It’s called TAXcess, and can be found at:
https://taxcess.gov.mb.ca/

I recommend reading through all the information on the site, however here are a few basics that may be helpful to know:

• Signing up is relatively quick and easy, with a few minor annoyances (for instance, make sure you precisely follow the telephone number example - otherwise it’ll just reset the form without the password with no indication of what you did wrong).
• While it claims that it may take a day or two to receive the response email with your activation code, I received the activation code instantly. However this was done on a business day – it’s possible that the system doesn’t do new activations on weekends/holidays or that manual intervention is needed if your information doesn’t match their records 100%.
• By default, signing up means that you will not get forms in the mail anymore. You’ll be e-mailed reminders instead. This can apparantly be switched off in the preferences/options when signed in.
• The only payment method currently is direct withdrawl from a bank account. They have instructions for entering your direct withdrawl information (which you can pull from a cheque) if you’re not familar with bank/branch/account numbers.
• It appears as though you may be able to file without making the payment (although you’ll still be required to make the payment somehow by the due date). I haven’t tested this.

Again, I recommend thoroughly reading through the information on the website. There may be a few other quirks, but hopefully the above captures the gist of things. Naturally, this is all subject to change.

As it turns out, it wasn’t a bug (although there was zero information about this out there). The locations for the Mages Collective Cache’s have extremely small clickable areas. If you’re doing the quest, go to the location marked with the X and *slowly* move your mouse around all over the area (whether it’s the pile of wood, the bags, etc).

Eventually you should end up mousing over the tiny area and will get the clickable popup. Don’t forget to hit up all the caches – fortunately they’re all marked on your minimap with an X. Once you’ve done them all, the “Find the Mages’ Cache” quest should be complete.

Few steps if you want me to bite my tongue to keep from lashing out at you. I won’t mention the site/business because I don’t want to give them any traffic whatsoever.

1) “Cold call” me in the middle of the day to schedule another call for the next day.
I have no problem when actual contacts phone me to schedule a conference call or discussion, but if I’ve never heard from you before, you might want to start with an email. Heck, even those who I’m on good terms with usually start with an email first if they want a chat.

2) Mention that you think I’m an “expert in the industry” and that you’re looking at partnering with me and/or one of my sites.
If you’ve actually got some substance here, this might be ok. If on the other hand you’re offering junk, no matter how well you’ve dressed up that junk, if I’m an “expert in the industry” as you claim, I’m going to see right through your trash and be very very angry at you for wasting my time. Don’t think that playing to my vanity will work. It won’t.

3) Let me find out on my own that your site combines the concept of a link directory with the concept of a scraper site.
Congratulations, you’ve just combined a link directory with a scraper site – you took 2 of the crappiest concepts on the web and put them together. It’s like mixing puke with diarrhea. If only somehow you could add domain squatting you’d have the whole “sewage package” going on.

4) When I email you letting you know that under no circumstances would I ever partner with a site such as yours and not to bother calling me (but in nicer words as I feel my tongue start to bleed), in the reply email, mention that “The partnership is about getting new traffic to your site and splitting the revenue from a subdomain we would power.” Oh, and mention that “expert in the field” stuff again.
Wow. So you’re going to either duplicate my content (because one thing Matt Cutts always talks about is how we don’t have enough duplicate content on the web… </sarcasm>) or have me write some new stuff, take all the traffic, take some of the profits, and… I’d want to do this… why?

-

Yes, this is about the worst deal you can find, short of Amway/Quikstar (aka Scamway/Quickscam), and those deals that all the Nigerian “princes” have to offer.

The goal in this case is basically to use your content to give them traffic, and when they say “getting new traffic to your site” what they really mean is getting new traffic to *their* site, and if you’re lucky a couple percent will then click the link to your site. Your only alternative if you don’t go for this deal of course is to publish your own content and get 100% of the traffic and revenue.

-

The last line they gave was “When you wish to pursue the conversation, we’ll be happy to move forward.”. Right. Sorry, I don’t need to know the rest of the details. I don’t need to know whether the diarrhea is brown, or whether it’s green.

I’m not having it either way.

Call me again and I’ll make you regret it.

Have a nice day.

I have provided a DSDT which I finished most of – it has all the basic fixes, and adds USB support properly so that 10.6.3 doesn’t choke – the only thing left to add is the sound (which you’ll probably want), and switch the IDE setting to SATA in the DSDT (which you probably won’t care about).

WARNING: USE AT YOUR OWN RISK! No guarantees. It worked for me, but for all I know it might melt down your system!

You can grab it here:
GA-H55M-UD2H – DSDT for F8 BIOS (DSDT.aml.zip)

Unzip it first. Generally, you put the DSDT.aml in your /Extra folder, but it could depend based on your bootloader.

I did the following:
-Minor fixes so it would compile
-CMOS reset fix (so it won’t clear your CMOS every time you shutdown/restart)
-TMR, HPET, PIC fixes
-SBUS fix (for sleep although with the onboard video I couldn’t get it to sleep anyway)
-USB -> UHCI/EHCI fix (so your USB should work properly and won’t break at 10.6.3)

I would strongly recommend using iBoot Supported + MultiBeast. Tony’s also got fantastic tutorials on his site for installing, and others that can help you if you decide to try further editing the DSDT for audio (though I believe you’ll still need a kext) and for IDE -> SATA. His tutorials helped me a lot – I was learning from scratch and can now do DSDT edits! In addition, there’s a bit on putting your CPU and video card stuff on his site also, so check it out and support his work!

I’ll note the following about this motherboard, DSDT, and other bits:
-I strongly recommend using the F8 bios, because that’s what this DSDT was based on. Others may work, but they may not.
-You should be able to remove most kexts from /Extra/Extensions. You will still need fakesmc.kext, but the rest might be able to go. Remove them one at a time though so you know which one is causing the problem if something breaks.
-If you mess something up (remove certain kexts without having DSDT.aml in place for instance), your CMOS might get screwy. One of the symptoms is that the physical reset button stops working! To fix this, unplug the computer and remove the CMOS/BIOS battery for a few hours, as well as shorting the cmos reset pins for a second or two. When you put the battery back in you’ll have to set all your BIOS settings again, but the reset button should work correctly.
-Assuming you use the 10.6.3.1 mach_kernel from TonyMac’s iBoot Supported (and copy it to your root) – something that may be necessary to support your i3/i5, you will notice that removing the NullCPUPowerManagement kext makes AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement die during boot (so it won’t boot) even though you have the DSDT! This happens because the kernel version is different from the AppleIntelCPU…..kext. To fix this you must download the MacBookProUpdate1.3 and use Pacifist to install the 2 AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement kexts. Don’t delete NullCPUPowerManagement until you’ve pulled/installed those kexts or you’ll end up having to boot from the CD.
-It is currently impossible to get the onboard Intel HD Graphics to work with QE/CI. It will not load any kexts. Even the ones from the MacBookProUpdate linked above will not work (the FrameBuffer one will stop you from booting and the others wont be detected even if you add your deviceID). I am certain this is what’s keeping this motherboard from sleeping. Use an external video card (preferably a well-supported nVidia) and I’ll bet sleep will work (confirmed – sleep is fine with an external video card).
-On the i3, speedstep will only work if you add a certain entry to smbios.plist. “About this Mac” will however show you as an i5. There may be a different entry that will detect the i3, but I have not found it if it exists. The i5 one that appears to work is the following entry in smbios.plist:
<key>SMcputype</key>
<string>1537</string>
-I recommend using the MacBookPro5,1 from MultiBeast. Trying to change it to 6,1 or using another one tends to stop SpeedStep from working if you do the above (if you don’t care about speedstep, by all means, go nuts).
-Adding your CPU to the DSDT is probably the best option if you’re intent on speedstep, but it’s dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing, and can be quite complicated. In the event you’re using an i3 540, you can try my CPU modded one for this motherboard but it’s risky – even if you’re using the i3 540, something could be different. It’s always possible that I’ve made a mistake in it too. It’s available by clicking here (use at your own risk – you’ve been warned!): GA-H55M-UD2H DSDT with i3 540 PSS entries. WARNING!!!! This can seriously mess up (damage) your motherboard, CPU, or something else if something isn’t correct. Never under any circumstance even try it on another CPU.

Recently, Apple dropped the price of their developer program to $99.

I decided to grab it. Apple lists the main benefits on their site:
-Mac OS X Pre-Release Software
-Development Videos
-Apple Developer Forums
-Technical Support

I’ll go into a few details (as much as you can while staying within the NDA anyway), but if you’ve come from a Technet background, this isn’t Technet, and certainly isn’t what you’re looking for unless you’re solely interested in checking out the upcoming Mac OSX releases. If however you’re a programmer coming from an MSDN background, this is the program you’re probably looking for.

-

Pre-Release Software

This basically includes the upcoming releases of Mac OS X (client and server), as well as a slew of SDK’s and other tools. The easiest way to compare this to the Microsoft side (although not entirely accurate) would be “MSDN without the Technet”. No, you won’t be finding iWork or iLife here, no QuickTime Pro or Final Cut. Just the base OS’s (including upcoming builds) and a pile of programming related tools.

As far as Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server go, you do get access to previous versions, as well as upcoming builds. I suppose if you’re not a programmer (ala Technet), being able to burn the latest release to a DVD for reinstalls might save you the couple minutes of running an updater – for example if your systems came with 10.6.0 disks, you could grab the 10.6.3 DVD image, burn it, and use it for all your reinstalls. Then again, Mac users rarely have to reinstall unless they’re doing something really funky to break the OS, so the value to them there is negligible. You will get access to the upcoming builds as I mentioned, and presumably an early look at 10.7 if/when it comes out, but that’s really the extent of the value to it.

One rather large difference from Technet/MSDN is the way that the Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server serial number works. On the Microsoft side, they currently generate 10 unique keys for you for every single OS if you want, which never expire (even if your subscription runs out). With Snow Leopard Server, there’s 1 developer key that everyone shares which expires every so often (it looks to be about a 6 month period presently). From what I understand, when it expires, you hop on to the developer site, grab the new key, and plug it in. This of course means that if you don’t renew your dev account the next year, you’re out of luck when the key expires – you either need to keep renewing if you want to test your stuff on OS X Server, or shell out the money to buy the software.

-

Development Videos

These are served up through iTunes. I took a quick peak but need to look a little more in-depth. I really get the feeling that most of this stuff you can pick up in books, but I could be wrong here. I’ll update when I’ve seen more.

Apple Developer Forums

Ho-hum. These forums aren’t busy at all. Friendly, yes. Busy no. It’s not the first place I’d ask a question most of the time unless I didn’t need an answer right away. Hopefully the reduced developer program cost starts helping. 4 posts a day across the entire forum isn’t… well… filling the place up with information very quickly.

-

Technical Support

“When you request Technical Support, you’ll be assigned an engineer with subject matter expertise for your specific issue that can help you troubleshoot your code, offer direction to additional technical resources, or provide workarounds that will fastrack your development. The Mac Developer Program includes two Technical Support Incidents per membership year.”

Excerpt is pulled from the Mac Developer Program page. Again, something very much for programmers, and if these are indeed actual engineers you get access to, this is actually pretty sweet for your $99.

-

Conclusion

Developing on the Mac is already free. Apple really beats the pants off of Microsoft here. You can download XCode and create a program, all costing you nothing but time.

As far as the Developer Program goes, your $99 does give you access to some SDK’s, and you can test your software on upcoming releases of the Mac OS to make sure it works, even the server version. The videos and forums don’t seem to be anything stellar, but I’m sure others find them to be a huge asset. The one really nice thing is of course the 2 technical support incidents, and is what I assume most of your money is going towards.

So for someone coming from a Technet background who isn’t a hard core programmer, is it worth it? Probably not. It’s a cheaper way to experience Snow Leopard Server if you want to get yourself a little training on it and see what it’s all about, or a more expensive way to check out Snow Leopard if you’re using Tiger/Leopard and haven’t dished out for the upgrade yet. Other than that you certainly get a sneak peak at the upcoming OS (whenever it comes about), but that’s all you’re going to get from it.

What might help Apple would be to drop the price even further – as low as feasible really, and remove the 2 technical support incidents (add it as a premium option or a pay-per-incident thing). It would give more programmers access to the tools (presumably helping stem development), get the forums a little busier (perhaps reducing need for support calls), and help out a little with bug testing in new builds.

-

As one final note – a testament to the support – I had an issue when trying to activate my account / verify my identity because of a mismatch between the information I’d entered and my credit card information. Online it gave me the option of printing/faxing a form (with copy of my driver’s license which I’d have to get notarized of all things), but also gave the 1-800 number for support. I called the 1-800 developer number and was immediately greeted by a living, breathing person who got the information needed, found the issue (an initial) and straightened things out immediately over the phone. It was the fastest, friendliest call I’ve made to any support service in the last 10 years. If the incident support calls go anything like this one did, the developer program is definitely a deal at $99.

VMWare Fusion 3 and Parallels 5 were tested, using a Windows 7 Professional 32-bit virtual machine. Windows 7 was chosen because both Fusion and Parallels now support it, and with XP being continually phased out (and Vista being bloated), it’s the operating system that most people are likely to choose.

So without further ado, let’s take a look at the 4 games chosen this time around. I’ve packed the screenshots at the front with a tiny explanation, and if you scroll down a bit further (about 1/2 way through the article, you’ll see the actual writeup.

Mass Effect (click to see full size):

Both actually had the error message you see on the right. After playing with the Windows Compatibility mode stuff, I managed to get to the error message on the left.

-

-

Halo CE (click to see full size)

The left side (Parallels) was nice and fast – the 59 FPS you see was the lowest it got, and that was just for the screenshot. Not so on the right side (Fusion) – it looks like snow in the right image. It’s just missing textures. At a whopping 2 fps.

-

-

Knights of the Old Republic 2 (click to see full size):

Both were very playable, but Parallels offered a perfectly smooth experience. Fusion played quite well, but crashed in the “Advanced Video” option menu.

-

-

Cities XL (click to see full size)

Just Parallels is shown, because Fusion only lasted about 5 seconds – not enough time for a screenshot.

-

-
Now for a little detail… We’ll start with a disappointment, and then cheer everyone up a little with a few successes.

Mass Effect
Parallels – no rating
Fusion – no rating

In the last comparison, neither Parallels nor Fusion supported PS3.0, and therefore, Mass Effect didn’t stand any hope. With both of the latest versions now supporting DX9.0c and PS3.0, the hope was that Mass Effect would, at the very least, run.

In Parallels 5, there was no such luck. The game would crash before starting up.

VMWare Fusion 3 shared the same fate. Crash on start.

Pretty disappointing. At first I thought it might have been the Steam backup i was restoring from – however I tried creating an XP virtual machine in each VM, and was met with a GPF – something to do with GMatrix2D. A little research showed that many people have had this error even on PC’s – specifically relating to video card drivers. It’s likely that nobody short of ATI or nVidia will ever get this game to run. Update: That’s not quite true – after doing a little searching around I decided to try installing the WineD3D package in both Fusion/Parallels VM’s (the Wine D3D package incidentally also comes with the free VirtualBox VM and has some support for DX9, as well as some experimental support for DX10). In Fusion the game still crashed at startup, but in Parallels the game started up and I was able to create a character, although it crashed the VM as soon as the game’s opening sequence started. The menu reacted slowly, and presumably had it worked the game wouldn’t have been exactly fast. It’s possible that VirtualBox would fare better than Fusion/Parallels, but it choked during the XP install so I didn’t get to try it.

-

Cities XL
Parallels - 4 stars (the game already has speed issues, emulation makes them even more apparent)
Fusion – 0 stars (it almost ran)

Recently, a SimCity4-like game was released called Cities XL. The game requirements aren’t overly specific, although it states that it’s “Enhanced for DirectX 9.0c”, and lists a GeForce 6600GT or ATI X1600 as minimum video card requirements.

In Parallels, the game ran, and worked quite well. In a city with about a population of 800,000, navigating, building, etc went along without a hitch. It was however noticeably slower than through the PC, particularly on the loading screens (which doesn’t really matter), as well as when zooming (which does matter). Moving around the map from the overhead view had a slight choppiness to it as well.

Much of this can probably be attributed to the game itself – Cities XL has been attacked by many for not being multi-threaded / multi-core. Many PC players have issues with it behaving slowly even on a multi-core machine. Running the game through an emulator certainly doesn’t help an already difficult situation.

Fusion was much slower than Parallels getting in. Once in your city, you have about 5 seconds of extreme slowness before it either bluescreens, or the video becomes checkerboarded.

-

Halo CE (custom edition)
Parallels – 5 stars (so good you’d never know it’s emulated)
Fusion – 1 star (technically it runs….)

Halo’s a fairly old title, and it only requires DirectX 9.0, so it would probably run on the older versions of Fusion/Parallels. In any case, it ran extremely well on the new version of Parallels at 1440×900 resolution, with absolutely no issues. By default it’s set to run at a fixed rate of 30FPS but once it became clear that it wasn’t having any issues, it was time to see how high we could go. Fusion was a whole other story.

Parallels framerate were generally between 200-300 FPS. Even in windowed mode it didn’t drop very much. Every so often with the right scenery and shooting it would drop below slightly 100 FPS – in fact the lowest it ever got to was about 60 FPS during the screenshot.

VMWare unfortunately didn’t fare well at all. It averaged 1 FPS, maxing out at 7 FPS. Very frequently the textures turned white as well (see the screenshot at the beginning of this article) both in Windowed and Full Screen modes. If all the video options were turned down, the white texture issue didn’t occur, but it remained at the low FPS mark.

-

KOTOR 2 (knights of the old republic)
Parallels – 5 stars (you’d never know it’s running under an emulator)
Fusion – 4 stars (solid, very playable, but a couple minor issues)

Despite being almost 5 years old, KOTOR 2 requires DirectX 9.0c, and thus, may not have run on the older versions of Fusion/Parallels. The resolution chosen was 1024×768. It does go higher, but doesn’t support any wide-screen resolutions, and if I ran anything higher in windowed mode, I ended up with scroll-bars.

The game play is perfectly smooth on Parallels, and while KOTOR2 doesn’t have a frame-rate meter built in, you’d never know it was running under a virtual machine. I can say it certainly didn’t have any problems – it was screaming fast & smooth. Video options for “anti-aliasing”, “frame buffer effects” and “soft shadows” were greyed out however (other options could be turned on).

On VMWare Fusion, the game is smooth, but not perfect. It’s similar to when in some games VSync being off causes a bit of a jaggy look during movement (although I tested with VSync both on and off). The game was very playable, although it did crash anytime I tried to go into the advanced video options. The screenshot was taken at 800×600, but it remained smooth (but again, not perfect) at 1024×768.

-

-

So the verdict? Parallels is the clear winner this time around. It’s just much faster in the games that were tried, and the games that worked were flawless graphically. Perhaps with a few version revisions we’ll see both VM’s pick it up a bit, but for now the choice is pretty clear.

-

A few things/tidbits worth mentioning:

-Parallels Coherence generally causes major issues with games (don’t use)
-VMWare doesn’t handle switching between full screen and windowed mode very well. Parallels tends to do alright if you start fullscreen and then change to windowed, but not the other way around
-VMWare won’t mount BIN/CUE disk images

There is a fundamental difference in the way they handle resolutions.
-In Windowed mode, VMWare excels because there’s a setting that can locks the cursor to the screen (one of the things the “optimize mouse” setting does) – it helps in games where having the mouse at the edge rotates the view.
-In Windowed mode, Parallels falls behind in some games because the mouse will move off the screen (better Mac integration, but not great with games).
-In FullScreen mode, VMWare excels because if the game resolution isn’t the same as the screen resolution, it will scale the game to fit the screen
-In FullScreen mode, Parallels falls behind because if the game resolution isn’t the same as the screen resolution, the game will be shown in a “box” in the middle of the screen.

Final thing to mention: Don’t believe all the reviews you read – from what I’ve read, Parallels stuffed their Amazon review page at launch – it’s disappointing when a company stoops to those levels. No, they didn’t stuff this one :p

-

And there you have it! It’s worth noting that similar to the previous comparison, this was done on a “hackintosh” – this time, an i7 920 machine with 12GB of RAM and an ATI 4850 video card, running under Snow Leopard. For comparison purposes, it would be very similar to a current high-end iMac or Mac Pro.

Each VM was given 2 processors, and 4 GB of RAM under Windows 7 Professional 32-bit.

I believed in you. I thought you had potential. But apparantly I was wrong. May whatever God you believe in… have mercy on your soul…. This court stands adjourned.

Q – “All Good Things…” – Star Trek: The Next Generation

DMOZ was arguably once a strong, vibrant, quality directory. But my, how things have changed. It’s about time that Google re-evaluated their usage of dmoz.org as a weighted directory.

Three years back, I submitted one of my sites to the DMOZ. The site in question is listed in the side-bar, and has been mentioned by USA Today, the New York Times, and WKYC (an NBC company), amongst many other places. I think it’s fair to say that it’s a fairly popular resource.

If you haven’t picked up on it already, the site is called EyeglassRetailerReviews.com . Whether it should or shouldn’t be listed isn’t the question, but I mention it to show that I have a good idea what I’m talking about below in regards to the problems I noticed with a certain category in the Open Directory Project (ODP) below…

-

About a month ago, I took a look at the ODP, and was pretty shocked at what I noticed. Take a look at the web archive’s capture of the DMOZ eyeglasses category (web.archive.org).

If you look over the archive, you’ll see that between 2006-2008, there were no additions to that category over those 3 years. At least one of the listings is a parked domain. Here’s a look at Google’s cache from 3 days ago (Oct 28 2009 – you’ll see it’s virtually the same as the web archive’s 2008 page):

-

Why is this a serious issue?

Well for starters, Zenni Optical wasn’t listed. Now I’m not in love with Zenni or anything, but I’ll be the first to admit that they’re probably the most popular online eyeglass retailer out there. If you’ve heard of buying glasses online, or read about it in magazines, you’ve heard of Zenni. It’s that simple. How in the world were they not listed by the ODP? Find any talk about online eyeglass retailers, and Zenni is always mentioned, and has been for at least the last 3-4 years, probably more. Not to mention some of the other big names were no-where to be seen on DMOZ, such as EyeBuyDirect, Goggles4u, Optical4less, and plenty more.

-

I really had to ask myself, what’s going on? Has DMOZ really become so stale?

Well, it could just be that they don’t have enough editors. Because I happen to know at least a little about the retailers out there, I decided to apply for an editor position for this category, submitted 3 of the retailers as examples following the very sparse 4-word descriptions that the DMOZ was using, was honest about the sites I owned and why being the owner of EyeglassRetailerReviews.com made me an ideal candidate for editing this category, and waited.

Today I got a response – the standard “application denied” sort of thing, although the reviewer did add the following response:

First I want to say that I did appreciate a custom response, and I’ll thank the reviewer here for doing so. As much as this write-up may be attacking the DMOZ, I’m not going to attack the reviewer who looked over the application – there are many valid reasons that I could have been declined as an editor (I’m not under any impression that I deserved to be accepted as an editor in any way, shape, or form).

-

That said, a couple things to note:

I was pretty sure that my examples weren’t “already listed” when I submitted them. Sure enough, they’ve just been listed (you’ll now find Zenni Optical, EyeBuyDirect, and Goggles4u listed in the current page). They weren’t listed 3 days ago according to Google’s cache of Oct 28th (which I screenshotted above in case the cache updates).

When I submitted, it was one of those “do a good thing and help out” occasions where despite all the bad-mouthing about ODP/DMOZ out there, I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. I really believe in the online eyeglass “movement”, simply because people have been gouged so badly by local retailers, and online is really the way to go nowadays. Many of the online retailers out there are very good, reputable companies. The example listings I submitted truly deserve to be there (and I’m glad they are now), although there should certainly be even more editing done to that category. To be clear, I don’t really care if my own site isn’t ever listed anywhere in DMOZ – sure it might generate a little more traffic, but my site is popular enough that the difference at this point would be negligible. Can a site do well without being listed in the ODP? Absolutely.

-

Taking everything into account, here are a few conclusions I came to based on my experience, as well as a little reading around about what others have said, and why it surprises me that Google still uses them:

1) The ODP on the whole has become stale. Yes, I’m sure there are examples of well-edited categories, and editors that do a good job and work really hard to make sure their categories are both current and valuable sources of information, but at the same time, categories that are left untouched for years really “poison” it as a resource. For example, anyone who actually used DMOZ to look for a glasses retailer anytime over the last 3 years was honestly put at a huge dis-service.

Now, Google is a current search engine. Why does a current search engine put weight in a resource that’s prone to be so badly out of date? I really don’t know.

2) The ODP (as well as some other directories) is concerned, at least to a degree, by the “looks” of a site. Having a professional-looking site increases your chances of getting listed compared to having a plain-looking site. I’ve read this in many places in the past, and I think I can now also make this statement based on the fact that EyeglassRetailerReviews.com wasn’t listed anywhere in the DMOZ over the course of 3 years, all while being picked up by various news media. I’ll be the first to admit that EyeglassRetailerReviews.com won’t dazzle the eye – it may help educate you, but it’s no piece of eye candy. It’s incidentally why I’d never consider submitting the site to Yahoo’s directory – I try to make the video reviews I do for the site a little “pretty”, but as far as the site layout itself goes, I’m not about to trade in my content for dazzle just to get a listing somewhere.

That said, Google’s big focus is on content. So again, why is Google putting trust directories that are prone to take “pretty” into account?

3) The ODP suffers from corruption – I base this more-so on many of the comments I’ve read about them – extortion, agendas, and so-on. The only confirmation (although I’ll admit this is a “slippery-slope” statement) that I had in my experience here was the mention from the reviewer that my site wouldn’t be listed in a Shopping category. That means they’re assuming that I’d have been planning to put it there, which means they probably assume that everyone with an interest in a category is planning to plug their site(s) into that category. Probably a right assumption to be making – that most people have an agenda.The big problem with that is… if everybody’s got an agenda, the editors they do accept are probably going to poison the category they’re assigned to edit – either declining competition, plugging in sites that may not deserve to be there, extorting others who want to be listed, and/or ignoring a category once they’ve plugged in their site. DMOZ is apparently short on editors, so if you think about it, they’ve got 2 options – either let a category become outdated, or risk people popping in to poison a category.

Both are bad options…. and Google wants to be associated with this why, exactly?

-

What Google really needs to do is scrap the whole notion of using a pre-existing directory at all. Why not just use their existing search-engine rankings and put together their own automated directory?

In a basic form, they’d just have to have keywords that relate to a category. If a site ranks high in general, find the keywords that the site on the whole ranks highest for and plug it into a category. For example, if a high-ranking site ranks highest for the “shop computers” keywords (and I’m talking a site – not a specific page on a site or you’ll have sites qualifying for multiple categories), put it in the Shopping/Electronics/Computers category. Yes, there would undoubtedly need to be some tweaking to perfect it, but Google’s already got some good algorithms in place, and they could have a pretty good automated directory that stays up-to-date, and in general provides really relevant results.

-

My message to Google – let others create their own hand-edited directories, and create your own based on your up-to-date, time tested and true search engine algorithms. As popular as DMOZ may be, it’s lost most of the value that perhaps it once had. You can certainly do better.

This year, we grabbed a 5 user license for Kaspersky Internet Security. Some of the family’s been switching to Mac’s, so we only needed 4 licenses for the remaining PC’s. It was a bit pricey for the license from the Kaspersky website (buying a couple 3-user packs from Future Shop, Best Buy, or London Drugs when they go on sale would have been cheaper). In any case, we still had 1 left over.

You might imagine my surprise when today I found this message on one of our machines though:

So let me get this straight… We have a 5 user license, are only using 4, and are somehow  over our limit?!

Let me be clear, we haven’t done anything to even remotely encourage an activation problem. Kaspersky was installed ONCE on each of these machines (there were no reinstalls or anything). I could see it if… you know… we were reformatting and reinstalling every week, but there’s absolutely no reason that we should be having these issues.

I sent a message to Kaspersky, but it’s supposed to take 2 days to receive a response.

In the meantime, virus protection on that computer is disabled. No, not just updates, the entire program is disabled.

—-

I guess this really begs the question… what are we paying for?

In a free vs paid antivirus comparison, shouldn’t paid come out ahead?

—-

I like math, so let’s do some:

It’s Sunday, and we’re looking at Tuesday before we get a response. We’ll give Kaspersky the benefit of the doubt and assume they fix it some time that day. That’s 3 days that Kaspersky’s not working, so we can say that Kaspersky works to “protect the computer” 362 out of 365 days of the year, or 99.17% of the time. The free ones don’t de-activate themselves on a whim, so we’re looking at 100% from them.

So we’re paying over $100 for the potential to have less uptime.

That’s like paying a doctor extra to close his eyes while he does surgery on you.

—-

Thanks Kaspersky. Our next anti-virus software will be a free solution.

Unfortunately, Sim City 4 is effectively where the franchise died. It’s odd because usually a franchise dies after a horrible game, not after an amazing one. And SC4 was definitely an epic success. EA tried to play off of the name with Sim City Societies, but everyone knows that Societies was never a true Sim City successor.

Years went by, and rumors of “the next Sim City” came and went. Finally, a real competitor came about, and was finally released earlier this month: Cities XL.

So, without further ado, let’s compare Cities XL and  Sim City 4.

——

The short version first:

Sim City 4 has been around for ages, and the graphics show it. It still remains a very complex yet fun game. There’s plenty of mass transit available, you can set up ordinances, and for the most part, it was well developed, and is a solid game. Solid that is, until your cities get large and the entire traffic/mass transit system breaks down. Custom addons/mods are the saving grace for SC4, but there are just too many things to fault with the game for them to fix them all. In some cases, an addon will make the game playable at the expense of removing all sense of realism/challenge in a certain area. You can get a fairly large well-functioning city without addons, but I guarantee you it won’t look anything like a real city.

Cities XL on the other hand grants a much better/smoother experience when growing into a large city. That said, the game isn’t quite as developed yet. It still seems like a beta (despite being released earlier this month) – there are bugs everywhere from one of the tutorials to various minor issues in the game itself. That said, the game is still being worked on, and will be constantly improved for the forseeable future. The graphics are a huge improvement. It both looks better and operates more smoothly than SC4. You’re not in a locked grid system – you can build roads that curve every which way if you’d like, and traffic is handled a lot better. However, Cities XL has more of a subscription/online/multi-player focus to it – we’ll get into more details about that later though.

——-

Now the long version:

I’ll start by noting that Cities XL does NOT have mass transit in any way, shape, or form yet (although apparently it’s coming).

-

Roads/Bridges

Sim City 4 has a pretty fair amount of road types available. It’s a grid-based system, so each section’s got to be in a square, and you’re limited in the amount of curvature you can have. Unfortunately, as your city grows, you’ll be forced to eliminate streets resulting in complaints every month about endangered streets. Even the roads won’t handle the traffic for long if you’ve got any more than 1 block of high-density connected to the road. To add insult to injury, your Sims are also a bunch of dumb lemmings. They take the shortest route from point A to point B, which usually involves driving through every single side-street to get across the city, rather than taking a nearby highway. They also won’t walk backwards half a block to hop on mass transit – if mass transit’s not on the way, they don’t take it.

Cities XL has fairly similar road types to SC4, although you’re not locked to a grid system – the roads are very fluid, and you can create very pleasant-looking curved streets and avenues along rivers, and throughout your city. By clicking on a road, you can upgrade it – in particular you can change it’s traffic flow. For some avenues you can change it to 3 lanes east and 2 lanes west for example. Or make them multi-lane 1-way. Or more. Your roads also don’t become over-burdened as quickly. You tend to have general areas of slower traffic if your roads aren’t keeping up in capacity. Replacing a road isn’t quite as simple as building a road over the old one. Similar to real-life, traffic will be diverted to other roads while you demolish it, and if the other roads can’t hold the new traffic, you may want to build a temporary detour to help out. Finally, in Cities XL, road types are opened up slowly. You can’t pump a highway through the center of town until you have the population to support it. You’ll be limited to regular roads for the first little bit of the game. This may frustrate those looking to make the perfect megalopolis right from the start, but it’s much more realistic.

-

Zoning

In Sim City 4, you can build high-density right off the hop if you’d like. However, you can’t choose what type of residential/commercial/industrial will pop up in your zone (poor, medium, or rich). There’s nothing worse than having a nice residential utopia, zoning an industry for a high-tech, and having a dirty factory pop up there instead.

In Cities XL, you choose the population type – Unqualified, Qualified, Executive, or Elite (the new poor to rich range). You then choose the density. Like with roads, you’re locked out of some to begin with. At first you can only build Unqualified low-density buildings. Soon after you can build Qualified low-density as well. As time goes on, other densities and types open up. The same holds true for the different types of industry and commercial buildings. As a bonus, each type tells you what types of workers it employs.  Edit: There is a setting to unlock all the standard densities. Things are a little more expansive here in some cases – for example with Commercial buildings you get the options of shops, hotels, or leisure. For farms, you get the option of building 1 silo for every 10 farms you have (with another option available later). With Cities XL there’s basically a little more depth in the zoning area.

-

Services

Services for both are very similar, although the effects are different.

In Sim City 4, no fire station means out of control fires. You’ve also got to dispatch the fire department when a fire breaks out. Health and Education also directly affect the further generations of Sims – good health and education result in rich sims as time goes by and the new generation comes into play. You can see how many students/patients/prisoners a building has, and adjust how much money it’s getting, etc.

In Cities XL, none of the services seem to have a very large impact, except on happiness. You’ll want the services to keep your approval up (particularly with Executives and Elites), but you won’t have to go fighting fires, or planning for (or worrying about) future generations. You also can’t see how many students/patients/prisoners you’ve got plugging up a building, or tweak it’s budget. It’s much more of a “plop it down and forget about it” scenario.

-

Utilities

Both games have somewhat similar utilities.

In Sim City 4, electricity is integral. If a line goes down, power goes out, people leave, etc. The power plants also break down over time and need to be replaced – realistic in that they break down more quickly if over-loaded, but unrealistic (and annoying) that they’ve got to be replaced when they get old. Water production is pretty simple, but again you’ve got to run lines throughout the city, and worry about water pollution on top of that. Garbage/waste is another concept that’s simple and grows over time.

In Cities XL, electricity, water, and garbage all exist – however they’re not implemented in the same way. You don’t need to run power lines anywhere for electricity – you just build the windmill/plant/etc anywhere, and it produces power tokens. Your city will use a certain amount (tokens) of power. More in the “Supply and Demand” section later. For water, your map needs to have a water-bed available somewhere, and you simply pop down towers/etc to tap them for supply. Again, it follows the token model we’ll go into later. Garbage works the same as Sim City, but with the token model. Finally, there’s also “fuel” which is obtained by drilling for oil in an area with oil. Again, follows the token model.

-

Parks, Special Buildings, Recreation, Blueprints, Areas

A bit of a long title, but it packs in a few things where both games vary.

In Sim City 4, you’ve got Parks. There’s no way to know what effect each has (unless you read the Prima guide), but you place them, and they generally help improve the land value. Special reward buildings are… well rewards that come up when you meet a certain goal. Again, it doesn’t always give an indication where you should place it (near residential or near commercial), but that’s the way it is.

In Cities XL, most recreation is part of the “Commercial” section called “Leisure”. You can build bowling alleys, ferris wheels, etc. If you’re looking to lower pollution though, you can use “decoration”, and place grass/park area, which will show an area of effect where it reduces pollution. There are other “decorations”, but I haven’t been able to tell yet how much of an effect they have (or if they’re really just decoration). Rather than Rewards, you’ll tend to either unlock higher items, or get specific items in the Landmarks section. Blueprints are also possible, which presumably are a large venture to get built.

-

Supply and Demand

This is a VERY key area where both of these games differ.

In Sim City 4, it really boils down to the RCI (residential, commercial, industrial) demand levels. Those break down further into poor/medium/rich style levels, but that’s really what it comes down to. You don’t directly determine what level of wealth is high in demand – you do it indirectly through various means – raising (or lowering) land value, educating, providing services, etc. It’s generally easy to meet a demand too. High tech in demand? Build some industrial zones near high-value residential areas. Need water? Build a water tower/pump.

The other side of it in Sim City 4 is in other cities across the map. You can build agricultural cities, industrial cities, commecial cities, and all the demand will pool together. You can trade/sell resources between your cities, bringing the game to another level. Want a clean rich city? Make a neighboring city take all the polluting power plants & landfills and just sell those resources to your “clean” one.

In Cities XL however, things are drastically different. Some of your cities will have finite resources. You can pick a map that doesn’t have water for example (or doesn’t have much). What this means is that you have to pay to import it when you need it. Same with oil. No map is rich in everything – you can typically get either get a lot of 1 thing, or a little of everything.

The rest has to be done through trading in Cities XL. In the single-player mode, you can sell to a computer corporation that always rips you off (although you have little choice). In the online version, you can still buy/sell through the computer corporation with it’s less-than-stellar-deals, or trade on the open market. The way trading is done is like this – you generally have a certain supply of tokens for many areas (mostly resources). Things like food, dirty industry, water, oil, power, garbage, etc. Your city also tends to have some demand as well.

In Cities XL, this demand is measured in “tokens”. If the end number is 0, your supply is meeting your demand. If the end supply is -2, you have demand for that item (and businesses that use it are probably suffering). If the end supply is +5, then you have an abundance. You can buy/sell on the open market (or trade with friends). In the online version, each contract lasts 5 days (although you can cancel early). If you’re selling something and you run out of the resource you’re selling, it’ll automatically cancel. In any case, you typically need to log into the game (or on the website) periodically to maintain your contracts and develop new ones.

-

How it all boils down

Sim City 4 is very much a single-player game. Play whenever you want, however you want, and you’ll never miss out on anything the game has to offer. The biggest upside is the community-developed content/addons, with the largest down-side being that the game itself stopped being developed long ago. It’s never going to get much better than it is now.

In Cities XL, the big idea is that it will continue to grow and be developed, with the cost being a monthly fee.  The game is designed to essentially “force” you to trade tokens based on your supply/demand, and you’re really only going to get good deals if you play online. Yes, Cities XL has a single-player mode, but trading with the computer who’s out to take your money doesn’t make for the best single-player experience.  The downside to online play is that you’ve got to pay to play. You’re looking at roughly $9 per month, although you’ll get free content for that. If you pay for 3 months at a time the price will drop down to around $6/month. What you do get for your subscription is constant content updates. So the game should get better and better as time goes on.

-

So which comes out ahead?

I have no doubt that Cities XL will tromp Sim City 4 as time goes by. It’s already a very close toss-up, with player preference in different areas being the determining factor. Each has strengths over the other, but Cities XL is the only one still being developed. That’s all there is to it.

The big issue for Cities XL is the cost. Think about it – SC4 fans were fans of a single-player game that only cost you money once. Cities XL is an online game, where you have to put in time to maintain trade contracts, and pay monthly to get the full benefit as it improves.

Cities XL is getting a lot of flak for the monthly fee, and it’s not surprising. The only people who don’t mind online fees are those who play a game EVERY DAY. Really, if you think about it, there are 2 major camps of SimCity-style fans:

• Those who play every day. Generally the type to be more accepting of a game they spend most of their free time playing. Problem is, most have probably been playing SC4 already, and won’t be thrilled about some of the complexities SC4 has that Cities XL doesn’t – a huge example being Mass Transit (which Cities XL doesn’t have yet, although it’s supposedly coming).
• Those who play casually. Generally, people who like to play a game for a few days, then “put it on the shelf” until they feel like playing it again either weeks or months later. These people won’t be fond of “needing” to come on to check up on their contracts every few days, and will be less impressed that they need to pay monthly to do so.

Hopefully (for Monte Cristo), there will be a subset of the hard core players that like the change of scenery enough to hop over to Cities XL, and perhaps a few MMO players that always liked Sim City will be willing to jump on board too. It would be nice if there was a little more catering to the single-player’s out there (ala Sims content packs), but the game is still young, and we’ll have to wait and see where it goes.

——

Cities XL can be found at http://www.citiesxl.com/.

Sim City 4 can be found at http://simcity.ea.com/index.php.

That said, both of these do work well for the simple task of converting to flash video.

——

Any Video Converter

Convert From

Convert To

I didn’t pack in any screenshots of the actual program, but it’s a very sleek interface, and obviously it supports quite a few formats. You can also pull video from YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe, or Nico.

You can set the output duration, frame size, video bitrate, video framerate, audio codec, audio bitrate, audio sample rate, and a few other things as well.

A few little things to watch for though. When you Add a Video source, it’ll detect the original’s frame size and framerate and show them. Neither are automatically set in the output though – you’ll want to make sure you manually set them. There are quick selection boxes (with presets), but in many cases you’ll want to manually type in frame size you want (particularly if you’re using a widescreen aspect ratio). The other issue is that the detected frame rate may not be completely correct. I used source that was at 29.97FPS, but it stated/detected it as 30FPS. Not a major issue, but you may want to double-check your source.

Doing the actual conversion used only 1 core, and for a 5 minute HD video it took about 2 minutes to convert from an x264 MP4 to a flash FLV on an i7 machine – certainly reasonable, and you can watch the progress % if you’d prefer.

You can find Any Video Converter at:
http://www.any-video-converter.com/products/for_video_free/

——

riva FLV encoder

riva FLV encoder 2.0

The riva FLV encoder converts (presumably any) video to flash FLV. While it’ll only convert to FLV (or JPG images if you have the need for it), it allows you to insert padding or crop, unlike Any Video Converter. There are a few downsides though – it doesn’t auto-detect the source movie size or framerate, so you may need to use another program to get that info if you don’t know it already, and then type in your desired values in the appropriate boxes. Also, when you actually click the Encode button, it looks like it’s frozen/hung. It is in fact doing the encode and will un-freeze once it’s done, but looking frozen doesn’t bode well for it.

You can find riva FLV encoder at:
http://rivavx.com/?encoder

——

Both programs are decent, and of course, free.