1) When you have the option to blow up Megaton, I reported Burke to the sheriff, figuring he would be arrested. Much to my dismay, when I saw him pull a gun, he took no damage when I went into VATS and shot him in the head. Say what?

2) On the above, if I hit some guy in a reality pod with a grenade, it should break. And if I have a maxed out science skill, I should be able to disable the reality pod FROM THE OUTSIDE.

3) The entire plot was about conflict over a water filtering plant. A shadowy governmental organization fights with an enclave of super soldiers over the right to purify the area’s water supply. Does anyone CARE who does the purification? I sure don’t.

4) Why would it be evil to use the germ vial to kill the mutants? I spent the entire game fighting mutants.

5) Whats up with this “end of the game, character dies” BS. I have a henchman who is totally immune to radiation. letting me “keep my destiney” is a pretty lame excuse.

According to the article,  it turns out this is not a graphics card at all. It is actually a card capable of ” encoding and decoding H.264, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video streams in hardware.”

In terms of hardware, the card seems to be capable. It contains a 4 core based Cell (the SpursEngine SE1000), of the same type that Toshiba uses in its laptops for video manipulation. It also comes with 128mb of XDR (the really fast, really expensive RAM used in the PS3 and made by Rambus).

But do you know what else is capable of that? Every graphics card made since 2007. And you know what else? They don’t all cost $300.

So if somoene can tell me exactly what the target market for this is, I would appreciate it. Maybe you can use it to play PS3 games?

But even worse, in my opinion, is the DRM on Crysis Warhead. Because while Spore is a casual game, and casual users do not change their setp all that often (EA estimates that 1% of their customers will have their property illgealy taken from them by Spore’s DRM), the target market for is Crysis is a much more tech savy, upgrade heavy group.

So I would like to take the oppurunity to refute some of the points EA and Crytek have made here:

“Warhead uses online authentication and allows up to five activations. This gives you the opportunity to install the game as many times as you want on five different machines.”

The first problem is online activation. Games that do not need internet access for core functionality should NEVER require an internet connection. And worse, they do not allow you to activate on 5 machines. They allow you to activate on 5 operating systems. So if you dual boot XP and Vista, you have used up two. That means that if you own 2 gaming computers (like me) and a laptop, and you dual boot, your past your activation limit. Thats a small number of customers, but if a single 1 of those customers has been hindered by this, EA and Crytek have done something unethical.

“This DRM solution is safe. EA and Crytek would never allow anything that included spyware, viruses or malware to be installed on anyone’s computers.”

Securom = Spyware. From wikipedia : “The use of SecuROM is controversial because certain aspects of the protection are similar to functions of malware, and users are not always informed when SecuROM is included with a product.”

“Re-authentication is required only if you make significant changes to your PC’s hardware, reformat your hard drive, or in some cases, upgrade your Operating System. Multiple installations of the game on the same computer that has not gone through significant changes will not count against the number of computers the game can be installed on.”

Like I said above, this does not apply to one computer, it applies to changes to that computer. Compare this to a retail version of Vista, which can be used on one mahcine at a time as many times as you want.

Also not covered is you deactivate a machine. Im guessing you can’t. Which means that you waste an activation eveyr time you reinstall your OS, or make unspecified changes to the hardware. I know that if Crysis had this system in place, I would already have hit the limit.

Now, it may seem counterintutive to jump on the HD-DVD bandwagon after said bandwagon has crashed and died. But consider the following:

1) a combo drive is only about $25 more than a blue-ray only drive

2) HD-DVD are really cheap. As in $7 at my local Fry’s, which is less than a new DVD

3)you can buy up all the HD-DVD’s everyone else is dumping at rock bottom prices on Ebay

So by spending the extra $25, you get the ability to obtain a reasonably large amount of movies now at very low prices, and still have the ability to get Blue-ray movies later. It seems like thats worth a bit of extra money to me.

Lets start of with sunspider, a free online javascript performance benchmark. First is a comparison of Chrome and Firefox 3.

Benchmark comparing Chrome with Firefox 3

The results who a fairly significant edge for Chrome. However, there are a few areas were Firefox takes the lead. The Firefox team has announced greatly improved performance in 3.1, beating Chrome in most cases. However, 3.1 is still in alpha, so I will test it once it reaches beta stages.

Now lets put it in a bar graph, with IE7 in the mix. Lower is better.

Sunspider benchmark with Chrome, Firefox, and IE7

As we can see, IE7 loses horribly. By a factor of 10. As in, if Chrome and Firefox were sports cars, IE would be a tricycle.

Now lets look at Acid 3 standard compliance. I threw Safari on my Iphone into the mix. Keep in mind beta versions of Safari and Opera have been shown to get 100, although they are not release versions.

Acid 3 test for Chrome, Firefox, IE7, and Safari

In this test, Chrome takes the lead, although all of the browsers are relatively comparable. Aside, of course, from IE7, which again loses by a factor of nearly 10. Well done Microsoft.

So overall, Chrome is better, but not hugley better, than Firefox. And both stomp IE so badly it isn’t even funny.