Labor Day Rant

By August 31, 2003

It seemed for a while that the tech industry was in a huge slump. Computer sales were down and there was just no reason to buy a new system because our software ran fine on what we currently had. Well things could finally be changing for the better. The newest games coming out will push your computer unlike anything you have ever seen before. Doom 3 was spotted running at E3 and to my surprise was only playing at a 640×480 resolution due to the video cards limitations (I believe it was running on a Radeon 9800 no less). I just recently purchased Star Wars Galaxies for my home computer and I am stunned by the graphic quality of it. The water looks real, the leaves blow in the wind, and it even rains in the game with realistic looking clouds and rain. My system is not too old either with an AMD 1700+, 512MB of Memory and a 256MB Geforce FX 5600, and believe it or not my Frames per second are around 20 with the games graphics quality set at the medium mark. I can only imagine what this game will look like with a top-of-the-line system coming out with a next generation video card. On another tangent, the Star Wars Galaxy game is played entirely online in real time with other players at a price of $15/mo. Steep if you ask me, but I will save that for another article.

You always hear about these new commercial air planes out there with the latest entertainment technology. Video games, DVD players, movie screens and more are supposedly in the latest jetliners. Unfortunately I have yet to see them. On my recent flight to Florida via Southwest Airlines, I could not help but notice that the seats and seat belts look 20 years old with dents, tears and scratches all over the place. Could it be the particular airline I was flying with? Possibly, but I fly on average 5-6 times a year across multiple airlines and I have yet to see these new technological planes that everyone is talking about. Maybe I am too cheap or need to fly to Europe to see one…who knows.

I was reading PC Magazine on my recent flight and there was an article in it by John Dvorak. He mentions that the latest patch by Microsoft includes a so called “fix” that will only let Microsoft Windows search for “certified” files using the operating system’s search function. This has to be one of the silliest ideas I have ever heard of. And just recently I was in fact looking for a file and I decided to try the search function; it did not find the file because it was apparently not certified by Microsoft. I have to ask myself, what is Microsoft trying to do? If they want to dominate everything, they certainly are doing it the wrong way by making their OS overly proprietary. But of course everyone has been saying this for a long time.

If you have a comment on this article, please feel free to post a thought on it in our forums. I will be checking the thread often and will post in there. Till next time, Ian out.

http://forums.designtechnica.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2841

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