After a bit of patching up the address book I gave it a whirl and seems to be working flawlessly so far. Now I just have to see if it makes things more convenient for me in future or not.

h/t BlackFive

Julia Gillard has only just taken over the role of Prime Minister from Kevin Rudd after a cloak and dagger leadership spill. Rudd was sinking fast being, frankly, incompetent but it was the mining industry tax proposal which appears to have killed him off. Nice to know mining companies run our country isn’t it?

Julia is our first female Prime Minister and she draws the advantage and disadvantage of being the deputy Prime Minister during Rudd’s time. An advantage of not being too new a face and seen as being more competent than Rudd but she carries with that the baggage of the knifing and her own complicity in Rudd’s stuffups. Indeed, despite being so new, tarnish is already showing which is why Gillard has rushed us to an election.

Her opponent Tony Abbott is hardly a great alternative being a bit of a religious nutter and terribly prone to foot in mouth disease. He’s also part of the old Howard gang and indeed emphasised the very unpopular ‘Workchoices’ laws were not coming back today. Of course Howard himself said the GST was dead, dead, dead and how truthful was that? However, he is seen as decisive and strong willed which go in his favour. If he keeps his big mouth shut the Liberals would probably win but we’ll see about that in practice. I definitely expect Labour’s outcome to be worse than last election but if it’s enough for the Liberals to win, I cannot be sure. It’s very hard for opposition to win without a strong mood for change. At this time I think the Liberals will get it which is my preference too.

As for the minor parties, I think the Greens will do well in this election mostly feeding off Labour’s fall. The ‘Family First’ party will probably do about the same as usual and the Nationals will decay even further.

• They are much cheaper even at US dollar or Euro rates
• You can browse and buy from the comfort of home without a visit to the store
• No stuffing around with disks, ie non-pirate no-CD functionality.

There’s also some problems;

• I have yet to see a provider of these services deal with the issue of game access once they close, for example. All that money and gaming goodness? Goodbye most probably.
• You have to actually download the games. If your connection is slow this is a very long delay, if you have bandwidth limits this is costing you extra.

There also some interesting developments. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is one of the least exiting of course, but it does show a changing landscape from games being cut and dried products to games being services offered. I expect this to continue until we simply buy game time at a very low rate but we don’t actually own the games. Games as services started long ago thanks to the internet with such simple things as patches and forums. Now these are often automatic or integrated. This is happening more with expansions and mods and extra content of various sorts. In a sense the Massive Multiplayer Online software (MMOs) such as World of Warcraft are miles ahead in this games-as-services development. I expect we will see the same with other software.

Socialised gaming is also a development which shouldn’t be ignored and this includes the ‘achievement’ systems, twitter-like info feeds, chats and voice services.

More exciting are the new blood of Indy developers getting their hands on exposure and thus money as well as the revival via smaller devices such as mobiles, iPads and netbooks. These can’t run the usual new games. That new game market has ossified into the same old FPS or other cookie cutter genre offering and so a lot of clever, interesting and dare I say fun ideas have been coming into such non standard games on those platforms.

Anyway back to the topic at hand. There are several digital download games providers of note;

Steam is probably the most popular. To use steam you have to run extra software which is essentially a games browser, social and download tool. I can’t say I like that. Games on steam are well presented and quite numerous. There appears to be a younger focus. As I have reported before steam support is very slow. The real Steam killer for me though is it installs games a bit differently and so many mods will not work with games from Steam.

Gamersgate is not as well known. It also has a very large range of software which is very simple to download and install. It’s often cheaper than the competition too. Gamersgate support is even worse though. One game bought had a payment issue due to their credit processor where funds left my account but no game was delivered. Gamersgate, while fast responding, did nothing to help and I had to go through the bother of a charge reversal to solve the problem.

Direct2Drive is the one I probably use most. This is more because it rarely seems to have problems with it. Simple to use, decent range and no issues.

Good old games known as GOG are a specialist one who have, as their name suggests, a bunch of old games available. In the context of old games GOG has the best range. I do think GOG are a bit overpriced.

The last major competitor Impulse, requires software to be installed to use and frankly I haven’t given it a go nor seen reason to.

There are many other digital providers. Specific companies such as EA or MMO ones have their own digital download services. There is certainly a lot of competition which is good for prices and improvements too.

If anyone knows a reliable Australian one let me know.

Now that I’m actually using Windows 7 both starter and home premium editions I can say a few things about it. As you know I used the rather icky Windows Vista before. There are two obvious differences:

The taskbar has been significantly improved over Vista where now instead of having to click through stacked items you just mouse over the stack you want and it pops up. It is also more icon based than text based so more can be fitted in.

The other major difference is the UAE is less irritating. It’s still irritating but less obviously so most of the time.

There are many other less significant changes. For example, there’s a more or less automated home networking system which is nice enough but only good if all are using Windows 7.

Changing backgrounds have also been added even with an Australian theme pre installed in the home premium edition. A nice touch really.

It still has it’s issues. No bluetooth driver for my mobile, odd bugs with older games. A very pushy internet explorer. You know, Internet Explorer is just a firefox downloader.

There’s also a new Action Centre which collects the various issues you are suppose the deal with such as Windows updates and security or bug issues. A good idea but it has too many serious flaws such as telling me I have no video drivers installed just after I successfully updated the drivers and bugging me to rechange windows update settings after I changed them to my preference.

I’m not convinced it’s faster to boot or shutdown than Vista was on the older hardware but IMO that was fast enough on Vista anyway. I haven’t been irritated by this issue on Windows or Linux for many years now but it seems some people get very annoyed about it.

A very silly issue when I clicked on the games folder on Vista it would take several minutes to load up. Windows 7 is much faster, perhaps 10 seconds if that.

I would have to admit overall this is definitely better than Vista which will deservedly go down in history as a shitty OS and all they really had to do is remove the problems especially fixing the UAE. I think it’s also better than Windows XP at long last.

Ubuntu 10.04

I’ve also switched back to Ubuntu from Kubuntu on version 10.04. It’s nice to see Ubuntu has dumped the ugly brown default theme. First impressions do count.

Overall I’m impressed it’s super smooth and everything “just works”. They have switched to Mac-style on having the close and resize icons on the upper left instead of the upper right of windows but this setting can be changed back to the right if you desire.

There’s more social media focus and Ubuntu One is built in now which is a cloud computing service. Cloud computing is everywhere now, I may even blog on that. It’s very much where things are going right now.

Price was $469. The iPad is $629-$1049 depending on HD space and if you want 3G. The Eeepc is far and away cheaper which greatly enhances it’s value.

OS: Windows 7 starter 32bit, iPad uses iPhone OS 3.2. The iPad doesn’t do multitasking and cannot run flash.

Processor: Intel Atom N450 1.66GHz, iPad uses 1GHz Apple A4 chipset which contains an ARM Cortex-A8 CPU

Memory: 1GB DDR2 RAM, iPad has 256MB DDR RAM. This is probably why there is no multitasking yet.

HD: space 250GB, iPad gives a measly 16-64GB

3D capability: Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3150. By desktop standards this is very much underpowered. In practice this lets you play lowball 3d games such as Civilization IV. It will not adequately run more demanding games such as Risen. The iPad has 3d capability via the A4 chipset.

Screen: 10.1 inch, 1024×600. iPad has 9.7 inch 1024×768 with a wide viewing angle. The 1024×600 is a rather uncommon standard which can cause issues with things likes games not designed for this standard. The iPad can be viewed from a wider angle which is good for sharing but not good for privacy. Both screens are very crisp and are backlit.

Battery Life: 14 hrs, iPad has 10 hrs still respectable but not as good. Batteries are heavy, the Eeepc has obviously gone for more time rather than less weight.

Wireless connections: 802.11b/g WiFi, No 3G, bluetooth. iPad has 802.11n WiFi, 3G optional for a price, bluetooth.

Touch: only standard laptop style touch mouse. As everyone knows the iPad has a full touch screen which is much better. I use a Logitech M305 cordless mouse with the Eeepc which uses 1 USB port with a truly tiny signal receiver and adds the mouse. This, frankly, is a portability issue. So I must choose the ease of a mouse or the portability of the touchscreen. The iPad is obviously strong here with the only exception being it means fingermark smears on your crisp display.

Keyboard: yes, it’s big enough and easy to use. The iPad uses the touch screen to emulate a keyboard which is so-so in landscape and poor in portrait and of course chews up screen space.

Webcam: Yes a decent 0.3M pixel one is built in. The iPad does not have a webcam.

Sound: Stereo and microphone built in. iPad has mono and microphone built in. Many would use headphones of some kind via bluetooth or the jacks.

Connections: power, VGA video out, 3xUSB, ethernet, SD card, microphone and audio jack. The iPad has an audio jack and a dock connector. The Eeepc is much better here.

Form and weight: The Eeepc is 1.27kg compared to the iPad’s 0.68-0.73kg making the iPad roughly half the weight which is quite a lot less. The iPad also looks sleeker and is not as thick as the Eeepc.

I should note here in case you’re not aware that although the Eeepc, other netbooks and the iPad compete with each other in the same, as I call it, “home or office-roam” market, they have a significant difference in focus. Netbooks such as the Eeepc are offering a full blown computing experience with full application flexibility and fully accessible and flexible filesystem. In other words a miniaturised desktop. It’s designed for you to do with it as you wish. The iPad does not do this, it is instead a very large iPhone without the mobile phone. It’s focus is presentation and the responsive touch interface/OS. This makes it more an entertainment unit. It’s also built around sales through it’s built in and largely mandatory stores. This greatly decays it’s value beyond the price issue.

Obviously I’ve already decided the Eeepc is the superior choice but the iPad still has something to offer.

Firstly there’s the email which doesn’t do it’s job on junk mail filtering.  Then when you try to mark it as junk the server doesn’t respond.  And that’s half the issue with their email, it is frequently down.  Nowadays all I get is junk there, I simply don’t use it.

Then there’s Games for Windows LIVE which I truly despise.  Fallout 3, an otherwise excellent game, uses this awful system.   When I first installed Fallout 3 Windows LIVE was automatically setup in Xbox mode instead of PC mode and I very nearly wasted money getting a game expansion which would only be available for the Xbox version of the game.  After berating Microsoft for it they helpfully advised me they’d not have refunded my money or even my ‘points’ if I made the mistake of trusting them.  They also didn’t bother to help me fix the problem.  Fortunately Google search solved that one for me.

I recently reinstalled Fallout 3 on Windows 7 which, despite coming for the same company, is a decent job.  However, again Windows LIVE struck.  This time a bug in Windows LIVE and Windows 7 made the game fail.  Don’t these people have any internal communication?  That problem too was fixable via Google search.

I do use MSN messenger, another Windows LIVE branded product.  This one has not been such a disappointment but I’m trying aMSN again which seems to be better implemented and doesn’t have adverts.

It was good to see so many people involved in this rather important nationalistic event.  Yet this involves the diggers and veterans of two nations, not just Australia, but New Zealand too.  New Zealanders were also involved with and mentioned in the service.

We will remember them.

Do you want a real maverick? Sarah Palin. This has either long been her nature or she took the maverick idea to heart. Let’s face it she’s outside the norm. A wildcard who should have not only the Democrats but the GOP rather worried as well.

She’ll shoot her a deer for breakfast. Emerged as an inexperienced nobody who is thrust on centre stage and manages to survive. Perhaps not quite so lucky as Obama though. She’s physically attractive which is as rare as hen’s teeth in politicians. A foreign expert on Russia! She quit her job dumping her responsibilities which would conventionally be political suicide. She will go and actually talk to the voters she wants to represent at townhalls, stadiums or indeed in any way she can. That’s lead to her hosting her own TV show on ‘Real American Stories’.

For good or for ill Sarah Palin is a real maverick.