Sunday 15 February 2009

The World Of Goo!

Not many quality games that aren't Quake Arena clones appear on the scene for Linux and even fewer that work properly on 64-bit Linux. At least that's the impression I get. So it is with genuine gratitude I thank 2D Boy for the awesome World Of Goo!

Getting The World Of Goo up and running wasn't too difficult. 2D Boy provides the game all nicely packaged up in .deb .rpm .tar and other formats. Since I'm a Ubuntu user I choose the .deb download. It cost me $20-dollars or £14-odd after pay pal did the conversion. I'm in the UK.

Since I'm running 64-bit Ubuntu I couldn't just double click on the .deb package once it had downloaded. Instead I had to break open a terminal session and install it from there. Some people might be horrified by this. But installing from the command line was how we did things back in the good old DOS 4GW days. It's not hard!

All I needed was one command.

dpkg -i --force-architecture [packaged name goes here]


The game installs just fine and runs perfectly. All the icons are in the right menus even. The World Of Goo is the first game I've bought since the sad excuse for a PC port that was Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. I'm glad I did buy it! It's awesome!

One really important thing to mention though. This game has no DRM. So don't be a turd and rip off the company that made it. BUY the game! It only costs $20! Follow the link to get your own copy!

Thursday 5 February 2009

Windows 7 Falls From Grace

I'm actually enjoying this stage in the Windows Vista 7 saga. A lot of juicy details are coming to the surface and a lot of people are starting to express disappointment at the dumb limitations Microsoft are imposing on the various different versions of the OS.

For example! The "light" Starter version which will be OEM only will limit the number of running applications to just 3 user applications. I'm betting Microsoft won't be cutting down on the 20 plus process that spied on user in Vista. But this does beg the question why?

Fair enough netbooks aren't that powerful. But are people really likely to try and run a net book like a full blown PC? What does this mean for road warriors? So you'll be able to have a web browser running while using Word and Excel but no e-mail? Or maybe you could have your E-mail, Word and Excel open but no web browser that you might just need for research. I don't think Microsoft have thought this through.

Microsoft just lost the netbook market.

Of course when Microsoft have customers like this commentator it's no wonder they're losing touch.

"By othercents on 2/4/2009 6:53:04 PM , Rating: 2
I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate on my netbook and I consistently run 8 or 9 apps without a problem. The lightweight version isn't really needed. Plus how many people actually know how to launch more than one app at a time?

Other
"

And Linux advocates get accused of being patronising and treating newbies like idiots?

http://www.dailytech.com/Windows+7+Has+Six+Editions/article14152.htm

Some follow up info.

As I suspected Windows Vista 7s much praised ability to run "just fine" on a netbook is coblers. As with Windows XP, the Windows 7 "Starter" and "Home Basic" versions that will be found on netbooks are seriously cut down quite literally to their most basic features.

Presumably that means you will at least get the boot screen before the blue screen.

http://www.dailytech.com/Questions++Answers+Windows+7+Editions/article14162.htm

Wednesday 4 February 2009

Microsoft Is Suicidal

After all the "push-back" Microsoft got about UAC it's seems it has decided to leave it broken and abandon all efforts to make their OS more secure. Rather than actually fix UAC Microsoft just turned down the default protections. Making it useless!

If there is anything worse than having no security on Windows it's having useless security while at the same time claiming the system is secure. Microsofts attitude to security absolutely stinks. They have acknowledged this fault and said it won't be fixed because it exists by "design". Just like Microsoft intentionally made UAC annoying.

Is it just me that's thinking Microsoft is suicidal?

http://www.dailytech.com/Windows+7+UAC+Leaves+Door+Open+for+Attacks/article14127.htm

Sunday 1 February 2009

Windows 7 is really Windows NT6.1

If you're a Windows user planning on buying Windows 7 to upgrade your Windows Vista installation you should really stop and think for a moment. During a discussion following an earlier post I was lead to a Wikipedia article that assigns a version number of 6.1 to the Windows 7 OS. Which to me lends much credence to the conclusion many have come to that Windows 7 amounts to little more than a service pack to Windows Vista.

Basically Windows Vista users need to mount a campaign to force Microsoft to release Windows 7 or rather Windows 6.1 as a service pack. Because that is exactly what it is. Microsoft are ripping people off by changing the name from Windows Vista to Windows 7. Just like the infamous Mojave experiment, the name change is nothing more than marketing to dupe the public into buying something they effectively already have. Microsoft should at least be honest and call it Windows 6.1.