For those of you who didn’t know… Ubisoft’s new DRM for Assassin’s Creed II and Silent Hunter 5 sucks. You have to be constantly connected to the internet to play (ACII is single-player only, by the way) and if you get disconnected, or start losing packets for any strange reason (ISP, router, wireless signal dies, etc.) it will boot you out of the game without letting you save your position (More information at Tom’s Hardware). Well, some people didn’t like this very much and organized an attack on the authentication servers so that those who bought the game legally would be completely unable to play at all (First news, the update). Ubisoft finally got around to fixing the DDoS attack yesterday night, just in time for the official launch of ACII (Login servers were partially reestablished at 10pm CET and fully restored at 1am CET. The attack affected only those trying to login.).

For those interested in RTS or strategy games in general, R.U.S.E.’s open beta started yesterday and will last for roughly a month. (Steam store, Official site).

Windows 7 SP1 could be out as early as the end of this year (Q4 2010). It was originally planned to take around 22 months for SP1 to be finalized and released (TechArp).

“10 Years After: A Look Back at the Dotcom Boom and Bust.” An interesting look at the past 10 years and what’s been hot with the dotcom craze (Wired).

Cisco just announced a new router of theirs that will be on the market shortly, though I seriously doubt anyone would be able to afford it let alone operate it. It starts at $90,000USD and only gets more expensive as you put modules into it, like any piece of Cisco technology. But for that cool 90 grand, it will operate at a theoretical 322Tbit/s. No, that’s not a typo, three hundred and twenty two terabits per second. Cisco gives a good example for how fast that exactly is, “Using a CRS-3, every person in China, which has a population just over 1.3 billion, could participate in a video phone call at the same time. It could transmit the whole printed contents of the Library of Congress in one second and every movie ever made in four minutes.” (Computerworld).

Newegg finally admitted that those Core i7s that were shipped out last weekend were indeed fakes. It’s cut ties with the distributor that supplied them (IPEX for those who want to keep track), and are immediately sending out replacements to everyone who received one of the fakes (PCMag).

I recently finished Eve no Jikan and Elfen Lied, so I’ll probably post an article or two about those and maybe some other random stuff that I’ve seen in the news lately.

I’m waiting on the arrival of a SATA Y-splitter to hook up the last 1TB hard drive that I have. My stupid power supply only has 4 SATA connectors… Ah well, I never thought I was gonna end up with 5 hard drives when I first built this PC.

It used to be used as my primary machine, since it was the only one that I had. But since I bought my laptop, I’ve been using that as my primary computer. Belldandy has been turned into more of a web/ftp/file server since then and was doing a craptacular job at it. For the past couple weeks I’ve been trying hard to reinstall the operating system but I’ve run into many issues that I never would have expected. The first being that the BIOS did not want to boot from the CD/DVD drive that I was using. So the first thing I did was to double check to make sure that it was functional properly, which is did and I could read/write CD/DVDs while Windows XP was running. I then went back into the BIOS and checked in there to see if it even saw that the drive was connected, which it did. So I tried to boot from the CD once again, without success. I didn’t even get that “Press any key to boot from CD/DVD….” message. I restarted again to see if I had screwed up the boot order and that it was booting the HDD before the optical drive. The order was: Floppy, CD/DVD, HDD, . So… maybe the BIOS just didn’t like that drive for whatever dumb reason. I went and took one of the several optical drives I have lying around and plugged that in. The BIOS recognized it and it worked in Windows XP, but once again it did not work when trying to boot from the CD.

After scratching my head for some several days, I decided to give making a bootable USB drive a shot. I’m not even going to go into details about the issues I ran into this. The biggest issues probably came from my laptop running Windows 7… and I’m not gonna install XP on it just to make a bootable USB drive. So let’s see… CD/DVD install, bootable USB drive… what’s left? Oh! Let’s try installing Windows on the drive while it’s plugged in via USB/Firewire to my laptop since I know my laptop works fine. I had recently taken apart a couple of external hard drives to make them internal drives (I needed the extra outlets on my surge suppressor), and still had the guts from that around. so I plugged the board that controlled the external drive into my internal hard drive and viola! Insta-external hard drive! However… I never would’ve guessed… You can’t install Windows on a drive connected via USB/IEEE 1394. WTF MICROSHIT. If you’re so worried about people installing Windows on an external drive and using that on random computers then guess what, it’s easier than you think because I made an internal hard drive into an external in around five minutes.

After about a week of being frustrated and not wanting anything to deal with it, not to mention the research paper than I had to write and finish in a week, I decided to think some more about how to get an OS on the boot drive. I remembered that my mom’s computer was still being repaired/worked on and that there were several things wrong with it and I could probably talk my dad into letting me hook up my hard drive to install an OS since that computer was already being worked on. So I unplugged the bad hard drives (2 drives in a striped RAID configuration), plugged in my drive and inserted the Windows Server 2008 R2 DVD. It installed! Woo! Once I finally got back to my computer and installed the drive back in… I found out that 2008 comes as a blank shell by default. Neato. So I installed all of the features that I needed and rebooted.

Everything worked fine, minus the video card and wireless card. Surprise, surprise. The video card I have a CD for and the drivers are easy to find once I get online so I went to install my wireless card. Unfortunately the driver didn’t work. It installed, but when I went to reboot the linksys software didn’t run, nor did it detect my wireless card. So I went researching a bit to see if there was a newer driver for it. This is an older card and it was a fairly low-end card. Nope, there’s no driver for Vista/7/2008. Lovely. I was able to find out that the people who actually make the board for the card put out a new driver, but it doesn’t work at all so I’m stuck with no wireless… That means no ChaosRO until I get a new wireless NIC~

Anyways, I took the opportunity to take some newer pictures of my desktop since the ones that I do have suck.

Buy it, use it, break it, fix it,
Trash it, change it, mail – upgrade it,
Charge it, pawn it, zoom it, press it,
Snap it, work it, quick – erase it,
Write it, cut it, paste it, save it,
Load it, check it, quick – rewrite it,
Plug it, play it, burn it, rip it,
Drag and drop it, zip – unzip it,
Lock it, fill it, call it, find it,
View it, code it, jam – unlock it,
Surf it, scroll it, pause it, click it,
Cross it, crack it, switch – update it,
Name it, rate it, tune it, print it,
Scan it, send it, fax – rename it,
Touch it, bring it, Pay it, watch it,
Turn it, leave it, start – format it.

etc.

So I decided to get back into EVE Online after finding out that someone in the same department had started playing during the summer. I thought it would be better to play along with someone else I knew IRL instead of having to find new friends all over again. We happened to attract attention from a 3rd person and got them started as well. So far it’s been fun, but haven’t been able to play as much as when I first started because of all of the stupid school work… It’s a conspiracy I tells ya!

Right now I’m flying around in a Rupter (Minmatar cruiser class ship), with a Catalyst to do salvaging of wrecks and stuff. Gonna be a while before I get into a battlecruiser simply because of the sheer amount of ISK you need to fly one. I’m doing good to get around 250,000 ISK from a single mission right now and a cheap battlecruiser that I would be able to fly is 17,000,000 (without fittings).

All well, I can dream can’t I?

I finally got around to upgrading my laptop from Vista to Windows 7. So far I like it and a lot of the quirks that were in Vista doesn’t seem to be apparent in 7. It took me a long time to finally convince myself to upgrade to Windows 7 because I wasn’t sure if Windows 7 came with the drivers that were needed for my laptop, and Sony hasn’t put out any Windows 7 drivers. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that the XP/Vista drivers won’t work… I just don’t like taking a wild guess and possible be wrong.

In the end, I had to install 5 drivers after I figured out what Windows 7 supported and what it didn’t. 2 were for the audio/media buttons (don’t ask me why there are two, there just are…), one for for the track pad (the Windows 7 one sorta worked, but I didn’t have the scrolling thing working on it), another was for the webcam, and the final was the audio driver for mic+HDMI support.

There are plenty of good things that I like about Windows 7, once you get past DEP and Windows Defender. The Desktop Sidebar (called simply gadgets in 7), is much more efficient than it was in Vista and you can move each item to anywhere on the desktop. Right now the sidebar process is taking up 46MB of RAM and 219MB of VRAM (I have 4GB total of each), before I was seeing 100+MB of RAM and 350+MB of VRAM on Vista with the same amount of items in the sidebar. I like how the taskbar and tray are now setup, there is no longer a quick launch bar but you can “pin” items onto the taskbar which serves the exact same purpose. You can change the taskbar to look like how it did in XP/Vista, but I kinda like having just the icon there. I also like how Windows now supports desktop wallpaper rotation by default now. Even with a ton of images for it to look through, it doesn’t take anymore RAM or processing power (noticeably). I don’t like how 7 doesn’t support multiple desktops yet… Common Windows, you’re the only (popular) OS that doesn’t support it!

All in all, it’s a pretty nice OS and I hope it lasts for a couple years so that I don’t have to upgrade again…

1. I’ve kind of stopped watching anime for now, see list item #. Doesn’t mean I won’t watch any more, I just need to find time to.
2. My grandmother passed away about a month ago now, so I was mentally crazy for a bit and had to catch up on school work that I missed when I was in South Carolina.
3. I’ve been playing more games recently to keep my mind occupied with random nonsensical things. L4D+TF2+Eufloria = win, L4D2 looks great when I have money to buy it.
4. My desktop is partly disassembled and I’m trying on getting Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 installed on it, but the BIOS doesn’t seem to want to recognize the DVD Drive when it boots or the DVD Drive doesn’t like the DVD, even though it works fine on my laptop.
5. Classes have me swamped with work between normal homework, projects, essays, etc. 6 classes on Monday and Wednesday is a killer.
6. etc. etc. etc.