I’ve had it! I bought Need for Speed Carbon the day it arrived in stores. I ran out after work handed over my hard earned cash and ran home to install it. It was fun, and I loved it. Sounds great. But the game crashes all the time. Random crashes, no warning, no error, straight to desktop crashes. All the time. Patch 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, none of them do anything to improve the situation. I’ve reinstalled the game, Direct X, updated drivers all the recommended support tips. No good, still crashes. I started playing again, because I love the game and I bought it, and it still crashes. Because it’s random I can sometimes get through a fair bit before it crashes, other times one race. Sometimes in the car store, other times after cut scenes, the last time, which prompted me to write this, right in the middle of a race. ARGGGGHHH!!!!

Maybe it’s my system. Could be. But why wouldn’t Doom 3, Quake 4, Half-life 2, Tomb Raider, Bioshock, or Need for Speed underground, underground 2, or Most Wanted crash then too? In fact no other game I’ve played has crashed. My system is pretty much top of the line. Core 2 6400, 2Gb RAM, ATI 1900XTX 512Mb VRAM.

Why wouldn’t a company write a patch to resolve such a widespread, common problem. This is a well documented issue:

• reaper-x
• Gameguru
• Neowin
• Megagames
• Overclock.net
• Guru3d
• Here is the full Google results link

I understand not knowing how to trace an un-reproducible bug, that doesn’t seem to be a problem here. I understand having hardware that doesn’t meet the system requirements, not an issue as far as I’ve read. I understand abandoning a project, not the case here as there have been three patches released since it launch. So what’s the problem?

More importantly I want to know why EA would think that I would actually buy the next installment of this game that comes out this week, Need for Speed Pro Street, when they haven’t even gotten the last one to work! I for one am waiting to buy this game until the user reviews come out, becasue even the game magazines didn’t report this problem with carbon. Buyer beware.

Update

Right after I wrote this article, I found that the demo was online for Need For Speed Pro Street. I downloaded the 750 Mb file, installed it, and ran it. It trudged through the intro movies, flashy animations etc… Then I set my video setting to match my screen, this game at least supports my wide screen monitor, unlike Carbon. Setup my game pad. Then started the demo for the speed challenge. CRASH!!!!! I tried again, having to repeat all my setup procedures again. This time I quit after changing my settings, anticipating the crash and not want to set up my screen and controls again. Re-launched and tried again to start the race. CRASH!!!!!!!!! Wow, now I really want to buy this game.

Aren’t demos supposed to be the compelling, “oh my this is so amazing I have to play the full game” experience? The “this blew my mind, now I want to give them my credit card number” kind of experience? Oh well, guess I’ll save my money for the Orange Box, Crysis, or anything that doesn’t have the EA name on it. Pathetic!!!

One of the often overlooked problems with our dwindling oil future is plastic. As we continue to burn oil in our engines we are using a valuable resource that could be used for durable plastic goods. When the oil runs out, or becomes extremely rare and expensive, how will we manufacture plastics? We rely heavily on plastics for all our products; electronics, transportation, medical technologies, construction, and housing. There are few things today that do not rely on plastics and polymers.
Continue Reading »

It’s amazing to me how many times I read an article and end up disagreeing with the conclusion. Not because I don’t like the results, but I don’t like how they arrived at the conclusion. For example I read an article stating that California leads the nation in motorcycle theft rates.
Continue Reading »

According to John W. Dozier, Jr., the “Super Lawyer”, viewing his site’s HTML source, as in, “right-click - view page source” is illegal. They are trying to claim that viewing their page source is a copyright violation. Additionally they have an End User License Agreement, EULA prohibiting this behavior, as well as forbidding links to their site.

Now the interesting thing is that the code for the home page, as an example, is really poorly built. They still use tables for layout, and the JavaScript is embedded in the header. Worse still they are an internet law firm.

There are a few things that strike me as ludicrous from a developer’s standpoint. Continue Reading »

I’ve add an RSS feed link in my main navigation, and tweaked my Google Analytics a bit.

It’s official Vista is was rushed to market. It’s been reported that playing an MP3 file will throttle network traffic to roughly 10% capacity. The reports vary in which network types are affected but there is no doubt that Microsoft officially throttled network capacity because they noticed that there was some distortion without the throttling. This has been confirmed through further analysis. Microsoft is working on a solutution at present. Continue Reading »

I just got an unsolicited email this morning from Spam Arrest. The email was from joelt@spamarrest.com.

I wasn’t aware of Spam Arrest so I did a Google search to see what I could find out. I discovered quite a few pages detailing the poor practices of the company. I would think it would be in bad taste to spam people to use your anti-spam product. No worse I suppose than installing malware on people’s computers and extorting them to pay you to remove other malware applications.

According to this email I emailed some guy at www.joel.net. For kicks I followed the rabbit hole to see what was at the other end. Joel Thomas seems to be a web developer, but at no point do I recall emailing him. I just submitted an email via his form mail on his site to see if he can shed some light on the subject. We’ll see what happens.

I will update this as details arrive.

UPDATE: I did hear back from the gentleman that uses Spam Arrest, but he didn’t conform what the first emails was that I supposedly sent to him. It’s a tricky system. He can’t see my email until I reply to his. His email was from some automated bot so I have no intention of replying to it. So now neither of us will ever know what that initial email was. Probably spam made to look like it was from me…

It seems that Microsoft’s biggest critics, bloggers, are now being asked to write what ‘People-ready business’ means to them as a way to bolster the phrase and Microsoft’s association with business. This strikes me as a flailing attempt to garner support in people’s minds to think of Microsoft as a business software company. Yes, they own the Office productivity market. Yes, they own the OS market. No they are not ‘People-ready business’. (and no I am not going to link to their site!) Continue Reading »

Hello again and welcome to the Microsoft show, the greatest show on earth. Where the marketing department seems to have a bigger budget than the developers. It seems now that they aren’t pleased that so many people are waiting until the big bugs are worked out before upgrading to Vista. They are now about to launch a new marketing attack to coerce consumers that everything is ok, they don’t need to wait for the service packs. Do they really think that jedi mind tricks work on consumers?I won’t rehash the article but I would like to articulate why people are legitimately hesitant; no two people can agree on whether or not it is worth upgrading! Continue Reading »