Seeing the benefits of Physx [Brit]

On a quick PC World stop last night to grab a new mousemat, I grabbed a copy of GRAW2 (therefore enabling me to play with m'clan colleagues as war is waged against Mexicans various). As I trawled through the harshly lit emporium I remembered the whole Ageia Physx shambles that both GRAW and GRAW2 make use of and thought "what the hell, lets see if these cowboys have any".

Phenomenally they did and even more unbelievably, for £75 which is cheaper than Overclockers. So I grabbed one. (Interestingly, the PC World website lists the same card for £79.97 not including delivery at £4.99).

Installation was of course a breezy 2 minute affair - indeed, downloading and installing the upgraded drivers took longer. Expecting great things, I fired up GRAW2 and in a fit of pique (and figuring my aging 256MB Radeon X8500 would breath slightly easier from a dedicated physics card) shoved the video quality up a few notches; negotiating the usual ramshackle Ubi approach to multiplayer lobby interfaces, I joined a server and started blasting.

The results of this card are immediate and impressive, and frankly, give those with them installed a slight edge by dint of the added effects which help reveal if not the location of, the direction an enemy is firing at you from.

Of course, it also looks very pretty and therefore the game experience is more engrossing; grenades and the resulting explosions are extremely powerful and impressive, ricochets, debris, smoke, and yes even the humble tumbleweed all behave differently or at least appear to - net net, for £75 GRAW and GRAW2 actually become GRAW+ and GRAW2+.

Interestingly Unreal Tournament 3 is also taking advantage of both the software and hardware Physx components which means at least one of the two games competing for Game of the Year 2007 will benefit from a (in the grand scheme of things) fairly trivial investment cash wise. Of course, as I now launch headlong into my new rig build (codename PE0N) and upgrade my graphics card to an uber NVidia doo-da, I expect things to come together quite nicely and hopefully future proof my GFX capabilities for at least 18 months.

I'll grab some screenies later and chuck them up, the difference really does need to be seen as its quite the turn on.

Media Player Hell [Slim]

I've moved from the stix into town, and find there's now five wifi lans in my street. Not ideal, so decided to invest into some powerline ethernet adapters. Here's where my hell started. Powerline worked right off the bat, and tested out at 80mbps, great stuff given they're the cheaper ones that are rated 85. Laptop works off it, streams movies a treat, file copies are super fast, xbox 360 works fine off it, live seems ace, downloads work, bosh. Plug the chipped xbox in, stutter hell. Gah. So no worries, the xbox goes back on wifi, and works. Then I remember my wifi lans only on wep because I was using my DS on it, and wasn't really that arsed about wifi security when I lived in a field. So I enable WPA on my wifi, change the bridge to the xbox1 to wpa, now that's in stuttering hell too. So my xbmc basically doesn't work any more. Feh.So I try the 360 as a media player. Jesus, how hard is that? First effort involves connecting it to Media Player 11, except that doesn't work if you have a domain, as I do at home. So, I install ORB, a upnp streaming thing. That works very well for mp3 and images, no complaints at all. But it transcodes xvids, so they look shite. Fuck that.The next step is to fuck it all and go for native wmv 360 encodes, but orb and it wont play windows media at all, fuck knows why, just dosn't. Jesus. So apparently I can plug in an external hdd to play shit via usb 2. Cor, didn't know that, so I try copying a 9gb hd wmv movie to my external hdd. It farts, you can't do that, it's FAT32 and the limits 4gb. Fuck me! So I convert to NTFS, copy the file, sorted. Plug it into the 360, naff all. I read up some more, the 360 doesn't do NTFS. What the fuck? It's microsoft for fucks sake! What I can do, apparently, not tried this yet out of principle, is format it HFS+, and that works with large files AND the 360, fuck knows why.So, I'm fucked, I've fucked me beloved chipped xbox somehow and I've got no replacement. Wank.(ps, anyone got the default cache settings for xbmc, I'm wondering if I've dicked that up?)

Madeleine search reaches 100 days [Lurks]

But really, who gives a fuck?! Jeez, enough already.

My local beer has gone green! [Slim]

Great item onmy local radio stationthis morning from our branch of the Campaign for Real Ale about how drinking locally produced beer in a pub is good for the environment. Of course, 'buying local' is greener isn't hot news, but the owner of a local brewery did pretty well to back up the argument as it applies to brewing. It boiled down to:

• local beer doesn't travel far to the pub
• it's delivered in barrels that are re-used, not creating waste like beer cans and packaging
• if your drinking in a busy pub instead of alone at home, you're sharing the heating/lighting with more people making it more efficient
• you can walk to the local rather than drive to the supermarket to buy your cans of beer
• local breweries re-use the bi-product, like the waste fromthe beer productiongoes tonearby horsesto eat

So get down the pub and sup for the planet, I'll be down there this lunchtime doing my bit!

Shattering the green myths [Beej]

Great article in The Times today which suggests that walking to the shops does more damage than driving to the shops. Hehe! Although presumably not in my car or Am's barge. This is something about how much energy from walking you will need to replace by eating (although presumably, but not mentioned, if you ate stuff from the farmers' market not from evil Tesco this would not be the case).

There's also a follow-up with some great anti-green Clarkson-esque trivia:

• Disposable nappies are not worse than traditional nappies, as the traditional cloth ones need a lot of washing (argument fails if you wash in cold water without detergent!)
• Paper bags take more energy to store and transport than plastic bags (hmm, we should use more paper bags anyway).
• Organic milk is less environmentally friendly because less milk is produced by the organically, erm, farmed cow than a regular cow, and therefore methane emissions are prortionally higher (heh!).
• You undo a year of saving from an energy-saving light bulb if you buy two bags of imported veg (the easy fix is that we accept that we can't eat runner beans all year long and so we don't fly the things in from Kenya... celebrity chefs have a lot to answer for!).

Something to chew on :-)

Egg must die! [Lurks]

So you have a credit card, right, and the idea of them is that you type some numbers into web sites and you can order things. It's a way of paying. It's quick and convenient and that's why you use them and how they managed to cream 2.5% off the top to the shops. However today I tried to order something and my card was declined. The phone rings, missus picks it up and it's some automated Egg thing. I don't make it to the phone in time and it rings off.

Odd. I check my details and submit again, denied again. Alright this aint cricket so I call up Egg only to be greeted by this new blight upon the service industry, the voice recognition automated system. This actually does a good job, to be fair, of recognising my irritated monotone but it still takes three times longer than had a human being just gone through the security stuff.

I get through to a human being eventually and apparently it's just some security thing which has randomly decided to decline the transaction. Despite the fact I've bought stuff off them before many times over the previous years. She fixes it, I say you don't mind if I hang on and give it a go. I do, it works, fine.

But it's not fine, not really. I appreciate credit card fraud must be pretty high and they look for ways to minimize it but if I have to call up for fucking minutes at a time just to order something, I may as well pay some other way. All of these developments have been shoveled onto me, wasting my time, to save them money. You reckon I'll see anything back from that? Lowering of interest rate? Will I buggery. I signed up to these guys years ago when they were 9.9% but now they charge 70% more interest than they did back then.

They just seem to think they can fuck me over bit by bit and now I can't even use a web site to buy something without having to go auto-retard voicemail hell. Enough is enough I say!

I need a new credit card. Anyone recommend something?

Mainstream wakes up to broadband speeds [Lurks]

At long last it would seem there's something of a backlash against the ridiculous selling practises of broadband Internet in the UK. Pretty much all of them sell broadband by advertising the top rate that you might get, if you live every close to the exchange.Which released a report which the BBC is commenting on where the average speed of delivered broadband is 2.7Mbps. I would assume that this is a measured throughput so equates to an ADSL sync level of about 3.5Mbps.

Of course this is nowhere near the fiasco of wireless technologies being sold on a base signalling rate which has pretty much no relation whatsoever to throughput seen. The bottom line is you let companies get away with it, they'll keep boosting the numbers however they can.

The truly depressing state of things though, I happen to live virtually on top of my exchange and I'm one of the few that gets a full 8Mb ADSL sync from my exchange. However I get a bit less than 6Mb of actual throughput on that rate, or 700K/s max. So not only is national ADSL (let's ignore cherry picking LLU companies here) based on a seriously ancient standard when everyone else has done a great job of rolling out ADSL2, but it seems that there's some additional invisible handicap on actual bandwidth delivered applied within BT's network.

Protocol overhead wise, throughput on my line ought to be around 13% incorporating ATM and TCP overhead. This should equate, all said and done, to around about 900K/s throughput. The thing is, BT actually cap throughput on the DSLAMs in each exchange based on your sync speed. I discovered this because a common ADSL issue on speed regrades is that your sync can be regraded but you don't see a shift in bandwidth until something magical happens. It turns out that this is called a BRAS profile and it's basically a set of throughput cap limits for each possible ADSL sync rate.

This is the table of BRAS profiles which are allegedly employed by BT.

Download sync rate (kbits/s)	BRAS profile limit (kbits/s)	BRAS profile limit (kBytes/s)
8128	7150	893.75
7968 - 8127	7000	875.00
7392 - 7967	6500	812.50
6816 - 7391	6000	750.00
6240 - 6815	5500	687.50
5696 - 6239	5000	625.00
5120 - 5695	4500	562.50
4544 - 5119	4000	500.00
4000 - 4543	3500	437.50
3424 - 3999	3000	375.00
2848 - 3423	2500	312.50
2272 - 2847	2000	250.00
1728 - 2271	1500	187.50
1152 - 1727	1000	125.00
576 - 1151	500	62.50
288 - 575	250	31.25
0 - 288	250	31.25

This is, patently and demonstrably, complete lies. I think BT have a completely different set of figures. We're not talking about me getting my throughput numbers wrong here. It's not contention. It's not dependent on the time of day. The result is the same if I use my neighbours consumer DSL or my own business DSL. The figures in the boxes on the top row appear to be in actuality more like 5600 and 700.00.

Of course I like so many others have no choice. None of the LLU operators will be heading down to my south coastal retreat in order to get into exchange and install some expensive equipment. They're too busy hitting the big cities where the real low lying fruit lies, which seems a bit rotten to me really. Unfortunately we'll be getting the same treatment from BT with the 21CN network rollout, where ADSL finally becomes available, as being listed in the third quarter of 2009. So it would seem I will have to wait three years for any better quality broadband, although who's to say they wont cripple it in much the same way asBT are now.