The Fault

I'm restarting this blog with two focuses. Tech and music. Weird hybrid I know. Doesn't matter. Also will feature some anecdotes of life, especially due to my role on the radio show Angry Rants, airing every monday at 5 pm EST on http://cfreradio.com.

I also have a music show, The Fault with Ash Slaughter, on the same station at 3 PM on wednesdays.

Expect reviews, opinons, articles, whatever. I don't have a set theme officially, it just will most certaily relate to tech, music, or an arbitrary rant.

Asus EEE PC Review

A few months ago ASUS released a range of ultraportable laptops that got a fair bit of attention for a lot of reasons

1: They were 7"

2: They used flash based storage – much faster than a hard drive, but much more expensive

3: They came with Linux preinstalled

4: They cost $400.


Most ultraportable laptops cost between $2000 and $4000 so this is obviously appealing.

That said a $400 laptop is obviously going to be cut back a bit in functionality, and when they started releasing cheaper variants it really becomes a question of asking if the EEE PC is a value purchase or simply a tossing away of our money

Okay here's the difference between the models

$300 gets you the EEE PC, 512 mb of ram, a celeron procssor, with TWO GB of Flash storage (which is silent, more power efficient, fast as hell… but it's only 2 gb). You can get white, blue, green, or pink

$350 gets you the same thing with 4GB storage and a nice little sleeve to carry it in plus the option of getting it in black, and a marginally faster procesor

$400 gets you the same setup as the $350 one with a bigger battery and a webcam, as well as not being available in blue, pink, or green

All models have VGA out, wifi, three USB ports, and an SD card reader

Being a cheap bastard I bought the two gb model (in pink if you must know), then bought an 8 GB SD card for $40 because I'm cost effective that way.


So on to the review now that you know what I'm talking about

For $300 you already know somethings getting shafted. So lets look at the negatives and my own response to them

1: Disk space. With the custom linux distribution on there you're left with half a gig to store shit. This is someone lacking if you want to play media. However the SDHC slot makes up for this to an extent, and booting windows xp (yes you can put winxp on it) in 15 seconds is also very nice

2: No optical drive: It's a 7" computer, where would you PUT that? A CD is almost as large as the entire machine.

3: Not everyone likes linux: The EEE comes with a linux distro set up with everything you need – firefox, office, pidgin (lets you use MSN, AIM, etc), and all the configuration tools. But if you want to run your favourite games in your remaining storage linux wont be for you. If you have an external cd drive however, win XP will install just fine, as I've done with this

4: Low specs: It comes with a small hard drive, a slow processor, and not much ram. But who cares? It uses a very efficient linux distro that doesn't eat at this, and it ever lags up. If you load win xp you'll need to hack it up a bit but the EEE comes with a manual telling you how to do this. The ONLY time ive noticed a performance hit is in firefox when people have those last.fm album quilts. Which is weird as I play Quake 3 fine on this.

5: The most obvious problem it seems is the tiny keyboard. But I'll be honest. I'm a triple digit wpm typer, and while I'm not blazing through this review, it's workable and not bad. Yes, I'm typing this wall of text [currently almost 600 words] on an EEE and am having no problems. My only complaint is a very badly placed left shift key.

6: The screen is fucking tiny. Well of course it is! Its an ultraportable. Don't expect a 7" screen to have 1280x1024 resolution.

So there's it in terms of flaws. All of them have some form of answer. Now whats great about it?

1: It's 7 inches. You can take it anywhere. You can probably fit it in a cargo pants pocket, a purse, or anything.

2: For a low spec machine, it's REALLY quick

3: Ever notice how annoying those note table things in college are for laptops? The EEE fits on them perfectly

4: Expandability – most ultraportables (I'm looking at YOU Macbook Air) have one USB slot. This has three, and vga out. So hook it up to all your desktop equipment and you lose the portability but you can use it at a desk.

5: Silent. With no moving parts save for a really really small CPU fan, you don't really hear the EEE PC unless you're playing music through it – which reminds me, the eee has nicer speakers than many laptops

6: price point. If you need to take notes, or check your email on the go, it's a hell of a lot more useful than an iPhone for only a couple of hundred dollars less.


Okay so you've got a fairly arbitrary and seemingly biased list of pros and cons. But what... is it good for?

Well, notetaking and portability are huge selling points. But if you don't have a bigger computer to go home to you can give the EEE a miss. That said, it is a quick system you can take anywhere, and there's plenty value in that.

So now I'm just going to go through some of my observations and usage patterns that I may not have tread over before. Having such a small screen means that some websites may need a horizontal scroll bar in firefox. This isn't as annoying as it sounds, but it is still something to be considered. Also the F11 key in firefox is incredibly valuable. The battery lasts a long time (3 h under full load, max brightness, with wifi on – much more if you turn it down or are just surfing). Also the low res screen is amazing for nes emulation. It looks more crisp on my EEE than it does on my 42" tv through my Wii.

Another intrinsic value the computer has is a bit less obvious. It's an attention whore, and you don't need to pay the couple grand a macbook air would cost for that. People will crowd in. "What is that? It's pretty / small / cool!" and then they just get more interested when you tell them that you spent less than $500 on it. It's an incredibly nerdy piece of social technology. I use it to pick up babes. Well, the ones that don't think I'm gay for having a pink laptop next to my pink cell phone.

Also, as for using it for media, a good workaround is using Hamachi. Network it to your desktop through that, and share your movie or music folder, then watch / listen to streaming media on the EEE. The lower resolution doesn't struggle at all, though higher quality video and music above 192 kbps may lag up a bit due to network bandwidth.

Ultimatly the flaws in the eee cave to what this machine is good for – a system for casual use on the go, and with the price point there's no reason to go more expensive.

The PC Gaming Crysis

Oh yes, starting off my first article with a bad pun. I'm a class act. So this article is austensibly about Crysis, but it's not a conventional review. Let's get right to the point.


Crysis is a decent first person shooter with lots of options, sub-par level design, racial overtones, cool gadgets, and broken multiplayer.


Oh. Crysis is very pretty. Boner inducing if you have the hardware to run it.
Which is part of the problem and what this paper is about. Crysis is the problem with PC gaming.


Crysis's minimum software requirements are a 2ghz processor, a gigabyte of ram, and a 256 megabyte v- oh. I've lost you havn't I.
See, you don't KNOW if you meet these minimums. This is further troubled by the fact that theres four year old computers that can run this fine, yet if you go and buy a Dell tomorrow there's a shot that you won't be able to run the game. There's no incentive to really know your hardware, except "my comp is new" or "my comps probably too old for that". And seeing as people are generally content to go play on their almost-as-pretty Xbox 360 there's not exactly room for people to enter the PC gaming market without more than basic knowledge of their PC hardware. Luckily Microsoft came in and created a rating system for hardware, so you just look at the number the game needs, the number you have, and you're fine. Except you need Windows Vista for this, and the Windows Vista and Games for Windows brands are generally associated with plague, pestilence, and death despite the dark secret in the industry that they do not in fact suck.

So back to Crysis - it sets a performance bar so high that I don't think there is a mainstream PC manufacturer that actually produces a PC that can run it on medium to high settings for under $600. Why is that a problem? It just enhances the idea that PC gaming is prohibitively expensive, when realistically you can make a computer that'll run Crysis on high for $500 without any real difficulty. Why is this number important? It puts it right in the same league as console gaming's price. And a computer monitor is a fair deal cheaper than an HDTV, and said monitor supports higher resolutions than any HDTV. But now there's a game that the entire industry perceives requires a two thousand dollar investment to play, there goes any effective means to invest in PC gaming for ONE GAME, ignoring the fact that games like Call of Duty 4 and Bioshock feature better interfacing and graphics on PC as well (Okay, interfacing is another argument, but graphics are not - PC games are prettier. They have better video card technology and their monitors support higher resolutions). So now we've got an industry saying you need to spend two grand for a PC, you've got a public who doesn't want to spend two grand, and you've got a competent console generation that's obviously going to appeal to people more than a BIG SCARY COMPUTER. But this is only half the problem.

The other half is Crysis epitomizes a lot of what's wrong in PC gaming gameplay. Just because you have a keyboard doesn't mean you need to use every single key on it. While everything is nicely customizable,lets face it, if you don't have a five button mouse, you're going to be playing "where the fuck is that key" game a lot. Let's combine this with a cumbersome, badly organized multiplayer and people are going to be continuing their ongoing fellatio of Xbox Live. Naturally these flaws aren't seen in the reviewing community, it's even received a 9.5 score from GameSpot, so people are going to assume this is the great beacon of PC gaming.

So wait, the game they just spent two grand on buying a computer for isn't that good? And they're likely to believe that this is the best the system has to offer? Well you just effectively killed any incentive to play a PC game ever again.

So what's to be done about this? Microsoft has the right idea with their performance rating scale - it scans your computer, and gives you a rating. It's simple. My computer gets a 4.8 in this scale for example. It's not widely enough implemented though to be effective, and i doubt Dell is going to start saying "This computer is a 5.1 on Windows Performance". So now the pressure is to learn hardware - not hard, but who wants to learn that shit. And we're losing incentive to bring people to the PC fold. I'm not attempting to convert people to PC gaming in this article, but for those who do care about the PC as a gaming platform, the more the common market shafts PC gaming the less developement will go into it. And as developement goes down, the PC game platform dies. And Crysis is a huge part of the problem. Fuck you Crytek.

Updates forthcoming

In a bout of incompetence I managed to both delete my backlog and mess up where my blogs are. Nonetheless, http://riwork.blogspot.com and http://riworkd.blogspot.com now ultimately point to the same location


To new readers and such,
I'm going to post a well thought-out update every Thursday. It'll be either tech or politically centric, quite often integrating both. They're two centres of my life, and they'll be focused on as such.