Games are being taken too seriously. We hear about people killing themselves as a result of losing in a game; we hear of people dying because they’ve been playing for too long. We read articles that are just grave. Reading IGN or GameSpot makes you feel bored after about 15 minutes. Games are fun; so we can figure out that articles about games should also be funny - they have to make you laugh, they have to be written as if the author was talking to a friend, not to a ‘reader’, and - first of all - they have to be humourous. Life without sarcasm would be totally boring - and that’s why The Sarcastic Gamer was created by Doc Adams.

It’s completely different from other gaming websites, it’s interesting. It’s written… well, not only is it written - it’s also sung! “How To Kill Your Brand” (also known as “The PS3 Song") watched by nearly 2 million people, is the most popular of Doc’s songs.
It reminds me of many Weird Al Yankovic’s songs, which are also full of sarcastic barbed remarks. That’s why it appears on my iPod’s Top Rated playlist.

The Sarcastic Gamer isn’t just about parodying and laughing at everything - it’s a gaming news centre, in the full meaning of this phrase, even though it gives the news in a… erm… very uncommon way. It even - despite being just three-week-old - is launching its own podcast (tomorrow, to be exact).

The Sarcastic Gamer is really a perfect gaming news website for me - it has up-to-date information from console gaming market with a huge dose of humour. Check it out at SarcasticGamer.com.

Below is a YouTube video by the Sarcastic Gamer about Microsoft Surface and its uselessness (although Doc Adams says he’d like to have one, but he just can’t afford it, so he parodied it).

Since the third PlayStation was released in the US (November 11, 2006) and later in Europe (March 23, 2007) every console gamer in the world has been arguing which console is the best. I’ve browsed and searched the whole Internet to find the technical specifications, descriptions and opinions on the best next-gen game consoles: Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3

According to the old rule “first things first", I will give reasons why I will compare only Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, without Wii:

• Wii has a 729 MHz processor with 243 MHz clock speed. My laptop’s better than that.
• It doesn’t support HDTV-resolutions (just 480p) and HDMI.
• It has only 64 MB of (GDDR3) RAM.
• It doesn’t support DVD!
• It has no hard drive.
• “Wii” sound like “wee".

I hope it’s enough. And here’s a proof I’m not lying.

Now, let’s get to the main point of this article.

Hardware comparison

PS3 is said to have a more powerful processing power - it’s  b u l l s h i t . It’s true that PS3 has a 3.2 GHz Cell processor with 7 cores, whereas Xbox 360 has a 3.2 GHz unit with 3 cores only, but: 1) 360’s cores are dual-threaded, PlayStation has single-threaded cores and 2) these processors aren’t directly comparable - you can find out more in IGN’s article. It says:

When you break down the numbers, Xbox 360 has provably more performance than PS3. Keep in mind that Sony has a track record of over promising and under delivering on technical performance. The truth is that both systems pack a lot of power for high definition games and entertainment.
 
However, hardware performance, while important, is only a third of the puzzle. Xbox 360 is a fusion of hardware, software and services. Without the software and services to power it, even the most powerful hardware becomes inconsequential. Xbox 360 games — by leveraging cutting-edge hardware, software, and services — will outperform the PlayStation 3.

Moreover, Xbox 360 has 512 MB GDDR3 of system video RAM (at 700 MHz) plus 10 MB embedded DRAM (eDRAM) frame buffer, whereas PS3 has only 256 MB of GDDR3 RAM (at 700MHz). It’s said that PS3 has higher-quality textures while X360 has better light effects, but the graphic processors comparison shows that Xbox will be able to display more graphic marvels in the future.

(more…)

Microsoft has been the symbol of fucking everything up, wasting all the chances that somebody can be given and releasing shit that is the best operating system anyway. On Uncyclopedia there is an awesome quote:

The day Microsoft makes something that doesn’t suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.

I’ve been thinking that way until few weeks ago, when Popfly and Surface came into being. I won’t talk about the latter, you can watch a great video on its website, I’ll just focus on M$ Popfly.

I’ve never seen something with such capabilities as well as powerful and user-friendly engine being so… useless. Yeah, you can create great mashups with Microsoft Silverlight (code-named ‘Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere’) and put them to your Vista desktop or emded them to your website, but… what if I don’t have Vista and don’t want to make my site look like Miniclip? Well, here comes the other way Popfly can be used - it can substitute your Dreamweaver or whatever as a WYSIWYG website editor. Yeah, you can create nice websites using Popfly - I mean it’s almost impossible to write a nice-looking website, but all of them are W3C-friendly (I mean they all validate in W3C’s validator).

In a contrary to Popfly’s uselessness, mashups are great. They consist of blocks (developed by users or by companies, e.g. Flickr) joined together to give some kind of output. Yeah, it sounds stupid, but imagine you could take all your Flickr photos and show the places where they’ve been taken on a world map. A lot of work, you say? It’s 3 seconds with Popfly. It’s in Alpha version right now (you have to wait a couple of days before they let you see it), but just think of the things it’ll be able to do when it’s officially released. And they say it’ll be free!

Summing up - if Popfly’s mashups won’t be used only as a part of your Vista desktop and mega-flash-or-even-silverlight-loaded-website, it can be a great thing e.g. for web developers who don’t even know how HTML code looks like. Otherwise - nah, it’ll be another piece of shit released by Bill Gate’s company.

Oh, and if you’re a Polish-speaking fag, you could bother reading Śmiechu’s article, which has convinced me to sign up on this shitty waitlist and wait over a week to see Popfly.

After a month or so of a break, regua.biz is back. It has a nice new layout (I haven’t made a final decision on its colours, though) - however, it isn’t powered by Django, as I’ve promised. Why? I just got fucked up with all these errors, and it would take months to write trackback or OpenID modules. I decided to use some kind of blogging system. There are only a few blog tools written in Python, so I looked at good ol’ PHP. Using WebLogMatrix I’ve chosen b2evolution, a nice and simple system with many plug-ins. Hope it’ll work fine, it seems to have all the features I’d want a blogging tool to have.

All feedback is welcome. Please give your opinions on the new layout, b2evolution and everything you’ll find annoying.

UPDATED on 30/06/2007
b2evolution seemed to be a great blogging platform, but really it just sucks. I switched to Lifetype, but after having some problems with mimetype, I tried Movable Type and it’s great. It supports trackbacks and works on static files, meaning that after new entry or comment is submitted to the database, the whole site has to be rebuilt in order to show that entry/comment. It works well and now the page load in a shorter time and there are no problems with it (although configuring MT is a terrible experience, I had to copy the same template code in 20 places). Hope you like - because you have no other choice :P