst EVER

A newly disclosed Microsoft patent application — Avatar Individualized by Physical Characteristic — takes aim at fat people, proposing to generate fat avatars in gaming environments for individuals whose health records indicate they’re overweight, limiting their game play, and even banning them. From the patent application: ‘An undesirable body weight could be reflected in an overweight or underweight appearance for the avatar. Only requisite health levels are allowed to compete in a certain competition level. A dedicated gamer could exercise for a period of time until his health indicator gadget shows a sufficiently high health/health credit in order to allow reentering the avatar environment.’
http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/12/18/1649253/Microsoft-Seeks-Patent-On-Shaming-Fat-Gamers

being fat is bad so we’re going to shun you for it
why is being fat bad? because people shun you for it.
why do people shun you for it? because it’s bad.
Why is it bad… because.. you see where this is going.

if you didn’t feel bad about your weight before trying to play computer games, you will afterwards! well done microsoft, showing those fat people what’s what.

this also means there will be no well shaped female avatars with whom the owner obviously played dress-up, which LET’S BE HONEST is the only reason to play some games (see: Fallout 3).

note: I haven’t actually RTFA.

bah

sometimes our wonderful loonix gets criticised by the windows noobs (yes my blog is going downhill, I know) about it beng hard to install.
Has anyone ever tried installing Windows to a SATA drive when you also have an IDE hard drive plugged in?
if you have, you might have been greeted with the message “This disk does not contain a Windows compatible partition” even though it can plainly see there’s a partition there and it’s the right type. Windows 7’s installer does exactly the same thing so it makes you wonder how much of their code is rehashed.

For this reason I have finally got Windows again after some time of being Windowless. I had to unplug my IDE drive although in theory I could have disabled it in the BIOS. I didn’t really miss it, but I did miss games.

all does not go so well with my sister’s computer. The motherboard has borked, it is going back. Unfortunately the motherboard has borked in a way critical to the health of a certain other component, so it remains to be seen whether that will also need to be replaced, and if so, it remains to be seen whether we can convince them that we shouldn’t have to pay for it. Don’t buy Biostar motherboards. Don’t even buy one!