Alpha CPUs are pretty obscure these days, and they also seem to be obsolete. This architecture is a load-store or RISC design, and it was one of the first 64-bit ones out there. It was largely optimized by hand, just right when CPU designs were starting to be automated, leading to competitive performance. There was a version of Windows NT released for it, and its floating point performance was superior to x86.

Fallout: New Vegas is an interesting kind of game, and not quite all in the good way. For some, it's the only game they have on their neglected Xbox 360. For others, they wanted more Fallout 3. And New Vegas is sort of that, but not really. There is much less emphasis on the karma system, in that it hardly affects anything, and more emphasis is placed on your relations with another person's faction. If a town doesn't like you, the people won't be friendly, and if they hate you enough, they will start shooting. Last summer, I decided that I would replay it.

In this second installment of the CPU register series, I take a look at the Itanium CPUs. Intel and HP designed Itanium throughout the 1990s. Intel hoped that it would be the successor to the old x86 architecture, with a bonus of not being legally obliged to share these secrets with anyone else (AMD specifically). When it went on the market in 2001, its performance was not competitive with x86, and was super expensive. While Itanium had x86 emulation, it was not fast enough to be useful. At the time, AMD was busy at work expanding x86 to 64-bit, which proved to be the winning strategy.

Sorry, it seems that I've been slacking off the shooter promise for a bit. Let's get back to work with the next F.E.A.R. installment.

I've never really looked closely at the individual registers upon which most of my computing is done. I stay comfortably above that stuff. But I've been curious of late, so I looked, and I got lost, but I don't regret it.

Broken Age is the game that, for the longest time, was known as the Double Fine Adventure. Unfortunately the man behind all of this, Tim Schafer, cannot get publisher funding for a game to save his life. It was Kickstarted a long time ago, and it did well. So well that it made crowdfunding a viable method of fundraising for... pretty much everything.

This morning, while perusing the web as I do, I visited Datachomp, the blog of Rob Sullivan. I originally started reading over a year ago after being linked there somehow through one of Scott Hanselman's activities. I read yesterday's article, I Am a Bad Blogger. I realized that I share several opinions with this man with regards to blogging and attitudes thereof. Let me respond to his points one at a time.