Three Wise Men

Call of Duty: Black Ops is out! We are all happy and sad at the same time. No more problems with who is hosting the game because servers are back and lag shouldn’t be an issue anymore, right? Wrong. This is where the sad part comes. Single player game is no problem and everything works flawlessly (more or less) on my old NVidia 8800GTS. I finished the game with almost no performance issues. Frame rate dropped down with a lot of enemies and explosions on the screen, but it was never unplayable. With multi-player this is a completely different story. I tried many different servers, and they were based all around the world. My ping times were ranging from as little as 70ms up to 300ms and to be honest, I didn’t notice much difference. Characters in front of me were warping here and there and they all appeared laggy and stuttering.

If you have a PC version you could try few things and the game will work better. Don’t worry, this won’t eliminate your problems it will help a little.

Image via Wikipedia

Unity will be the new desktop environment for the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal and Canonical is turning its head away from the Gnome shell. This generated a lot of controversy and heated arguments on many forums. I decided to give it a go. Currently I am running Ubuntu 10.10, an upgrade from 10.04. Unity was (and still is) a default login shell for three days now. I have a little non-standard setup because I am using two displays and I wanted to see how Unity will behave with my configuration. First screen is a Samsung with a resolution of 1680×1050 placed in front of me. Placed on the right is the second screen with a resolution of 1600×1200 pixels. I am NVidia powered – an old 8800GTS with a 768MB of RAM.

I will restrain myself from making any political statements about Canonical’s decision. My user experience is all you will get. Either good or bad. :)