The days of crappy networks in my college seems to be endless, and it just went crapper than ever. Yesterday I was trying to upload a small image (my current avatar in /g/), using my usual image hosting site, imagehost.org. Oddly enough, this site seems to be blocked with Websense by the network admin, under the category "Personal Network Storage and Backup". I wonder what kind of genius is that, it's far beyond my comprehension.
This Websense filtering has been used before over here, with numerous revisions, but it has never been as nonsensical as this. "Personal Network Storage and Backup" supposedly belongs to file hosting sites such as MediaFire, RapidShare, MegaUpload, DepositFiles, etc. It makes sense if they are trying to improve the Internet surfing experience by not allowing the users to leech large files from these sites, thus saving bandwidth.
But why image hosting sites are blocked as well? Many of us rely on these services to upload and view images all over the Internet. And most of these images doesn't go larger than 100MB, due to the website's restrictions over unregistered/free users. C'mon, do us some justice. There's no good reason why image hosting sites should be blocked.
I tried a number of websites and keywords that I expect to be blocked, the results are pretty much weird. Popular file hosting sites were blocked, as well as popular image hosting sites. XS.TO, which I used to upload the image just now, isn't blocked, probably because its less popular. The keyword "porn" is blocked, under the category "Streaming Media". Keywords like "sex", "nude", "warez", "hentai", etc. haven't been blocked, which is indeed weird. So they're stopping us from downloading stuff, which might be important/legal, but allow us to view porn sites?
I can't get YouTube, Metacafe, or Google Video to load though, so I don't know the results for the time being.
Websense is never a welcome addition to me. It just worsens the Internet experience. Now since file hosting sites are blocked, I can't download regular cool stuffs from there anymore. Just throw the web filtering nonsense away and give us better networks instead. We pay for that.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Monday, September 14, 2009
Busting Ghosts - Frame by Frame
A friend of mine just lend me his copy of Ghostbusters: The Video Game a few days ago. Although most licensed games end up bad, I'm actually looking up to this title, since the gameplay video looks kinda sweet in X-Play.
And so goes to the installation. It was all fine until it said the installation failed in the end. Oddly enough, I found the files in my Program Files folder, and actually able to launch the game. Perhaps it's the crappy installer by those pirates I guess (sshhhh!).
So the game launches, and I reach the main menu. And... it lags like hell. More like a slightly movable slide show. Whatever. I tried to play career mode, regardless of the lag, hoping it would be fine there. It was indeed better, but still unplayable. I set the resolution to 800 x 600, then it becomes playable, but not entirely smooth either.
This mystery of extreme lagging has puzzled me. My rig is a good 2.6GHz dual core CPU, 4GB of DDR2-667 RAMs, and a factory-overclocked 9600GT with 512MBs of DDR3 memory. What could've gone wrong? Vista sucks? Unlikely, since my friend also uses Vista, and his game was really smooth.
I almost gave up playing the game, until I briefly re-played Call of Duty last night. I tweaked the game (Call of Duty) via Nvidia's Control Panel to give the old game justice some time ago. Then I realized, maybe I should check something in that control panel.
Indeed it was. The culprit is the global 3D settings were set in a way that not all games are compatible, perhaps a mistake I've done some time ago (I should set profile setting instead of global, which affects all 3D apps). Reset to default settings, and voila, problem no more. In fact, other games seemed smoother than before.
So yeah, next time, try looking up into the control panels if there was any problem with your games. Perhaps you can find a solution there. Now the only problem is beating up those tough and swarming marshmallow minions. Wish me luck, because it's really hard.
And so goes to the installation. It was all fine until it said the installation failed in the end. Oddly enough, I found the files in my Program Files folder, and actually able to launch the game. Perhaps it's the crappy installer by those pirates I guess (sshhhh!).
So the game launches, and I reach the main menu. And... it lags like hell. More like a slightly movable slide show. Whatever. I tried to play career mode, regardless of the lag, hoping it would be fine there. It was indeed better, but still unplayable. I set the resolution to 800 x 600, then it becomes playable, but not entirely smooth either.
This mystery of extreme lagging has puzzled me. My rig is a good 2.6GHz dual core CPU, 4GB of DDR2-667 RAMs, and a factory-overclocked 9600GT with 512MBs of DDR3 memory. What could've gone wrong? Vista sucks? Unlikely, since my friend also uses Vista, and his game was really smooth.
I almost gave up playing the game, until I briefly re-played Call of Duty last night. I tweaked the game (Call of Duty) via Nvidia's Control Panel to give the old game justice some time ago. Then I realized, maybe I should check something in that control panel.
Indeed it was. The culprit is the global 3D settings were set in a way that not all games are compatible, perhaps a mistake I've done some time ago (I should set profile setting instead of global, which affects all 3D apps). Reset to default settings, and voila, problem no more. In fact, other games seemed smoother than before.
So yeah, next time, try looking up into the control panels if there was any problem with your games. Perhaps you can find a solution there. Now the only problem is beating up those tough and swarming marshmallow minions. Wish me luck, because it's really hard.
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