I love my iPhone.  I have used a large assortment of cell phones over the years, and in my opinion, it is the best phone ever made.  Even with its missing features, it is the most robust and easy to use phone in the world.  With the announcement of the upcoming iPhone 3.0 software, it has just widened its lead.

Today Apple listed many of the new features coming to the iPhone.  Chief amongst them are copy, cut, paste, and MMS messaging.  Yes, you can argue that other phones have had these features for years, but now that the iPhone has them, why would you want to use those phones?  They are also opening up the API so that developers can create turn-by-turn direction applications, so expect to see some cool GPS navigation software to pop up soon.  I also like the fact that they are introducing the landscape keyboard to other applications, mainly the Mail application that needed it badly.  SMS gets it, too.

There is only one glaring omission to the iPhone feature set and that is that it still won’t be able to play Flash media. I don’t understand their reasoning for it because every iPhone user in the world would love to have that ability.

There’s too many new features to mention here, so head over to Apple’s preview site and see for yourself.

I looked into my missing Sidebar problem and I am not sure what to do about it.  The Sidebar will not appear on the front page of this blog no matter which theme I use if I am using Internet Explorer. The Sidebar does display on all other pages, even with Internet Explorer.  The Sidebar is perfectly fine when using other browsers.

Anyone have any ideas I can try?

Edit:  Well, wouldn’t you know. I make this post and the problem goes away on its own.  There must have been a problem with the post that got pushed to the next page.  /shrug

I just noticed that the Sidebar is not showing up on the right-hand side of my page when viewed with Internet Explorer 7.  It seems to work with all other browsers.  I’ll see what I can do to fix it in a day or so.

If you are using IE 7 and want to access various areas of my site, the Sidebar does show up of you click the Contact Me option at the top.

Yes, it has been awhile since my last post. I have been working an insane amount of hours lately and that has not left much time or energy for writing. I work in the IT department of a casino (I won’t say which one), and we have been working night and day to get an expansion open. Now that it has opened, I hope to return to the realm of normal life again, although I think most people would be surprised at just how hard all casino employees work.

My last post mentioned that I had purchased a Lenovo S10 netbook computer. I have been using it has my main machine at home and I can say that it was a very worthy purchase. Now, you may ask why would I use a 10″ netbook as my main computer. Well, I decided to sell my Alienware M17 gaming laptop and go back to a 17″ Macbook Pro. The Macbook Pro does not have nearly the same graphics card power as the M17, but I really missed using OS X. Plus, with the hours I have been working, my gaming time has dwindled drastically.

The Lenovo netbook is what made me realize I missed OS X. You see, it is possible to install OS X onto the S10 and that is exactly what I did. I am now dual booting Windows XP and Mac OS X. Installing the Mac operating system on a machine like this is not the easiest thing to do, but when you get it completed, it runs perfectly fine. All the hardware works well. The only exception to that is the built-in ethernet card. It currently does not work, but the built-in wi-fi does, so it is not much of a problem.  I started with this guide from the Lenovo S10 forums.

The Lenovo S10 uses a 1.6ghz Atom processor. Its intended use is light tasks and that is exactly it shines at. I can browse the web, check email, view online video, play music, and other standard things. It can’t view high definition video. It just does not have the raw power necessary to do so. I don’t find this much of a limitation as I don’t think most people get a 10″ netbook with the intention of watching high definition video. Non-HD content plays fine, but it does push the processor. If I watch a YouTube video or watch Twit Live, the CPU utilization stays at 75%.

I only have one complaint about it and that is the placement of the right-hand “shift” key. It is not in the standard position and I find myself pressing the “enter” key most of the time by mistake. It is awkward but I can live with it. All-in-all, the Lenovo S10 is a great little machine.

My 17″ Macbook Pro won’t ship until February 26th, so I will get even more use out of the S10. I wouldn’t recommend it for every day use, but for light use and travel, it can’t be beat.

You might have heard that Apple will no longer be participating in the yearly Macworld event.  They spewed forth some token excuses as to why they are doing this, but I don’t believe what they say.  It has nothing to do with Steve Jobs’ health or any other wild notion I have read about latley.  No, I believe it has more to do with production time and having the need to no longer be held hostage by hard deadline dates imposed upon Apple by these big conventions.

The iPhone 3G was not ready for release when it went on sale.  Many promised features were not available or pushed back to a later date.  The iPhone OS was very buggy and slow.  Apple usually does not make mistakes this large, but they had to have a product ready by convention time, so they released it as-is.  I also believe that the App Store was meant to launch at the same time as the iPhone 3G but it was not in a shippable state at that time.  Also, the release of OS X 10.5 had many problems at release and needed to be corrected with several updates.  Again, it had to be released at a keynote convention.

Apple has done a fantastic job at creating good products and growing the company like never before.  They have more products in more categories than they have had in the past.  All of them require major R&D, programming, testing, and production time.  I believe that Apple no longer has the ability to release products and services in time for all of these conventions.  To appease Apple fans who seem to demand greatness from Apple at each convention, they have had to rush products to market to meet these hard deadlines.  Because of this, more bugs, errors, and problems are introduced into released products, causing bad press from the media and complaints from loyal customers.

Now that Apple has removed itself from most major conventions, they can now release products on their own timetable.  They don’t have to rush production and release things before they are ready.  They will no longer be expected to have an amazing new product available each time a convention rolls around.  This will benefit customers in the long run because the item they buy at release will be more polished and refined.  All the parts and pieces can be ready at the same time so that the whole user experience can be had right away.

Apple has grown, and maybe they have grown too fast and expectations are higher than ever.  This will make it much easier on them going forward to get things right, and in the end, will please their customers greatly.

As earlier mentioned, I bought an Alienware M17 gaming laptop.  A quick listing of the specs shows a 2.5ghz Core 2 Duo, 4gb of RAM, and most importantly, two ATI 3870 graphics cards in SLI Crossfire mode.  I was interested to find out how this beast of a machine handles Vanguard.  To be honest, I am a little disappointed in the performance it gives in this game.  Turns out, there is a good reason why.

First, I don’t want to give the impression that the M17 is not a good gaming machine.  It is a great one.  The 3DMark ‘06 score is well over 12,000 and it plows through World of Warcraft at max settings while running at 1920×1200 resolution.  WoW has a very refined graphics engine, however, while Vanguard falls far short in this cateogry.  It also plays Crysis and other games extremely well.

I expected to be able to run Vanguard at Very High settings while keeping to my screens native resolution of 1920×1200.  In reality, the best I could do and still get a smooth experience was set it to High and tweaking it from there.  One of the biggest performance killers are shadows, and I had to set them to low quality.  I wanted to use full drawing distance but I had to set it at around 70%.  Turning on HDR made the game flicker like crazy, so I had to keep that turned off.  I also had to lower tree detail at long range.

I am not a FPS numbers kind of guy, so I don’t have that for you.  What I find important is how the game feels and flows as I play it.  If it hitches or stutters, that is all I need to know that the game isn’t running well at the current settings.  With the above modifications to the High graphical settings, the game runs very well while I am out in the field adventuring.  Things get much worse when I go into a town.  The game struggles to load NPC’s and buildings, which causes major stuttering until all the objects are loaded.

I had read that Sony had made some improvements to the graphics engine that they claimed would improve performance and reduce the “chunking” effect.  The Vanguard world is cut into many squares of land, or chunks, and when you pass from one chunk of land to another, the game freezes and churns away while it loads the contents of the new land area.  My experience since returning to the game is that there has been no improvement whatsoever.  My character still freezes in mid-stride and I have to wait a few seconds before he moves again.  Many times my character will start moving again but his legs are stuck in place, which makes him float over the terrain instead of running over it.

Keep in mind that all of this is happing at a high screen resolution.  Sure, I could lower it down to 1650×1080 or even lower, but I bought this computer in order to run games at high rez.  Other games are not a problem, but it is painfully obvious that Vanguard still has a long way to go before it will run well, even on high-end computers.

Now here is the kicker.  After being disappointed in the performance of this game on the M17, I did some research and discovered that SLI in Vanguard is not supported if you are using two separate video cards.  Bingo.  This is the reason for my troubles.  It boggles my mind that it doesn’t.  Here we have a game with extremely high hardware requirements and yet it doesn’t support SLI.  Fah!

So, the fault isn’t with the M17, it is with the game itself.  With this information in mind, the M17 plays Vanguard amazingly well.  I am not so disappointed after all.

Happy New Year to all of you!  I hope all of your New Year’s resolutions come true!

My new resolutions are:  devote more time to playing MMO’s, win the lottery, and have sex with Jennifer Aniston.  I wonder which will come true?

Wow, it has been a long time since I have posted anything here at the MMO Notebook.  Unfortunately, my job took a strangle-hold on my life and all of my MMO playing time with it.  The past months have been rough and tumble for me, but things are finally starting to settle down a bit, which hopefully will get me back to playing the games that I love.

First off, I was laid off from a job that I very much enjoyed. Needless to say, all my recreational expenses had to come to a quick halt.  I had to say goodbye to my MMO subscriptions.  It was necessary to do so, but that didn’t make it any easier.

It took more than two months to finally find a good job.  I was happy to be working again, but I was also working a crazy amount of hours, usually six to seven days a week.  As you can imagine, there was no play time to be had.

Now, months later, the job is starting to slow down some, which has allowed me time to play again.  I am not sure which game I will settle on as my main, but I am currently back in World of Warcraft.  I am also taking advantage of the free play time that Vanguard is offering former players.  This will last until the end of January.  Chances are that I will keep both World of Warcraft and Vanguard and split my time between them.

A friend of mine wants me to come back to Everquest, and while EQ will always be my first and best MMO love, I just can’t see myself doing it.  Everquest requires more play time and it usually requires several people to get anything done.  My play time is casual at best, so Everquest doesn’t really fit what I need right now.  I wish it did.

So, I will slowly start posting on this blog again.  My adventures in World of Warcraft and Vanguard will mostly be lower-level stuff, so I am not sure how interesting it will be for most people playing these games.  I will do my best.

Been playing the MMO called Life lately and it has kept me busy.  It has it’s rewards if you do the right quests.  Case in point, take a look at this awesome loot drop:

Yep, I got the new Pet drop and it is awesome!  It’s a Miniature Pinscher that is one year old.  I camped the animal shelter until this one spawned and I snapped him up!  I named him Zip.

–Wolfen

As seen over at The Ancient Gaming Noob, who picked it up at Ars Technica, Games For Windows magazine, formerly Computer Gaming World, is officially closing its doors.

This is a sad announcement for me because I always assumed this magazine would be around forever.  I have very fond memories of this magazine when I read it back before I had a computer to play games on.  As a teenager, I was fascinated by the games you could play, and I anxiously awaited for each issue to arrive.  Once I was finally able to buy a computer, Computer Gaming World became my staple for gaming news and reviews.

One of my favorite sections was written by an author known as Scorpia.  She wrote about role-playing games and sometimes went into great detail about her adventures in those games.  Reading her articles on the Ultima games really sparked my interest in the genre and was one of the catalysts that eventually got me involved in Ultima Online and MMO’s in general.

I think the magazine took a big downward turn when it became Games For Windows Magazine.  The new design and focus didn’t appeal as much to me as the old school CGW version did.  It was decent enough, but some of the quality was lacking.

We can probably blame the internet for putting the magazine out of business.  The same thing is happening in the newspaper industry.  People can now get all the information they need on the subject with just a few clicks on the mouse and without paying a dime.  The digital revolution claims another one.

I salute you, Computer Gaming World, for bringing me all the fantastic gaming news and reviews for so many years.  You helped spark my interest in computers and computer gaming.