RMstudents Technology meets medical education

I am really behind in my reading and I can't make this as long as I'd like to. This is more for myself (sort of something I can look back on), as is most of the blog I guess.

whatever happened with your 8800GT?

Slipped in the 8800GT a while ago, and although my PC is louder, it also kicks more ass than before. I've included a picture of the card as well as a comparison between it and my old 7600GT. (the 7600gt is the shorter one). Note also that my 7600GT was rigged for silent running (made possible due to it's 2-slot design which had a giant heatsink (on the GPU) whereas the 8800GT has a dedicated fan.

8800GT

7600gt vs 8800gt (it's so long!)

Playing Bioshock and Portal (and Call of Duty 4 Demo and Crysis) was no problem for this card. One of the best selfish investment I've made. And to think this is the middle-of-the-line of the next-gen 65nm cards in the GeForce 8 series. I wish I could write a more detailed piece about the experience. Oh I forgot to mention, I picked up a widescreen 20" Samsung monitor from someone on Craigslist, and it's made my gaming experience all the more fun as I get beautiful high-res fluid movement with all the widescreen goodness and DirectX 10 pretties that Crysis and Bioshock had to offer.

update: I forgot to add, Brian Crecente of Kotaku wrote up a nice little piece on Objectivism in Bioshock

nVidia loves me

Speaking of nVidia, they bought PhysX maker AGEIA! Basically AGEIA was touting the idea of having a dedicated card in PCs to handle all the physics. Not only would this leave more room for the CPU to focus on other tasks, the dedicated card (PhysX, which would consist of a PPU, a physics processing unit) would allow for more realistic object physics. Well it didn't really take off because no one wanted to buy yet another card to put in their computer unless important games supported it.. and developers didn't support it because no one really had it and they didn't want to require gamers to buy a separate card.. so yeah. Well nVidia bought PhysX, most probably as a pre-emptive measure to counteract any future competition from Intel (that's right not AMD and their ATI divison but Intel) becuase of Intel's plans to start incorporating graphic capabilties into the CPU when they get to oct-core processors. Still it means, ideally, that nVidia cards, or at least the high-end series, will include a PhysX PPU on board! And developers can write games that support this card but can be modular in case you don't have it.

In fact it gets better. nVidia has already announced plans to push a simple software update to all owners of GeForce 8 series cards that would allow them to make use of PhysX! Like my 8800GT! Now of course there aren't really any games out there that support this yet but it's good to know my investment is somewhat future-proof. If I ever SLI with another 8800GT I can have one of the two cards be dedicated to PhysX (ideally).

Ubuntu

Finally, after Jonathan's recent foray into the wonderful world of Ubuntu, I was reminded of my frustrating attempt at getting Ubuntu to work on our home desktop computer a couple years back. I remember I stopped short of doing a full install because I didn't want to mess up the main computer. At the time I had a custom-built AMD Athlon computer but a) it wasn't built by me and b) I used HPNA to get on the internet ... for those reasons I really had a tough time getting Ubuntu's internet to cooperate. Well times have changed, and after talking to Jonathan I decided to make the jump and try Ubuntu again. Although I had some frustrating experiences, all the problems can be chalked up to me not doing my homework and just going into it blind. I must say that this is a weakness of the Linux world. On the one hand I understand that a user should be accountable for what is expected of him, and try to educate and prepare one self for what might be needed to go through with an installation. On the other hand, Ubuntu is all about making software available to all and I have to say that as user-friendly as the installation was, there are still some kinks that need to be worked on, but they're mostly a result of simply being in a Linux environment. What I mean to say is, there are some driver support issues that still bother me. This isn't Ubuntu's fault, as most times companies mainlly support drivers for Windows. Still when you can find a driver, installing it does not seem as intuitive as it should.

Anyway I want to thank Jonathan because long story short, I got Ubuntu running and fully supporting my wireless card and my graphics card (thanks to the Ubuntu community at large on Ubuntu forums), and am having a lot of fun messing around with it and learning stuff. If it hadn't been for him I probably would've put this project aside for a long, long time. Maybe I never would've gotten around to doing it. I'm also thankful to slickdeals.net which allowed me to procure a 200GB EIDE HDD from Staples for a mere $30, which is what I'm using for this Ubuntu install. I guess I didn't need that much space for a hobby, but I thought: what if I start using this as my main OS? I'll need the space. But you know what, the thought just scared me. No Windows? I'm not as excited about that as Jonathan is. Plus, I love Vista. I really do, I haven't had any problems with it and in fact I find it more powerful and useful than XP ever was. But the draw to Ubuntu is undeniable.

In fact this entire post, including the editing and posting of the images, was done in Ubuntu with software that came with it (Firefox, GIMP Image Editor, etc.).

I guess I did this all just in time too, as Anandtech's Ryan Smith has commenced using Ubuntu for a month to try it out and give his thoughts on the whole process. I fully expect him to give criticism with regards to the driver support and all that, but to give high marks to the complete package because of how much bang you get for your buck (note: buck = $0).

So I guess I'll be using Vista and Ubuntu equally, with XP just around for video editing purposes. I guess I could use Wine to run Windows apps but like I said, I love Vista so I don't want to simply force myself to use Ubuntu for the sake of learning it.

HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray

Oh one last thing: HD-DVD is all but dead it seems. Warner Bros., then Netflix (Blockbuster had switched to Blu a while back), and now Walmart? It's sad.. I really felt that although HD-DVD did not have the superior specifications, it did offer a much more consumer-friendly solution. Also, secretly I wanted Blu-Ray to fail so that the PS3 would suffer. Anyway if you're in the market to buy a High Definition player, I'd go with Blu-Ray, and specifically a PS3. Not because I think the console is worth your money (it isn't, at least not yet), but because it's the only player that can keep up with the constant updating of the Blu-Ray firmware. HD-DVD is dead, and Toshiba is expected to say as much in the next few weeks.

Okay, now I need to start focusing on school again. Yikes.