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It’s been a while since the latest Transformers movie hit the silver screens. Nevertheless, one thing remains regardless of whether you liked the movie or not - the Transformers just looked incredibly awesome.

Similar notions may count for Windows Vista. It’s been a while since its release and opinions, until today, are mixed. Despite the varying opinions on Bill’s last OS, the wallpapers that came with it were just breathtakingly beautiful.

This prompted a simple idea - let’s just combine the two. Using pre-production models of the Transformers I layered the models over my favorite Vista wallpaper. Voilla, enjoy. Click on any of the thumbnails to download the .zip file that contains high-resolution versions of all four wallpapers. Given that this was a simple idea, it may have been done already - actually I have done the same thing many months ago before the movie came out but the images got wiped by a new Wordpress installation on my server. Republishing them can’t hurt, though. They’re just too pretty. Just click on one of them - they all link to the same .zip file.

Frenzy - click to download the .zip package

Optimus Prime

Blackout

Ironhide

Bill, I'll make it painless. I swear!

Is Linux really the next up and coming OS, slowly sneaking up behind Windows, ready to pounce and rend Bill’s love child to shreds?

I believe by now a fairly large percentage of the populace is aware of Linux. Take my office, for example. Given that our work evolves around the hi-tech industry, Linux isn’t really a foreign term to most. However, the majority of my colleagues have all grown up with Windows. Linux, while known to everyone, wasn’t something most had really spent time on.

And thus the tale begins of why Linux had such a short lived existence in our offices.

As if Windows vs Linux articles aren’t already running rampage through the web like the Spanish Inquisition, Techrepublic published yet another article detailing the greatness of Linux over Windows. The author delivers an account of success with Linux like it has been done uncountable times before. Such articles are contagious and are one of the main contributors to the spread of Linux. When browsing google for OS related issues, stumbling over an article such as that is inevitable.

Thus it happened that at some point the Linux wave hit our offices and pretty much everyone with their own laptop at work wiped Windows from their machines and went for Linux - one after the other. The excitement was large at first and everyone marveled at the greatness that is sudo, the joy that is Gnome, the ease of installation, the excellent repositories of Ubuntu, the driver compatibility and the awesomeness of the community.

No doubt, at first Linux was just a gift from heaven.

Software existed for pretty much everything that we needed ranging from office tools to multimedia packages, full compatibility with web apps and communications software. The desktop was pretty, customization was great, it was fast and furious and everybody was soon talking about anti virus software as if it was a thing of ancient past. Viruses? Prft! Welcome to the world of NOS!

Come Monday morning the following month:

[Me] “Hey guys. What are you doing? Are you installing Windows again?”

[Jeff] “Yep.”

[Me] “How come?”

[Karl] “Call of Duty 4, man.”

[Me] “Have you tried Cedega for that?”

[Jeff] “Blah. Hassle.”

[Me] “What about dual boot? You don’t have to scrap Linux all together.”

[Karl] “Hard disk space is precious, man.”

And that ended the Linux era in our offices. These days they’ve switched to Company of Heroes as their game of choice and Adobe’s creative suit collection is the latest fad amongst our photography fans. Nobody bothers with the Gimp. Soon Spore will be the next big hit and many are anticipating the upcoming release of GTA IV for the PC.

Of course, this isn’t a justified death sentence for the Linux OS. I am sure that these games, like most others, could have been run on Linux with the help of Wine or even the purchase of the Cedega service. I am sure that somehow, with a lot of tweaking, a lot of fiddling and a lot of patience, they could have gotten the entire Adobe package running on their systems. And I am confident that if they had enough patience, they’d eventually also get GTA IV running on their machines. Linux is a very versatile, stable, peace giving and optimized OS - no doubt about it.

The problem, however, is that nobody cares. At least not the people that matter - Video game companies and mainstream production software companies. In our case, we’re gamers. We game on everything we can get our hands on and the easily accessible mainstream of the gaming industry is located around Windows and the various console systems. Gaming makes up for a huge, gargantuan percentage of the computer industry. Gamers want to spend effort on mastering and beating the game; not on mastering the OS on which their games have to run. Wine and Cedega may be great options, but they are hurdles. Nobody likes hurdles. Like with Sony’s first walkman, the key to success is ease of use, one-button-push, instant exposure to content. No hurdles.

A militant Linux defender’s answer to that may be, “RTFM, dude. It’s not that hard. Give it a chance.” While he’s right with this statement, it is also the core of the problem. You have to make preparations before you get exposed to the content. With Windows you don’t have to do this. People tend to choose the clear path over the rocky, obstructed one. That’s how simple the formula is.

The solution for all this would be the magic phrase “Works out of the box”. Make this possible and Windows is history.

Imagine you had one free computer game to play for every day in the year.

Here you go, try this.

Out of all the games found in the link above, my absolute favorite is Torus Trooper.

Best Tempest clone I've seen so far

Remember Tempest? It was one of the most action packed, fastest and challenging arcade games of it’s time. With Missile Command you had to be fast but with Tempest, you had to be even faster. The sheer bombardment of shapes and the vertigo inducing effect of the tunnel was just mind blowing back then. No level in Tempest was really like the one before and the pressure just kept building up. People would gather around you if you reached a certain level and that’s when you had to start proving yourself. Would you make it into the highscore top 10? If you made it and you were cool enough, you’d just smash an AAA into the highscore list and walk off like John Wayne, smiling smugly and going for some more coins.

Torus Trooper takes you back to that kind of feeling. Just this time you’re alone in front of your PC and the graphics are far better. No worries, though. You can still get up, and walk over to the fridge to get some juice … like John Wayne.

Monday morning and I am at work - procrastinating as always. I stumble around the web and do my best to avoid having to deal with daily metrics at work. I succeed at this for quite some time until I find this:

Click to view larger image

This pissed me off.

I will approach this flow chart systematically by listing points on PC gaming and points on console gaming. In the end we’ll see how this correlates to “liking video games”.

PC Gaming

Dell XPS Series

Machine in use: Dell XPS series gaming computer (I never treated a computer as caringly as this one)

Points on PC Gaming:

• Sit at a desk using more or less comfortable office chair.
• Screen size limited to what fits on a regular office desk.
• Limited to a few variations on sitting positions because of mouse handling.
• Mouse and Keyboard controls give superior reaction speed in FPS games.
• Problematic game installations due to hardware incompatibility.
• Reduced quality due to need to upgrade hardware (every 6 months)
• PunkBuster kicks me offline constantly. Reinstall, mess with ports. Rinse repeat.
• VOIP causing trouble. 2 hour delay on a constant basis before all the guys could play together.
• Given a certain lack of moral values, PC games can be very cheap to come by.
• Game crashes and other OS based interruptions are common depending on software and hardware of given system.
• A lot of PC games allow for user generated content.
• The PC gaming industry is suffering from significant release/update delays in comparison to consoles. This is rumored to be related to ease of use of respective development platforms and tools.
• Gaming experience varies from gamer to gamer depending on his financial situation and ability to upgrade/purchase sufficient hardware.
• PC gaming tends to be a solo experience unless LAN parties can be organized. Online friends do not count and currently you can’t really play a game with a friend by hooking up a second mouse and keyboard to the same computer.
• PC gaming is sometimes tedious to get into. Sit down. Start computer. Wait for Windoze. Install game. Download updates for hours (World of Warcraft WTF?). Start game. Configure ports. Start game again. et cetera.

Console Gaming

Xbox 360

Machine in use: Xbox 360 (HDMI)

Points on console gaming:

• Sit in living room, on couch, very comfortable.
• Screen size limited to the size of LCD/Plasma TV I can afford (currently 37 inch).
• Possible to play in prone, sitting or any other position.
• Console controller gives slower reaction in FPS compared to Mouse and Keyboard
• No installation required.
• Top quality of game performance out of the  box.
• No upgrades neccessary.
• No game interruptions due to security software or other filtering processes
• No communication issues with gaming partners
• Console games are expensive. Immoral cheap option possible, but complex to implement
• Console games rarely allow for user generated content, save for Halo 3 to a limited extent.
• Console gaming industry apparently enjoys higher priority on release and update frequency.
• Gaming experience the same for everyone in terms of quality.
• Console gaming can be and often is a very social event in which real people in your immediate vicinity can participate.
• Console gaming is quick to get into. Sit down. Push button. Play game.

First thoughts

Both systems have their ups and downs and often it will come down to whether you absolutely need a mouse to play a game or whether you can adapt to change and learn how to use a console controller properly.

Both systems can offer very cheap (or free) alternatives to acquire games but require jumping a few moral hurdles.

Pricey investments

Computers tend to require a lot more financial investment to keep newer games from running on lower performance levels. Currently consoles still offer the cheaper solution by incorporating GPUs that make pretty much every game a high quality experience for quite some time to come. This will not be the case forever but most people would rather buy a new console after a few years and live in peace for the next few years than having to upgrade their PC once to twice a year. Remember that not always a new graphics card will suffice for your PC. Next is RAM, then a new CPU and perhaps that will also require a new motherboard. Anyone who denies this to be a fact, is lying. It happens. And at least twice a year I hear the same question in the office “New game? Can my graphics card do it?”. However, if you have the money you can keep on upgrading your computer ad nauseam. I have spent 4000 USD on my PC when I first bought it. In under a year it was already unable to perform along with the newest games. At least not the way I wanted it - on the highest graphics settings. This irked me.

In the end it is all down to preference. No system really rules over the other. There are pros and cons to both sides. So now that we have gotten the physical and circumstantial issues out of the way, let us focus on the actual presumption of the above flow chart.

How does my social involvement with other people define which console system best suits me? How does a PS3 only apply to people without friends? How do internet friends only apply to Xbox 360 users? No matter which way I try to twist the possible explanation, it all makes very little sense. Does it all correlate to the rather underdeveloped online community functions of PSN? Does it have to do with the “Friends List” on Xbox Live which, by the way, hardly influences with whom I can play on Xbox Live. Does it have to do with the Wii remote control? The chart makes no sense at all. But all this is just nitpicking at an already flawed idea.  I may be reading way too deep into the sincerity of the flow chart. It’s just a joke, right? Perhaps it is.

We can therefore leave that entire part of the flow chart behind us and focus on the actual idiocy of the image:

Do you like video games? Yes? Then go for a PC.

Look at the points on PC gaming again and let me know how any of that should qualify a love for video gaming. The author of the chart effectively says that if you love video games, then you also love mice and keyboards, you like to sit at a desk, you hate big screens, you love to spend a lot of money on upgrading your computer, you love to troubleshoot your system instead of playing the game and enjoy waiting longer for releases. If you go “WOOT!” over all of this, THEN you are a video game enthusiast.

Wouldn’t someone who loves video games just want to play video games? Isn’t that precisely what consoles are made for?

I can’t believe I actually wrote a huge rant about an obviously silly chart as this.

Oh my goodness. Huge hype. Cuil, the next big thing after Google. Announced to be THE contender to the search engine colossus. Much fuss about nothing if you ask me. First of all go and have a look here to see why there was such a big hype about Cuil.

Even if you tried your best avoiding any kind of tech news, chances are high you still stumbled over a link that announced or otherwise talked about it. I, for my part, saw it on my Wordpress dashboard.

So what is Cuil to the average user? It’s a search engine that looks nice. Very web 2.0, very stylish, very soft and round. But does it work? I tried:

I work with networking equipment on a daily basis. One of the many annoying things to come across when trying out new drivers or software is “error code 10″. Now if we’re unsure what code 10 is related to in conjunction with a certain piece of hardware or software, we look for hints on Google.com. The way around this problem really depends on the hardware, drivers or software that is causing the error.

We need a good selection of possible answers and usually google finds those for us.

While Google gave me a broad, yet very valid selection of search results, Cuil merely threw a handful of half-way related results at me. Cuil may have lead me to a solution eventually, but the way it presented the data was anything but helpful. The excerpts that Cuil used from each link were not related at all to the keywords that I used in my search and didn’t provide any clue as to which link is most related to my query.

A screen capture of the Cuil search results

Google, on the other hand, bombarded me with a wide selection of spot-on links and excerpts that contained precisely the keywords that I used for my search tring.

A screen capture of the Google search results

My apologies for the chopped off screens of the search results. You can see the full results in the links I provided below or by clicking on the screen shots above.

These are the search results I get when I use Google.

These are the search results I get when I use Cuil.

To sum up the performance of Cuil, it just sucks. It just doesn’t provide the most relevant information right from the start and it doesn’t provide any insightful summary or excerpts for the search results. I went ahead and tried other keywords and most of the time I ended up with the same mediocre and not directly relevant results. It does feature some nice thumbnails for some results but that doesn’t really improve on the quality of the search engine.

Cuil doesn’t deliver.

Oh, and I almost forgot: How on earth do you pronounce Cuil?

Update: Apparently unable to practice what I preach and simply google for how to pronounce Cuil, I was informed by a kind reader that it’s pronounced “cool”. Kewl.

Update 2: If you thought that my example of how Cuil didn’t work properly, have a look at this result that a reddit user found. Amazing how much Cuil sucks.