Monthly Archive for June, 2008

MGS4 Reactions and Opinions

Published
by
John Griffin
on June 16, 2008
in Gaming
. 1 Comment

Shawn Elliot sums it up nicely.

I was literally screaming at my iPod listening to this week’s 1up Yours podcast. I think I spent half an hour venting to my brother about it and Metal Gear yesterday. I should have recorded it because I am struggling to write it up here.

Suffice to say Shane Bettenhausen and Ryan Payton don’t get it. They are in a bubble that resides up Kojima’s arse.

I find it hard to read game reviews these days, not just for the appauling hyperbole Shawn points out, but for the whole meaningless nature of scores and the subsequent arguement that ensues. MGS4 just highlights the immaturity of the entire enthusiast press be it Edge, IGN or whoever.

Play the game, critique it, done. Your scales and scores are meaningless.

As for MGS4, my opionion can be summed up in one sentence. If I wanted to watch an overly long and overly complex movie I’d go do that, I don’t need a game to do that for me.

Shopping for NAS

Published
by
John Griffin
on June 3, 2008
in Tech
. 0 Comments

I have been shopping around recently for a network attached storage device to see if I can come up with a better solution than my current linux server. One of the main features I am interested in is automatic volume expansion. Basically if I insert a new hard drive the NAS should just handle it and I won’t have to do anything.

Devices such as the Drobo and the ReadyNAS NV+ offer implementations of this but at £400 to £500 without any drives included makes them ridiculously over priced. So I looked back at my linux box and wondered what could be done in software.

The much hyped Sun file system ZFS offers these features and more but with it only being on Solaris and a Linux port not even close I ruled it out a while back. Then I remembered that FreeNAS is BSD based and that ZFS has been ported to FreeBSD 7. Well it turns out that FreeNAS is currently based on FreeBSD 6 but they specifically mention in the roadmap that ZFS support will be coming soon.

So now I just have to wait a bit and soon I will be able to build my own free software alternative to the overpriced Drobo.

Windows UI Taskforce

Published
by
John Griffin
on June 2, 2008
in Tech
. 1 Comment

It’s a huge undertaking but the Windows UI Taskforce are trying to detail every single UI bug in Vista. Just looking through the list serves as a reminder to how half arsed and rushed out the OS was.

The fact that there are still Windows 3.1 style widgets in Windows Vista is unforgivable, it’s the kind of thing that makes it feel cheap and mashed together when using it.