Skyrim sucks...

...and yet it made US $1.5 billion already. I am left dumbfounded.

Well, it will be quick today because all (and even more) I have to say in Skyrim has already been written. It is in Czech but is so true that I am considering translating it into English and pasting it all over the internet.

"100+ důvodů proč Dan Vávra nesnáší TES V: Skyrim"


Since I was only able to stand the "game" for twenty minutes (the controls were THAT bad, those 20 minutes were torture!), I was able to observe "only" about 35 of the aforementioned reasons for why Skyrim sucks. Oh yes, a couple more dozens are already known from the ages of Oblivion. Bethesda knows how to build on succe-- erm, old bugs.

The trend is clear - Morrowind was great, Oblivion was boring and Skyrim is unplayable. The consolisation of gaming is absolutely detrimental to the quality of everything - graphics, content, gameplay, controls, gui, ... Where will this end?

Now, all good games have come and gone and what is left is rubbish. Now I am really not looking forward to all the "new releases" and have to buy my games at GOG. Maybe, just maybe there will be a new installment of the STALKER series and it will be as amazing as Shadow of Chernobyl or Call of Pripyat. But when it comes to other games, I can just say: "No more sequels, please!".

Next-gen gaming

Well, well. After playing Dragon Age: Origins I thought that there was still some hope left for new games. But I was woken up from this nice dream by the harsh reality of what I saw today and yesterday.

I am talking about Battlefield 3 and Dragon Age 2. For Battlefield 3, I just watched some gameplay videos from the single player campaign yesterday, after it had been released in the US. Wha... what is this, am I watching Call of Duty: Black Ops? No? But it works the same, I mean - interrogation, then playing "your memories"... whoa. And the gameplay itself is just enemies shooting at you, more enemies, someone grabs, you "PUSH THE MIDDLE MOUSE BUTTON!" flashing, lots of in-game animation playing - to the extent of losing track of whether you are still in control or the game does everything for you. Oh yes, Call of Duty, nice. Except CoD is not nice at all, it is barely a game! I was expecting something like Battlefield: Bad Company 2 but this caught me by surprise. No fun, everything "dead serious" but it is just ridiculous, not realistic. Oh yes, firing the AKS/74U with an accuracy of 20cm at a distance of 20m - just wow. It does not have to be completely realistic but at least a little bit of consideration would help, if everything else is so "serious". No no, I am not going to play that game, thank you.

And what is this? Oh yes, it is the latest greatest RPG - Dragon Age 2! WOW! That must be amazing, DX11 graphics, a successor to DA: Origins... what else can you hope for? I do not know if you can "hope" for this but you start a new game, are given a choice between a warrior, a mage and a rogue (OMG you can EVEN choose your sex!) and you are hurled into the game. Well, "game"... you are shown some weird videos and then an in-game scene with interrogration. Wha... INTERROGATION? AGAIN? Nooooooooo! No no no, this is a joke, right? Unfortunately, not. The guy in that chair is again reminiscing, talking in the same way like the guy in Battlefield - "yeah, I'm cool". Then you get bumped into the game.

I will spare you lengthy descriptions of what can actually be ruined in an RPG. I will just sum it up - from a great RPG with a unique atmosphere, storytelling, dialogues... they just whipped up a terrible modern "action" RPG for consoles - for the masses. Characters talk like they are the "coolest guys" - yes, like the smart-ass you can run into everywhere these days. I do not even like my own character! Even her way of talking is irritating and the movement animations! OMG WHAT is that? I thought I would create a great elven sorceress (well elven, you cannot choose to be an elf in DA2 - and thank the Maker for that! Elves look disgusting in DA2!) but I am playing as a smart-ass modern city girl who is cosplaying as a mage. There goes the immersive experience... oh yes, just add some combo moves in DA3, will you? That will be PERFECT for the target audience.

I forgot to say one thing. One more thing... the gorgeous DX11 graphics. The latest technology, it must look... in some places worse than Origins? Yes, I mean that. And the game is stuttering weirdly even though I am playing at "30 FPS". I guess there are 30 frames per second but nobody cares that two or three of them take 100ms to render (each)? Even the facial generation system was apparently rewritten because I am not able to create such a beauty like in Origins. Basically - beauty is nowhere to be found in DA2 and you are lucky when you manage to create an acceptable face (as long as you do not look at your character's head from the side).

If I take DA2 as a mindless waste of time then yes, it is usable for that purpose. But as a great role playing experience, it fails miserably.

I am shivering already at the mere thought of Dragon Age 3! I will not touch that even with a long stick!

Internet (in)security

Maybe you have head about the Iranian "hacker" who gained access to several certification authorities and is now issuing certificates any time he wants. Well, maybe it is not one hacker, who knows... but the fact is, people should be really concerned. This incident absolutely undermines the trust anyone has ever put into companies offering SSL certificates. You can never know if you are accessing the site directly or someone is routing you through a proxy and is decrypting and intercepting everything you send and receive. Like your bank account, e-mail... just anything.

Well, is it not a bit surprising? The problem is that this approach to internet security is completely wrong. You download a browser and it already has some root CA certificates installed. Thus, it automatically approves all SSL connection to sites using certificates issued by these authorities. What is even more silly, most "modern" browsers even verify these certificates online, against some database. This goes against all security principles! First, certificates have to be delivered by a separate channel. Or at least certificate fingerprints. A good example (well, the only one I know of) is Fio Bank www.fio.cz . When you open an account with internet banking there, you will get terms of service with the fingerprint of the valid certificate. This document also tells you to check the fingerprint always when visiting the site. Thus, you will know that it is the original certificate and not a fraudulently issued one. But why to do this in such a complicated way? Can the browser not check this automatically for you? Of course it can! You just have to get rid of those root certificates!

Unfortunately, this is not an easy task to accomplish. It differs from browser to browser, some browsers use certificates installed in the OS but usually they are built-in. OMG, built-in certificates! Just HOW can they do something like that? If the certificates need updating, you have to update the whole browser! That is completely stupid. Not to mention the fact, that you are not able to choose which certification authority (CA) to trust. They just force those CAs onto you - and nobody asks you anything. It gets even worse. Not all CAs are included in every browser, in every operating system etc.. This means that some CAs get an unfair advantage over others, just because their root certificates are distributed widely. It makes you wonder whether these CAs give some "generous donations" to the interested parties from time to time...

Since the scheme is so rotten, it is a good thing to get rid of these "authorities" altogether. Again, this is not as easy as it may seem. I am using Mozilla Firefox and I thought that it uses system certificates. That I will be able to simply delete the directory /etc/ssl/certs and be done with it. Wrong! Firefox has certificates built-in! I clicked away through the long list in Preferences, finally clicking on the "delete or distrust" button. Unfortunately, all SSL sites stopped working and Firefox did not give me any option to do something about it. Fair enough, when I opened the Preferences window with certificates again, they were all there! It just distrusted them, it did not delete them! Well, it cannot delete them since they are built-in. I tried various things, even emptying the user-local database with certificates but nothing helped. After half a day of investigating, the answer finally emerged: remove libnssckbi.so. And it works like a charm! Now I am able to approve website certificates myself, SSH-style. When I first open an SSL-enabled website, I get the usual warning page from Firefox, but then I can examine the certificate, check whether I am being redirected and if everything it fine, I download and approve the certificate. When I open up the same site again, Firefox is now happy and everything is fine. If I get the warning page again, it will mean one of two things. Either their old certificate expired and they installed a new one or someone is redirecting traffic and using fake certificates. I can check the certificate saved in Firefox and if it was not nearing its "valid until" date, I can be extra suspicious and careful. Certificates can be downloaded and inspected using the openssl command line tool.

So, everything is working and I can go to sleep. Or is it? It would still have been too simple, I see. So as it seems, Firefox Sync is not working. Probably because of a missing certificate somewhere - but when I open about:config, search for the sync server and try to open it up in Firefox, it does not give me the option to download and approve the certificate. Therefore in this case, you have to do it the hard (manual) way. Using the openssl utility, we can download the certificate like this:

openssl s_client -host server.example.com -port 443

Just copy/paste the certificate between -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- and -----END CERTIFICATE----- (including these two lines) into a text file somewhere and then you can import it into Firefox using the appropriate window in Preferences. But do not forget to change its trust settings and mark it as trusted! I do not know why but Firefox automatically distrusts imported certificates. Do they think I am stupid enough to import a certificate I do not want to trust?

Well, that was it for Firefox. Thankfully, I do not need other web browsers. I just know that Opera has built-in certificates too but it is a big, statically-linked blob so removing shared libraries is not possible in that case and there is no source code available for modification. Maybe someone who is really good can tweak it in a hex editor but I for one will not use such a binary blob.

New developments

I have not written anything for quite some time but that is merely because I have not been able to organise my thoughts. I wanted to write something a few times but then I realised that I did not know how to begin and what exactly to write about.

Well, I will fix this issue shortly. Today, I will show you some neat developments in my home.

The first thing is (well, was...) a computing "server" with ~7 TFLOPS. It was a pretty weird machine because it was a mix of high-end and low-end components. It had the most crappy AM3 CPU I could buy (Sempron 140 I think), 2GB of DDR3 RAM (just because 1GB modules were out of stock) and a crappy (unfortunately, I found out only after I bought it) 700W Fortron Everest PSU. It also featured a cheap 4 GB USB flash drive. But it also included a fine MSI mainboard with four PCIe 16x-size slots (two of them were actualy 8x but I did not need them and even if I did, it would not have any impact on performance). The most interesting thing about all that were two ATI graphics cards, a Sapphire 5970 and a 5870.

It was running Gentoo Linux, which I pre-compiled and installed on the USB stick on my PC.

At first I had it running with my Fortron Black Power 550W PSU from my PC because it took a bit longer for the PSU to arrive and surprisingly, it worked like a charm. I was really amazed about the quality of the 550W PSU - running the system with those two monstrous graphics cards! However, when I installed the 700W PSU, it was not working as expected. After a couple of minutes running at 100%, the PSU simply shut down. I tried this a few times but it simply would not work. In the end, I took another PCIe power cable from the 550W PSU and installed it into the 700W instead of using a Molex cable and it started working. The conclusion is: The 700W Everest PSU is a piece of crap. How come my 550W PSU was able to flawlessy operate under such high load when the 700W PSU was shutting down in exactly the same cable configuration? The only good thing about this PSU is its design - I quite like the blue/gold colour scheme with a transparent fan, but that is about it.

On to the mainboard. It was an MSI 790FX-GD70 maiboard and its main advantages for me (apart from four full-size PCIe slots) were buttons placed directly on the mainboard. I was not intending to place it in a computer case so this was really something I appreciated. I could conveniently power it on or reset it, even without a case.

I cannot say much about the CPU. It ran well, I manually lowered the voltage but unlocking the second core was not very successful. The whole system was freezing when I ran a kernel compile. I did not really need it, even though sometimes the extra core would have been nice for distcc applications.

And finally, the best part. The GPUs were amazing. They produced so much heat that it was almost unbearable during the hottest days and I had to disable one GPU of the 5970 (that is a dual-GPU card). But I just loved the sound! Unfortunately, it was getting quite noisy when both cards were installed and running (the 5870 was really quiet in comparison to the 5970) so I solved it by placing a 92mm case fan on top of the cards, which was blowing air downwards between them.

After a month and a half, I sold the cards for the same price for which I bought them and I will also sell the rest of the setup after I do some more testing on it (I should test an older graphics card and maybe it will have to serve as a replacement for one of the PCs at home for a few weeks). It was a fun month and I loved the cards but... why did I not keep them? That is simple - because there are almost no games that would be able to utilise their potential. For the time being, the EVGA GTX 460 SC I have in my PC will be more than sufficient for all gaming needs.

What to do with the excess heat? Just defrost some muffins...

The ghost of... what, Fukushima?

The nature of people is really strange. They are ignorant for years about a topic - and then, suddenly, as something happens, they jump up and start looking very knowledgeable and/or outraged.
People people, what have you been doing?

When I was in high school, I wanted to study nuclear physics and later work at a nuclear power plant. It fascinated me, so I was reading books (and later articles on the internet) about nuclear reactors, radiation, waste etc.. I am also collecting elements from the periodic table, so I have a couple of these "nuclear babies" at home. Nobody was really interested in these topics a year ago, not counting the anti-nuke fanatics who think that we actually do not need nuclear power plants and if we shut them down, we will live a happy life. Please be realistic. There are too many people on this planet for this to be feasible. If you want to shut down nuclear reactors, tell people to have fewer children and in a hundred years maybe, you will be able to start shutting them down.

Well, that is beside the point but I felt I should stress it anyway. What is more important: people are going crazy because there was an accident at the Fukushima I power plant in Japan. People are panicking, thinking that this is the next Chernobyl and what not. But the reality is somewhere else.

The fact is, this cannot be even remotely compared to what happened at Chernobyl. Moreover, the Chernobyl disaster was caused by complete ignorance of safety procedures and a total lack of experience. The effects were then aggravated by the unfortunate construction of the reactor itself. But even though the reactor was poor (even by 1986 standards), such an accident could have been avoided. The reactors in Fukushima I power plant are not very advanced and new but they are of a completely different construction. However, if the reactor vessel broke and the core would be exposed, the radioactive release into the atmosphere would be comparable to Chernobyl. It would still be lower, because there is no graphite inside the reactor, but it would be terrifyingly high and completely on par with Chernobyl.

But the situation in Fukushima is almost laughable when compared to Chernobyl. Many people are very inconvenienced (having been evacuated from their homes) and tens of workers receiving radiation doses higher than they should (which increases the risk of cancer somewhat). The real radiation around the power plant has not been really measured so I cannot comment on that - but it will probably not be that high and the majority of people who were evacuated will be able to return home. This was not the case with people evacuated due to the Chernobyl disaster.

How many people have died because of radiation in Chernobyl, even in the first month alone? How many people were not evacuated in time and subjected to high doses of radiation? When I was small, I thought everyone had died there. Yesterday I learned that actually the majority of people are still alive but... the death toll is huge. Tens of thousands of victims who died and hundreds of thousands suffering effects of radiation. Of course the authorities today will acknowledge and regret the personal losses of people - but when you compare it to Chernobyl (moreover, where the authorities acted as if nothing had happened), it is like a grain of sand. People tend to forget one more thing: Chernobyl was completely fine. But Japan suffered a very strong earthquake and tsunami. We should be happy and say that today's nuclear technology is extremely safe and continue using it while it is needed. For some countries like Japan, there is no alternative. For many other countries, there is no cleaner alternative. If Japan shut down its nuclear power plants, it would be sent back to the feudal times. Unfortunately, there are so many people living in today's Japan, that were this the case, the majority of population would simply starve to death.

What happened in Japan was very unfortunate. But the damage was caused by the earthquake and tsunami, not a nuclear accident! And that, in itself, is quite fortunate - the land will not be inhabitable and people will be able to start their normal lives again, sooner or later.

Oh yes, one more thing. How come, there is no money in the world today to build a containment structure for Chernobyl for one billion dollars, when 18 billion (not counting inflation, which would further increase this number) was spent to build one in 1986? Are we so much poorer, compared to 25 years ago? I do not think so... but money today is wasted in completely idiotic ways. Billions of dollars are being burnt by the war operations in Libya and elsewhere in the world, for example. Sadly, today's world is not too different from what it was during the cold war - in some ways even worse.

The crysis of gaming

I have recently tried out Crysis 2 and this has led me to write this entry. I am not excited about the game at all. Rather, I am quite worried about the future of gaming in general. You can see it in several places and in several ways. I was looking forward to Crysis 2 because I played the original Crysis and Crysis Warhead and those were reasonably good (except for the boss fights in the end which were simply irritating). And I really loved the graphics. With all the hype around the next incarnation of this series, how could I be not looking forward to it? When the beta (or what was it) version leaked, I did not want to play it because I expected it to be unfinished and it was DX9 only anyway... so I waited for the final game. I tried it and - OMG. Intro totally messed up - it was not that I did not know what was going on (like in Crysis 1), I was majorly confused. Some infection, chaos, then some aliens, occupation, wtf? It did not make any sense. Then I started playing. Hmm, not bad, the lighting is nice. But what are the insane system requirements? How come my "mid-tier" system is giving me over 30 FPS on the max graphics settings? Was not someone from Crytek saying that I would need a really high-end system to be able to play it on max settings? Like SLI, some high-end CPU etc.? Hmm, seems not to be the case. After a while more I finally understood. It was not even making good use of the hardware I had. Mediocre texture detail, (almost?) no normal mapping in the environment, absolutely no parallax mapping, particle systems cheap - they look good only because the sprites are well-made. But they are completely flat. Same with walls and other things. This was to be the ground-breaking new-generation graphics? And the biggest shock came when I turned on status display on my GPU to look at the real framerates and GPU usage. It showed the renderer version too: DX9. You have to be KIDDING! Even Crysis 1 had DX10 support! The only good thing about the graphics are the lighting effects. But of course, because you cannot do much more with DX9 and you have to use workarounds for all complex operations anyway. And come on, that motion blur is plainly disgusting. I turn it off with a 3rd party app and say "much better". Unfortunately, when I looked at distant objects, I realised the true reason behind motion blur. Distant objects are rendered at half the native resolution (in my case 1920x1080). This means they are pixelated and overally ugly! Crysis 1 had amazing detail in distant objects, now what is this?

Well I could get over the lower-quality graphics (even though there had been so much hype about it) but what I cannot digest is the gameplay. It is an astoundingly boring console shooter where you do nothing but get overwhelmed by hordes of powerful enemies, some of which cannot almost be killed and stuck with a nano suit with super-fast energy depletion. The weapons in this game have a nice design but that is all about them. All of them are the same, they behave the same not to mention they are completely useless - high fire rate and laughable damage. Grenades are almost useless because their kill radius is about 1m. They were very weak in Crysis 1 already, but here they seem like a total joke.

The characters in the game are absolutely shallow, not interesting at all and all they can do is get on your nerves. After an hour or two of gameplay, you stop taking the game seriously and just laugh at all the glitches you can find on your way. Oh yes, and you try to sneak around all enemies without firing a shot because that is a complete waste of time.

Crytek screwed this one up. And all because of seeing lots of money being made on console game sales. The original Crysis was not available for consoles, only for the PC because the hardware in game consoles sucks. Console manufacturers update the consoles like once in five to eight years - even I upgrade my computer more often! Consoles are usable only for casual gaming because of their target market: people who just want to buy a "thing which will run games" and do not care about the rest. They do not want to get the best game experience, they just want to have fun. Unfortunately, the number of such people is very high and developers are often blinded by the vision of great income from selling console games. In reality, they need to buy expensive dev kits, licences and a big cut of their profits goes to the pocket of the console vendors. Contrary to what many think, closed platforms are not a gold mine. We can see this situation in portable gaming as well - for example on mobile phones. Even though the hardware is fairly powerful now and even if you do not have powerful hardware available, you can make a fairly complex and compelling game. But developers do not care about this - they see the numbers of smartphones sold, they see a "low level" of piracy and they want to get rich and fast. So they make a product for casual gamers, which in my eyes, is total crap. I try out such games and sooner rather than later, get bored. So even though I have such a powerful device in my pocket, I end up watching anime on it because the games there suck.

And things are getting worse by the minute. With the advent of "tools" like game salad (or what is it called), everyone wants to make "games". The market gets flooded with tons of total crap, just look at the AppStore, the Android Market or look around the web at all the flash doom. Are real gamers doomed? People who want to get into the game, who want to feel like they live there and get absorbed in an another world, do they have nothing to look forward to? I fear so. Maybe there will be a game or two released in a couple of years which will be fairly good but that is all. Call of Pripyat from 2010 was awesome. But another game released in the meantime that I would like? No. Just go out and see for yourself, the mess we gamers are in.

War? No no, we are just destroying things in your country...

The recent situation in the world is very interesting. We have come to a time when attacking another country, which does not pose any threat to you, without a declaration of war, is completely fine. I mean, this is outright crazy. Just because a civil war erupts where you cannot even say who the "bad guys" are, does this give the world superpowers a right to intervene?

Of course it does, because there is oil in that country. It is not at all about "supporting oppressed people" or some other humanitarian facade. If it were, the great US, along with France and GB (who seem to be very "righteous") would have attacked North Korea a long time ago. People in North Korea are far worse off than people in Libya! Why not save them? Oh of course, there is no oil nor other valuable resources there. And another point - North Korea is dangerously armed and probably has some nuclear weapons in their possession. Nah, NK is out of the question. Let us put out the ruler in Libya so that we can take a nice share of the profits from the oil that is produced there.

What is the UN thinking? Why did other countries not say NO to such an illegal act? How can the US attack a foreign country without the approval of the Congress? The unimaginable has just become reality. I really wonder why, of all countries, did Russia not stop the insanity. Well, probably they just do not care at all. Why did the UN intervene at all? It is not like the army started killing off civilians just like that. No, those "civilians" started destroying property and arming themselves - by stolen weapons from army warehouses. If they wanted war, they have war. They can enjoy it as much as they want.

The rebellion in Libya does not make any sense. The rebels did not even make their demands clear. What do they want? What did they want? Nothing. They wanted the leader to step down and leave the fate of the country in their hands. But why? I really do not know. They probably thought that he had been ruling the land for too long. Or some other such nonsense. Because to be clear, and that pertains to all other arid Arabic countries as well, people there can be glad that someone is taking care of them. Well, "freedom" is a nice thing - but it becomes secondary when you do not have anything to eat and drink, when you have absolutely nothing. Food is subsidised by the state in Arabic countries - if it were not, it would be much more expensive than it is now and people there would starve to death. But the rulers give people some share of the profits coming from oil in form of subsidised food prices. Okay, let us throw that ruler out and put in the great "democracy". Democracy just means that more people get their share of the pie. But on the other hand, nothing will force them to give up their earnings and pay for food for others. I know it from the situation here... people who get to power exploit everything they get their hands on to and other people have to suck it up and pay their debts. They use "state finances" in whatever way they like and it is then up to people who really earn something to pay.

People in Egypt and Tunisia live from tourism. It does not matter who rules there, it will not make much difference. But Libya along with other countries with valuable natural resources, are different. People, blinded by their naive vision of freedom, want to overthrow the rulers. But they do not see far ahead. They do not - and cannot - anticipate the things that will come. So yes, let the US, GB and France invade your country and take the resources there, disguised as an "investment company" who will invest in the oil fields. Such is the reality of this world. It is not about helping the weak, it is only about making more money.