Some pictures

“While the researchers tested their system on only two vehicles, the authors say that they have “no reason to believe that the issue is industry-wide.” However, due to the ubiquitous nature of the ODB-II port, they probably have no reason to think it isn’t industry-wide, either, but they chose not to say that.”

Read the full story at The Inquirer

Download the 16 page documentation HERE

Then about three months ago I went ahead and updated my system but decided to keep my current nVidia graphics cards in a bid that nVidia would have the long-awaited direct X11 compatible card just in time for my savings to catch up and order to purchased one.

looks like this card is going to be released tomorrow according to many sources. my savings however runs a little short. This card will be mad expensive so I think I will sit on the sidelines for now and wait for the cards drop about $100

let me list down interesting sources.
1. Geek Smack has a interesting photograph of the GPU next to a coin for size comparison. Click here to take a look and keep in mind there is over 3 billion transistors inside the chip.
2. Gizmodo has a blown up image off the chips die. Click here to take a look.
3. Endgadget has a detailed list of specifications here.

and finally have a look at this video

IMEC reports that they have developed a device that can interpret brain waves into words.  they call it the Mind Speller. You can read more about that HERE.

They have also mentioned the ability to interpret brain ways and detect user emotions for the purpose of feeding this information back into games. should really check out their website and see how many projects they have merging human bodies and technology to work together.

http://www2.imec.be/be_en/home.html

You can read the blog HERE.

Nintendo has announced that they will be releasing a version of their Nintendo DS with the capability of displaying 3-D without the need of any glasses. I don’t think that I will go out and buy a Nintendo 3DS ( although I might) but the main thing that has me a little excited is all the brand-new 3-D technology for televisions and computer screens require glasses. The fact that Nintendo is making a system that does not require any glasses may mean that we are a lot closer than I had thought to moving into 3-D projection without any visual aids.

we shall see in a couple of months exactly how visually appealing this technology really is on a cheap and portable gaming device. For all I know it may just be a fancy video capable hologram which is still a huge step up!

Anyway been spending a bit of time on Grid and just wanted to share my experience. Lets get my system configuration out of the way first.

AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 Ghz
G.Skill DDR3 at CL8-10-10-28 1600Mhz
XFX 8800 GT Alpha Dog OC edition in sli configuration
MSI NF980-G65 mother board
Logitech G27 wheel
Grid downloaded via steam and should be up to date

I’ve had a great experience at time with this game but very upset at other times with this game. Believe its a year and a half old and its had 2 updates but still at times seems like a beta version released to the public.

The user interface is confusing and maybe this is due to the console feel this game seems to have.  For example there is a maze to get online. You go to multiplayer, online, ranked/unranked/or private. If you select ranked/unranked you then have quick match which just dumps you onto a session or customer session which allows you to filter by setting on the server and dumps you on one that matches your filters and if it cant find one it gives you the optin to create one.  Create new session to create a new server. If you select private you can select to join a session or create one which requires you setup a password.  Notice there is for starters no way to search for you friends on a public server, and no list of public servers to select from.  This makes it nearly impossible to find a friend online and game with him on a public server. After you have joined a server you need to make sure you read the bottom of your screen for further instructions like press shift to go ready or ctrl to select a different car.

While we are on the subject of online play there seems to be issues sometimes with unable to connect errors, getting kicked for no reason automatically by server. I know a lot of people are experiencing same kicked issue as I see people get kicked while gaming all the time.  Occasionally you get lagged and your car seems bounces backwards a few feet then continues forward or jumps ahead a few feet.  Chatting happens in a text chat box and players need to press home to view it or be in a race where it is displayed on right hand side of screen. After many online games and attempts to chat only 1 player ever responded leading me to believe most players do not even know the chat box exist or care to check it.

Another example of not so intuitive interface is setting up a joystick. There is yet again a maze to go through to find controls and when you get there you have the option of either default or custom and no indication that you can use custom to setup your joystick. Then you need to go through a sequence of keys to setup your joystick. Again make sure you are reading bottom of screen for instruction.

The only way to skip the intro at the start of the game is pressing enter. Not Esc, space, or any other key. For new players this may not be immediately obvious.

In order to exit the game you need to hit Esc until you at the main menu and select exit. So for example you just finished racing and want to get out of the game you will wait for menu to load then hit esc several time and then select Exit. And sometimes it seems to lock up the system on exit.

Decals and stickers on the car in the garage tend to disappear on your car. They are still there just not displayed sometimes do to some graphics glitch.

As far as game play it seems very well put together with couple of very annoying glitches.  The force feedback at the start of a map sometimes doesn’t work and will not work through out the rest of the map. When it fails it seems to fail several maps in a row. Restarting the game seems to sometimes fix it. I also tried boosting the force level from the default 50% to 60% and that seemed to have made it work on the next level loaded but not sure if that was just coincidence.

Another annoying glitch I’ve seen come up is trees and their shadows start flashing rapidly. I’ve checked their forms and claim to have fixed this issue but I’m still seeing it.

Despite all this I have been pretty addicted to the game. The 95% of the time its working its great. I sure hope Grid 2 will fix all the glitches.

Turns out 2Million people get Deep-Vein Thrombosis (DVT) per year and out of them 300,000 die. Not so funny any more.

Get more information HERE.

First thing I did was connect a PS/2 keyboard and that seemed to work okay. I made sure that legacy support for USB was enabled in the BIOS and could not find any settings in the BIOS to enable USB keyboard support on boot. It has been quite a while since I’ve ran into a motherboard that does not by default support a USB keyboard. I believe the last time I express this was back in the AMD K6/Pentium days.

Believing that a new install was necessary I inserted my Windows Vista 64-bit business install CD. In the process of booting the setup it would lock up on a blank black screen. I thought that might be a problem with the CD so rather than using the backup CD I fetched the original but had the same problem. Then I thought maybe the Windows Vista was not properly recognizing the hardware especially since this hardware is fairly now. I went ahead and inserted my original Windows 7 install CD but that also would not start successfully.

At this point I’m thinking each one of these installs and might already configured install of Windows Vista 64 on my hard drive all seem to be getting stock just before graphics get loaded. This could mean that there is a power issue or a problem with the video cards. I disconnected my video cards and used the onboard video  instead but that also had the same exact problems. I disconnected the new power supply and connected my old Antec 650 W power supply but had the same exact problem.

Now thinking maybe there’s a problem with either the memory, processor, or motherboard. Maybe even an issue with one of the drives but this didn’t make sense. I went ahead and swapped out the memory with the memory that I had purchased for my friend (Corsair DDR3) but had the same exact problem. I then went ahead and swapped out the processor with the processor that I had bought from a friend which is identical to the one I had purchased for myself but had the same problem. I swapped the IDE cables to make sure that wasn’t the issue and also try to run the hard drive by itself and the CD-ROM by itself but had the same problems. The hard drive by itself would still get stuck when Microsoft Windows line started to fade in and the Windows setup CD would get stuck on a blank black screen rather than reporting back that there was no hard drive found for the install.

Now I’m convinced it’s got to be the motherboard. This time so I went ahead grabbed the second motherboard that had purchased my friend and installed my processor and my memory. I connected my drive and my CD-ROM. Finally I connected my power supply and guess what. I had the same exact problem.

Now my head is spinning. I’m at my wits. I connect the hard drive by itself and it has the same problem as before. I put in the install CD and have the CD-ROM by itself and it locks up the same place as before. Just for fun I tossed in a Ubuntu Linux live CD and that worked perfectly. I USB keyboard works, sound card worked, desktop loaded, mouse works, I mean everything.

In the process of diagnostics before I had noticed that when loading Windows Vista in safe mode it would get stuck just after it loaded diskcrc. But if there was a problem with the hard drive then why wouldn’t Windows install load from the CD? and if there’s a problem with CD-ROM then why did the us Linux live CD load up perfectly?

Finally as a last-ditch effort I went out and purchased a SATA drive. The system did not detect a SATA drive connected after I installed it. This motherboard has six SATA adapters. In the bios there is only 4 listed. I just happen to connect to SATA number 5 since it was the easiest one to connect to. I reconnected the drive using SATA number 1 and the rest worked fine.

I still cannot make sense out of everything. In between every change made sure that the jumpers on the drives were set up appropriately and the one thing that stuck out was when I had my hard drive connected alongside with the CD-ROM on the same IDE cable it would take a couple of minutes for the post screen to complete. But if either one was connected on its own as a master the post screen would complete and a split second.

I hope there is a update for this motherboard to correct the IDE issues I experienced and enable support for USB keyboard on boot.

More coming as I play with this and get everything working. Its already proving to be tons faster then my old setup but then again considering my old setup was a Athlon 64 4000 single core with 2GB of DDR ram vs the new quad core with DDR3 it should be faster. I was seeing a big CPU bottle neck then which seems to be removed now.