when Ritsuko times out

I’ve just been to Accany’s blog, where he seems to blog about new visual novels that he completes… every week or so!??? DAMN he can’t have much to do these days.

And I just learned that recently Kara no Shoujo, another visual novel from Innocent Grey who made Cartagra, was released. Instead of making me delighted, this depressed me to no end. Depressed, because it’s been 4 years since I started Ever17, and I haven’t even finished it yet! I downloaded Cartagra, got the Chinese patch for Cartagra as well as the patch for Nagomibako. And I haven’t even gotten past the first scene, which shows some woman burying some corpse in the snow (I remember being amazed at how many paragraphs of text I had to burn through to actually comprehend what was going on!). And to think, I bought original copies (fancy ritchan doing that!) of Remember11 Limited Edition and 12Riven, and I haven’t even INSTALLED them! And there’s also Never7. And there’s G Senjou no Maou, which was fully translated into Chinese (albeit with a very sparse QC).

If there’s one thing I learned from playing G Senjou in Chinese, it’s that good translations are hard to come by, especially in English, where I think No Name Losers is doing a terrific job. Also, getting it in Chinese practically guarantees that I won’t take the time to read it, because after 8 years of not actively using Chinese, reading traditional Chinese characters gives me a headache. Especially with a deep story like G Senjou – I didn’t even attempt Cartagra precisely because my Chinese sucked. In fact, I’m seriously considering learning Japanese instead just for the VNs – fancy that, a Chinese forsaking his own language for Japanese! There’s only so many languages you can really be fluent at anyway. Polyglots can’t possibly exist.

At the moment, it seems Cartagra, G Senjou and Kara no Shoujo are being translated into English. I’m sure the Chinese have already finished translating Kara no Shoujo, but I really can’t be bothered to check. And that’s the real reason why I’m so depressed – because my Chinese has fallen so far behind.

Repost. I hate having two blogs and not knowing what to post where, so I’ll just post on both.

The Sharp X68000 is relatively unknown outside of Japan. So I was quite surprised when I found there was a group called M.I.J.E.T. that actually translated some X68000 games. Granted, none of them are particularly text-heavy, but then again the X68000 was more of a arcade-ports computer.

They also translated Langrisser II for the Sega Genesis, which happens to use the same CPU as the X68000. I remember wasting away hours of my life on good old Langrisser I for PC, which also had an English patch. I’m afraid I can’t afford to spend that much time on Langrisser II, though.

If there is one thing I must level against M.I.J.E.T., though, it’s that they seem to be affiliated with Scientology.

My other blog is doing well. This one… it’s going level, it has about five times more uniques than the other blog, tho, mostly due to the sheer amount of content on this blog (most come from Google searches). I think I’ll have to start promoting this blog more aggressively so it doesn’t get left behind.

It’s been nagging away at my mind now, but just recently I’ve found the final piece of the puzzle – why I really don’t trust Intel… or should I say, I trust Intel less than AMD.

Back when Intel released the first generation X-25, people were ecstatic. Then after using it, they found that, like all solid state drives, the performance decreased over time, the reasons for which are out of the scope of this blogpost but can be found on Anandtech. The industry’s solution was a little command called TRIM. Practically everybody scrambled to support it, because it, in conjunction with an OS that supports TRIM, mitigates the performance decrease over time in solid state drives.

Except for Intel, which released a new X-25 G2 drive that supported TRIM. The owners of the first generation X-25 were left without TRIM, even though it was simply a trivial update to the firmware that would solve the problem.

This is just like the Intel which omitted VT-x extensions from every CPU except for the C2D E8xxx and Q9xxx series, until Windows 7’s Classic Mode required virtualization, only then did Intel slowly start releasing models with VT-x support. AMD had virtualization extensions from its cheapest Athlons up to its highest end models.

This is, of course, the Intel that left Socket 423 users dead in the water when they suddenly moved on to Socket 478 for the Pentium 4 CPUs. Or the Intel that released Celerons without L2 cache… except that didn’t work, because AMD CPUs outright killed those in performance.

This is also the Intel that’s currently making HyperThreading a high end option, one that’s clearly only for Core i7 8xx and 9xx CPUs. When in fact HyperThreading, as Intel boasts, only requires a small part of the die space.

And this is also the Intel that, for a more recent example, is abandoning support for the GMA500 chipset in Linux. There are open source drivers for Poulsbo, of course, but they are broken.

To add insult to injury, we get this kind of a response from Intel.

If some of the device drivers are closed, what does it matter? The system is “embedded” — it’s tied closely to the actual hardware present on the platform — and the user is never expected to change anything about the core system, neither hardware nor software. Even the manufacturer might not ever expect to upgrade the firmware on the device, once it’s shipped. Closed drivers? Who cares!

Not only is there no significant penalty for closed drivers in the device world, sometimes, they work out better. There’s a business advantage, in terms of vendor lock-in. If I’m a chip maker, my customer has to come back to me for a new driver or source-level license (with non-disclosure agreement) when they begin working on a new product model, or a firmware upgrade. In the thin-margin world of device parts, that kind of ongoing revenue stream might make the difference between getting by or having to lay off engineers.

nVidia would make the same argument. But nVidia at least has had regular updates for later kernels. No, “the user is never expected to change anything” is NOT a valid argument, because people can and will change things, inevitably. Hell, I wish they’d just all switch to AMD en masse already. R200/RV250 support in Linux is alive and well, and in Mac OS X too.

By now it should be painfully obvious that Intel doesn’t care about its customers… except, perhaps, for the HPC crowd. After all, there’s quite a few Nehalems in the Supercomputing Top 100 list. Which brings me to the sad part of this: Intel doesn’t have to be an asshole. If it wants to, it can surely get the job done.

Which is why I’m going AMD for my next build. And heaven forbid that I ever buy anything with Intel integrated graphics in it ever again. One GMA950 is bad enough, don’t get me started on its horrible 3D drivers.

It’s been a long time since I posted on this blog. The fact is, I’ve been busy. Once I started doing homework again, I realized that I was actually a very busy person. You see, I started another blog. Its purpose is to become really popular. If it doesn’t achieve that within a year or two… well, I don’t know, I suppose I’ll figure it out then. Thing is, there’s a lot of shit that goes into attracting traffic to your site. Not only that, I plan to make other static websites that will also rake in the readers. I also would like to finish Sengoku Rance again. I’ve been using SpoilerAL a lot so I can recruit all the commanders before the Demon Army enters the equation.

The aim, ladies and gentlemen, is to become like Danny Choo. But, of course, without living in Japan and without the benefit of fluent Japanese. So what’s a poor student like me to do? I hope I’ll be able to show you in a few months. I don’t expect to rake it all in through one website like Danny, but then again, I did accomplish the goal of getting a PS3 and a Syncmaster F2380 way before Christmas, so I have some faith in myself.