The True Cost of Vista

…about 22 years late, but creepy nonetheless.  Britain is adding speakers to its many surveillance cameras – allowing the observers to reprimand folks observed breaking the law.

I realize these cameras are all in public places…  And I really wouldn’t expect a lot of privacy on a public street…  But the pervasiveness of these cameras is simply staggering.  They are quite literally everywhere.  And now the folks on the other side of the lens can yell at you.

We’ve got a surveillance camera in our city now…  From what I can tell there’s only one so far, but I have to wonder if it’s just the beginning.  How long until we here in the US are as obviously observed as those in Britain?

I reloaded my PC on Monday… Backed up the little that’s actually stored locally and wiped the thing clean, then started a reload. About halfway through the reload I ran into trouble… Seems my SATA controller card, which I use to mount the 80 GB SATA HDD that all my games live on, is dead. Or close enough to dead that Windows pitches a fit whenever I try to load drivers for it, mount a drive, or even boot the computer with that card installed. Good news, I suppose, since I now know exactly what was causing all my problems for the last week or two… Of course, I’m now left with a single 20 GB IDE HDD in my system…

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Moving Through Matter with Buckaroo Banzai

FEAR, Condemned, Far Cry, and No-One Lives Forever 2 run terrific. Graphics options turned up fairly high…beautiful visuals…smooth framerate – very nice. WoW and Oblivion, on the other hand, run like crap.

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The 10 most dangerous playthings of all time

Was taking a look at the WoW support forums today, and it appears that I am not the only one having framerate issues after the 2.0.1 patch.  Looks like the issue has something to do with sound playback…and the fix involves manually editing my config.wtf file.

I’ll have to give that a try when I get home tonight…  Hopefully it’ll help.