Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

« ? Blogging Brians # »

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BSD Mall

10/6/2003 -  10/8/2003
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12/31/2001 -   1/6/2002
12/24/2001 - 12/30/2001
12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Friday, October 4, 2002
02:02 - Macs Inordinately Popular among Vikings http://www.runegame.com/news.php?page=2	(top)
I got a new ATI Radeon 8500 card for my machine today; it's the result of their nifty trade-in program, in which they'll take pretty much any old video card in exchange for a deep discount on one of their current lineup. My original Rage 128 card was getting so it was starting to trip over its own feet (besides which, the fan was becoming so noisy that it was waking me up in the middle of the night); so I figured, hey-- new Radeon 8500 for $150? I'm sold. It arrived this morning, and I installed it. OpenGL stuff like the "Flurry" screen saver now look oh-so-nice even on my nearly three-year-old 450MHz G4. This will make a nice stopgap until I'm in the market for a completely new machine, probably sometime next year. (Like when the GPUL machines start shipping. Heh... yeah, we'll see.) It's hard to tell what's improved, generally, except that my mouse pointer has that subtle little drop-shadow now that's indicative of a card that supports Quartz Extreme. A few little things here and there seem snappier, but I suppose I can't expect the card to instantly hurl my aging machine three years hence in overall performance. Fly!II now behaves acceptably well (it was completely unplayable before-- we're talking like 1 frame per second), but it's still not like buttah. That'll take a whole new machine, I suspect. Ah well. Or maybe just a patch. I found that the game has had a number of patches released since I bought it last year; maybe if I download the latest one, it'll address some of the performance woes. I'm currently #390 out of 519 in line at FilePlanet waiting to get the 33MB file. We shall see. While I'm at it, queueing up massive downloads to occur in the wee hours whilst I slumber, I figured I'd do well to go stop by the site for Rune and get what similar patches might exist for it. (I really enjoyed Rune. And it performed extremely snappily on my machine; I'm just hoping the new patch makes it work nicely with OS X.) So as I set myself up for another waiting-in-line-for-files session, like some kind of Soviet city-dweller queueing for bread or underwear or whatever it is-- we'll find out when we get to the front of the line-- I poked through the News section of the site. And I ran across this little gem: Voting Poll Results posted: 07:05 pm by: Kazi Wren We asked (quite some time ago): Who would win: Mac or PC Runers? The results are as follow: PC Warriors OWNZ YOU! 65.4% Mac Warriors RULE! 24.3% Um...I use Linux. 10.3% For a total of 1,751 votes. 24.3%, huh? That's a pretty significant percentage, if you ask me. Certainly the contrary of what I'd been expecting (wouldn't Macs be even more of a minority in the gaming world than at large?). Considering that the usual market-share figure we hear quoted is in the 3-5% neighborhood, this figure must have some kind of deep cosmic significance. Maybe Rune is really an awful game, and no self-respecting PC gamer would be caught dead playing it; but Mac gamers are desperate and will take whatever they can get, hence their overabundance among the game's players. Maybe the PC Rune players secretly harbor admiration for Macs (or Mac users) and voted accordingly, in honest response to the question. Maybe there actually are more Mac gamers out there in the world than I'd realized. (Naaaaah.) Although Johnnie at work has been expressing Apple Lust more and more lately, and his recent forays into the Apple Stores to drool over the various pieces of equipment have resulted in pronouncements that now more than ever in recent history, the library of Mac games is getting more and more equivalent to that of the PC. Two years ago, the new titles published dual-platform weren't even within a power of ten of the PC-only titles. But today... as he was startled to note, suddenly all the game companies seem to have leapt onto the OS X bandwagon, and a search for Mac games will turn up a wealth of treasure where before were only rusty nails and iron filings to set off the metal detector. We saw a lot of encouraging punditry from within the developer community early on in the OS X lifecycle, to the effect that while developing games on the Mac has traditionally been an infuriating enterprise-- system crashes during debug coding being among the most obvious-- now that we have OS X, with its almost infinitely better stability and its much more usable APIs for OpenGL and the like, it's suddenly a much more attractive proposition to do Mac ports than it was before. Couple that with a growing market, and cha-ching. It sounded like propaganda and hype at the time; but now the new titles are here. You can't argue against an existence proof. Now here's hoping it lasts...