Looks like a beta of Windows 7 is now available for people to download (at least for MSDN subscribes. I understand the general public will be able to download it soon as well).

When I got my new laptop, all I had was 32-bit Windows Vista, which isn't very good (I wanted 64-bit Vista, but they do that). Anyway, now that my MSDN subscription has arrived (the other half of my prize) I had been planning to install 64-bit Vista instead.

But now I'm thinking I could go with Windows 7, which is supposed to Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, etc... it's "only" a beta, though, so I'm not sure. I don't really want to dual-boot either, because I know after a while I'll stop using one of the partitions. I wish I could predict which one!

Maybe I can wait another week or two and see what others say about Windows 7 first. Yeah, I think that's what I'll do.

It seems to be a fairly common complaint that Aussie gamers get bad ping times when trying to play with people overseas (particularly in the U.S., which I guess is because that's where most of the Xbox Live users live). A lot of the time, the frustration is directed towards to Microsoft (i.e. "MICROSOFT dont care about us auzzies", "MS don't give a *** about us and will do nothing to facilitate our connection to international gamers", etc) but the thing is, it's not really Microsoft's fault. You can blame simple phsyics for it.

See, as far as scientists understand, information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Now, using a bit of mathematics and knowing that light travels at 300,000,000 m/s and that Sydney -> L.A. is ~20,000 km you can work out that a beam of light would take around 66ms to get from here to L.A. Ping times, of course, measure the round-trip time (there and back again) which gives a physical minimum ping time of around 133ms.

Given that an internet connection is not a simple beam of light - it has to travel through a number of servers on the way (e.g. a couple of servers at your ISP, the first tier ISP, the international link, etc) I'd say 300ms is pretty good.

The real problem, I guess, is that Live doesn't always make it easy to find local games. There's also been a couple of bugs in games where people in the US get preference for hosting and stuff like that. I guess that's because most game developers are in the U.S. and while the entire population of Australia is 22 million, in the U.S. you've got individual cities with a population of 22 million. That's a pretty big market difference!

I've finally bought a new laptop, yay! It's a HP Pavilion dv5-1007, which is a slightly older model, but I got the display model for $700 less than full price, which is nothing to be ashamed of :-) The specs are:

CPU: Core 2 Duo 2.53GHz
Graphics: 512MB GeForce 9600M
Memory: 4GB
HDD: 320GB

It's certainly a damn sight faster than my old laptop!

One thing which perplexes me, however, is how all the OEMs pre-install 32-bit Vista - even on computers with 4GB of RAM. In fact, HP included in my box a little booklet, written in about 50 different languages, explaining how when you look at the "physical memory" in Windows, it'll say closer to 3GB even though you've got 4GB and how you can go into the BIOS and look at the real value.

I mean, sure Microsoft charge more for the 64-bit version of Vista (at least, they used to. I'm not sure they still do...) but wouldn't it be more expensive for HP to hire a writer to write, translators to translate and printers to print that booklet than to just pre-install 64-bit Vista?

Anyway, given that the first thing I do with a new computer is wipe the OS and install from scratch, it doesn't really affect me. I just think it's a little strange.

Merry Xmas!

So back in my Uni days, I worked on a game called "War Worlds". It was supposed to be a real-time strategy game which features a "repeating" map - so if you scroll to the end, it just wraps back to the start again. The other "interesting" feature I had thought of was that you'd have separate bodies and turrets, but that idea was already done in Warzone 2100.

I still kind of think the "repeating" map was an interesting idea, so I've decided to resurrect my project, just to see where I can take it. Here's a screenshot of what I've got up to so far:

This is the editor, which will be for editing the heightmap, adding trees and initial buildings and so on. Most people use import images for those kinds of things, but I think this way will help to encourage others to contribute (heh).

Anyway, it's still in the very early stages and I don't even know if I'll finish it, but it's been interesting so far. It's also given me the opportunity to get back into C++ and (as you can see in the screen shot) I'm learning wxWidgets as well.

I filed this under "Rants" but this time, it's not my rant!

Who elected this guy?

The ultimate conclusion is like I say, we look at Bible prophecy, we are going towards a one world bank and a one world monetary system. And if you believe the word of God and you read Revelations...you will see clearly what is being spelt out. We in(sic) the end times.

It's like somebody took a raving, drunken lunatic off a street corner and stuck him in parliment! :crazy:

This, by the way, is the same guy who took a photo of someone who was threatening to kill himself by dousing himself in petrol, and then tried to sell that photo a newspaper. So some guy jumps from the House of Representatives and threatens to set himself on fire if the government didn't allow his parents to stay in the country. Mr Bidgood thinks this is a good time to whip out his camera and take some happy-snaps. Next, he figures the press would like to see those photos, so he tries to sell them to a photographer for $1,000. Apparently (according to the article) he realised the implications of his actions and changed the price to a "charitable donation"...

Apparently after the photograph incident, he was given a warning (after all, he was "new" - although he was elected in November 2007, that's a year of experience as an MP). But now...?