It’s me, live with it

FRIENDSTER IS CLOSING SOON!!!!!
from Mr. Allen Smith (Manager of Friendster)
Friendster system is getting too crowded!! We need you to forward this to at least 20 people. I know this seems like a large number, but we need to find out who is really using their account. If you do not send this to at least 10 Friendster members, we will delete your account.

WARNING!

We want to find out which users are actually using their Friendster accounts. So if you are using your account, please pass this e-mail to every Friendster user that you can. IF YOU DO NOT PASS this letter to anyone. we will delete your account. Sorry for this inconvenience.
 
Is the content of the message spreading widely on the Friendster network. I don’t care about it, because I know very much that it is not true. Why? I’ll explain.

Firstly, the name ‘Allen Smith’ is pretty much as generic as ‘John Smith’. Frankly, I think the hoax will be much more believable if they use the name ‘Andrew Pulowski’. Seriously, generic names just saps the credibility of a message like a black hole.
Next, for each new member in Friendster, they will get more money, eitheer from advertising or whatever, the point is, more users mean smore money and more money means easier maintenance and no member cutout.

Now we’ll go to the technical details. What do you think a message is? Just a collection of characters being sent around? Exactly. The only thing identifying the sender are the ‘from’ field. Of course, Friendster can tell their servers to count every messages passed by their servers. But it’d be a hassle, not to mention pointlessly loading their servers. You see, rather than telling the users to spam each other, they would be better off putting a button on each of their user’s homepage and telling them to click it for a survey.

So, what do you think of this new theme I am using?

The old colour combination stays, cause I really like it. But now, this blog only has a sidebar on the right. But since it seems adequate to contain everything, it’s fine. Yes, the menu on the sidebar gets much longer this way. To balance that, I changed the option and displays up to 10 posts per page.

Give me your feedback. 

What you don’t know, wont hurt you.

That line, I totally disagree.

To make an example: Gas price just rose, significantly. Look at the people around you. not all of them know why it raised, or why it has to be raised, or what the hell those people above are thinking. But do it has any impact on them? Sure, heavily.

But, I hear someone stupid says, They received cash fund from the goverment!

Okay, sure, but how much do you think IDR 200.000 would help in surviving for a month? How expensive do you think transportaion has become? What about Food? School tuition? House rent? The list can grow longer, but I’ll stop here.

Not to mention how many people need the fund, and how many actually receive it. I’ll bet a significant amount of money got sucked midway.

Now, we have some brave college student protested the goverment, and they got their campus ransacked by the police. This reminds me of darker times, where those guys above thinks they can control us with fear.

Now I’ve gone totally off-topic, but it is just a rant, anyway… don’t think too much about it.

I’m currently attached to Assassin’s Creed.

No, its playing experience isn’t nearly as great as in Call of Duty 4. Crysis has better graphics for sure. Bioshock offers much deeper atmosphere. And yet, I like this game.

One of the reason is that this game is as close to an open sandbox environment as it can manage without ruining the linearity. You can clmb a wall, get up the roof, jump to the building across the road, get up that huge tower, and perform a leap of faith down. It is fun, I tell you. It feels pretty much like GTA without guns. Or cars.

Not to mention there are some side quests that is pretty fun by itself. For example, you need to assassinate some guards on the rooftop, or you need to get somewhere within a time limit. These sidequests are not really needed, but it can help you in performing your main duty.

But what really caught me is the gameplay. You can just walk among the crowd, perform an assassination, and walk away, literary praying not to get caught. Or you can perform a high profile assassination and run your ass out of the sight of the whole batallion of guards and into a haystack.

You know, I don’t really know what to write. Just get it, You’ll probably like it.

No, this post is titled ‘Gaming on the (not so) cheap’, this one is ‘Gaming on the cheap’. They’re different. In the former, I talked about the powerful, yet not-too-expensive Geforce 9600GT and the likes. Not too expensive it is, but it still cost you quite an amount of money. The cheapest 9600GT I can find right now will reduce around IDR 1.650.000 (about US$ 170) from your bank.

Not everyone wanting to buy a graphics card are willing to cough that amount. The average people will only spend around IDR 500.000 - 1.000.000 (US$ 55 - 110). So what will that amount of money get you? Quite an amount of power actually, if you know which to buy.

The cheapest graphics cards you should consider costs around IDR 500.000. Yes, you can find cards much cheaper than that, this, for example. if you buy one of those expecting to play Oblivion/Crysis, don’t come crying to me.

Back to the topic, only two products I seriously consider at IDR 500.000 price range. they are Geforce 7300GT and Radeon X1650 Pro.

The first is the strongest of the Geforce 7300 family, leaving all of its siblings way behind. Seriously, it smokes 7300GS and LE. Especially if you can find the ones using GDDR3 instead of DDR2, The price is about the same, so if you find one with GDDR3, snatch it before anyone does.

On the red team (ATI/AMD), the offering is much nicer. You can get an X1650 pro for the same price as a 7300GT. It is a very good deal, considering an X1650 pro performs pretty much equal to better than a 7300GT. So, in this price range, if you can find one, get yourself an X1650 pro, if you can’t, a 7300GT GDDR3 is not a bad option, either.

Moving up the price ladder, we now reach the IDR 750.000 price range. This spot is really hot, we have radeon HD3650 DDR2 and HD2600PRO from the red team, and Geforce 8500GT from the green team. The two cards from the red team performs pretty much equally, but the 3650 supports more…things… I can’t be bothered to mention them, as they are pretty much insignificant for most user, and yes, the 3650 is a little faster.

From the green team, we can find an 8500GT sitting comfortably at that price range. Well… I’m not sure  I can reccommend this. But if you either using linux or just hates ATI/AMD, get this one.

Yes, those sentences above means that I like 3650 more than HD2600PRO and not really reccommending a 8500GT. But Wait(TM)! In this price range, I also found an 8600GT From Albatron, fully equipped with DDR3. Now that will pack a real punch for only IDR 750.000.

Next up we hit the one million mark. Here we have a Radeon HD2600XT, HD3650 DDR3, and the Geforce 8600GT. Okay, to be honest, the 8600GT is priced at only around IDR 800.000 - 900.000. But I put it here because it performs pretty much the same as a HD 2600XT. Yes, this means a 8600GT is a beter buy than a HD 2600XT. A 3650 performs a little bit better than a HD 2600XT, so if you find two of them at the same price, get yourself the 3650. Remember, I’m talking about the GDDR3 version of all the card in this price range.

Now, if you’re not a gamer, you can find yourself satisfied by buying a 7300GS, 7300LE, or radeon HD2400Pro, just for the sake of using a graphics card. If you have onboard graphics, though, a graphics card will become less interesting.

I realize this article will be obsolete by a… week, maybe, if I’m lucky. I can’t always write this kind of article, so if you need the most recent update, look for the prices and find a review on the internet. This should help you, too.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, those cards comes in PCIe only. Maybe I’ll make something like this with AGP later. Emphasis on maybe.