EVE Online for Macs!
Filed under: Computers, EVE Online, Entertainment, Games, MPOGs, Macs, Technology
As of Tuesday it seems EVE Online will be officially supported on Macs and Linux. The Linux version seems to be just improved (and official) support for running EVE with Cedega (a commercial WineX fork). At the moment only Ubuntu, openSUSE and Linspire are supported (and come with nice packages). The Mac version was developed using Cider (a modification of Cedega for Macs) and only supports Intel Macs.
The minimum hardware requirements are interesting. PRocessor and RAM are the same at 1.8GHz+ 1GB respectively. Mac users require a better graphics card than Linux users but the Linux version doesn’t support ATI graphics cards. I would guess 6 months to a year down the line when AMD have finished releasing open source versions of the ATI drivers then ATI support will exist for everything in Cedega.
Full info about the Linux and Mac clients
The other features in this release (Revelations 2.3) – incredibly minor
http://myeve.eve-online.com/updates/patchnotes.asp?patchlogID=154
Language learning app is back on
Filed under: Computers, Languages, Macs, Programming, Technology
The language learning app which I went on and on about a while ago is now under development again. When I say again I mean I started again in a completely different way (at least from a technical implementation point of view – the user experience is intended to be the same).
You see I recently started a large project in C# at work (a desktop app by the way, not ASP.NET) after saying I was somewhat familiar with it and it should be easy to learn. The good news is after two days I realise it actually is really easy to learn, providing you let it do the work for you. (To any programmers intending to learn it, you’ll spend most of your time at first not actually writing code but finding whereabouts in the huge class library the functionality already exists is. Once you get used to it and get the hang of how it works it is surprisingly relaxing.)
Despite all that I decided I still needed some practice in it so I came up with the idea of doing the language learning app as a fully fledged desktop application – although at work I’m using System.Windows.Forms I’m using Gtk# so it can hopefully run on Mono (and therefore Linux, Mac OS etc). The biggest problem I have is actually playing the audio. A quick search for “C# MP3″ comes up with a solution based on MCI, some clever thing embedded in a Windows DLL that obviously won’t be cross platform. My workaround at the moment is just use an external program via the command line that I suppress the window of. If anybody knows of a better way that would work on .NET and Mono, let me know…
Steve Jobs doesn’t like DRM
Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple has announced that the “best alternative” for consumers regarding digital music downloads is the removal of digital rights management. Implications from previous interviews have strongly suggested that he personally doesn’t like it and having the largest share of the personal music player market means it would be good for business too.
The music industry (and the movie/TV industry to a less extent) have to be worried by this. The sales from iTunes are now significant enough that if Apple threatens to remove DRM anyway then they would lose too much by not complying.
Ideally Bill Gates will announce similar feelings. Surely it’s good PR all round for Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to be united solely to protect the consumer? I’m being a little hopeful perhaps…
Quake 2 Coop
Filed under: Computers, Entertainment, Games, Macs, Technology
After discovering a universal binary patch for Quake 2 (a friend has an Intel Mac), I’ve started playing it again.
We had fun with deathmatch for a while and then figured we’d give coop a go.
Since Quake 2 doesn’t have coop built in I had a look around for a mod. There were quite a few but unfortunately I couldn’t get any of them to work. It seemed they were all designed to work with version 3.1, but we were running 3.2 (and 3.21 – a fix of OpenGL support to make it work on Linux and the one the Mac patch was based on).
The reason why was mind blowing. Apparently in their last update, id software actually added native coop support. Bring up the console and type “set coop 1″ and voila, multiplayer single player gameplay (rolls nicely off the tongue eh?).
Although Quake 2 was definitely not designed with coop in mind though. A lot of fighting in corridors where one person can’t fire for risk of blowing his partner(s) up. Although we certainly tried from time to time – occasionally with dire consequences. But fun nonetheless :)
Oh yeah, one more thing. Make sure you change from the default skin as it looks just like one of the enemies…
PCs are the new UFOs
What does UFO mean? In theory it’s “unidentified flying object”. Of course it doesn’t really mean that; at least when people say it they tend not to mean that. People say UFO and mean “alien ship”. This really annoys me. There are shows with quotes from people along the lines of, “Oh I definitely believe in UFOs”. You believe in UFOs? UFOs by the very nature of the definition exist. What they really mean is they believe in alien spaceships.
This sort of thing happens a lot: a general definition becomes implicitly more specific just from being used just to mean one thing. For example PC. Originally PC meant “personal computer”. This referred to many devices like BBC Micros, Amstrad CPCs, even Commodore 64s to some extent. But then one architecture took off and PC slowly got more specific. There was a transitional time when the phrase “IBM compatible PC” was popular but eventually they were all IBM compatible. So now PC means something based on x86. The most common use for PC now therefore (as opposed to computer) is just to differentiate an x86 machine from a Mac.
Which is a problem for one and a half reasons. Mac OS can now run on x86 computers and “PC software” can now run on x64 computers (only half a reason since x64 is designed to be compatible with x86). So what does PC mean now, a computer running Windows? Generally it does I suppose but you can a PC with Linux on it. Would you say you had a PC with Mac OS on it? No, you’d say you have a Mac. So apparently a PC is a desktop* computer that isn’t a Mac.
* Or maybe laptop. But probably not a server. So at least the “personal” part of “personal computer” still makes sense