Archive for the ‘Reviews’ category

HP dv6t Select Edition Notebook Review: First Impressions

July 24, 2010

Please excuse me while I geek out about my new laptop…

My work now involves some really significant number crunching, to the point that I was regularly using all the CPU and RAM of my previous laptop, and was then struggling to get anything else done while the calculations were running. And then they would crash. It also helps that I will soon need to renew the license on one of the programs that I use, and the student price is only available for a given CPU once. And of course, there’s a game coming out on Tuesday that I really wanted to be able to play.

I decided from the outset that I was going to aim for a high-end system this time. I spend a ridiculous amount of time in front of my laptop, for both work and fun, so I wanted a quality machine. After lots of web-searching and comparing, I decided on the HP dv6t Select Edition. It had impressive specs, and there was a $400 coupon to sweeten the deal. Here are the full stats:

  • Processor: Intel Core i7-840QM processor (1.86GHz, 8MB L3 Cache) with Turbo Boost up to 3.2 GHz
  • Windows 7 Home premium 64 bit
  • Hard Drive: 500 GB 7200 RPM
  • RAM: 8 GB
  • Screen: 15.6″
  • Resolution: 1366×768
  • Approximate weight: 5.5 lbs
  • Graphics: 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon(TM) HD 5650 Graphics + HDMI and VGA ports – For Quad Core Processors

The computer arrived on Thursday, so I’ve had a little time to get it set up and get used to it. Here are my first impressions:

First of all, this is the sexiest computer I’ve ever owned. I really like the (mostly) metallic case and the subtle texture on the lid and hand rests. I saw somewhere that similar HP designs had a “pinkish” hue to the metal, but the dv6t SE definitely does not.The computer also feels solidly built, with no “wiggle” in the screen hinges and no flexing when picked up by the corner.

Click for a closer view of the lid texture.

Also, I love the “chiclet” keyboard. It just feels good to type things on it, and it is big enough that I don’t feel cramped at all. If you’re considering this laptop, I highly recommend paying the $25 more for the backlit keyboard. I didn’t realize how useful this feature would be, but I have used it quite a bit.

I do have a few complaints. The biggest problem is the track-pad. For some reason, HP decided to forgo having separate buttons to click and instead made the lower left and right corners of the track-pad clickable. This would be ok, except that those areas also still work as a tracking surface. When I’m using the track-pad I like to have one hand pointing and the other clicking, but this doesn’t work so well when the buttons also act as the pointing surface. Also, you have to push the corner “buttons” down a lot harder than I’d like. The track-pad is also supposedly multi-touch sensitive. I haven’t played with this feature much, but have found it to be pretty unresponsive and therefore useless for scrolling around web-pages and documents.

The trackpad is the worst feature. Click to see its weird all-in-one buttons and the nice texture of the hand-rests.

Basically what I’m saying is that if you get this computer, be prepared to use a wireless mouse. That’s what I normally do anyway so the trackpad is not that big a deal for me.

Another very minor complaint is the row of keys on the far left side of the keyboard. I am used to the control button being the lowest left one, but on this laptop, to the left of ctrl is a button that brings up a calculator program. I find myself occasionally hitting the wrong button and having a calculator pop up instead of, say, copying text with ctrl+C.

One other downside is that it does come with quite a bit of HP crap-ware. But most computers come pre-loaded with software that you’ll never use. Once you get the worst offenders uninstalled or at least turned off, it’s fine.

I really like the keyboard, though I sometimes hit the calculator button instead of Ctrl.

Other factors that might be a problem for some users are heat and battery life. I sprang for a very fast Intel i7 Q840 processor, which puts out a lot of heat when it is working hard, and eats up battery life. I haven’t formally tested the battery, but I wouldn’t count on more than 2 hours. Again, that’s not a big deal for me because I almost always use my laptop near an outlet. And my previous laptop’s battery life had dwindled to about 7 minutes, so this is luxury for me! There is a larger battery than the one I have, so there’s always that option if you’re considering this laptop and want more battery life. The computer itself is very sleek but I was surprised at how chunky the power adapter is. Both the cord and the brick are pretty hefty. Again, this might be an issue for some but not a big deal for me: I’m used to my slightly-heavier Toshiba with a less-bulky AC adapter so the total weight will be similar.

Here's a close-up of the light-up HP logo and texture on the back.

Coming back to heat: yes, this computer runs hot. For normal use it’s warm but not uncomfortable to use on your lap, but if you’re doing anything CPU-intensive, this computer (and any notebook really) should be on a hard surface to allow plenty of air-flow. When I was running work programs, it got mighty toasty.

But holy cow is it fast. It’s noticeably zippy at basic usage tasks, like installing and opening programs, but what really blew me away was using it for work. Not only is it faster, but since I got the 64-bit Windows 7 with 8 gigs of RAM, it easily was able to load my entire dataset for work without breaking a sweat. My previous laptop had to break the data into chunks and half the time would crash if I tried to load too much of it at once.

Bottom line, I am really loving this computer. It looks and feels really nice and has awesome performance to match. The only major downside is the trackpad, and I typically use a mouse anyway so it isn’t a big deal for me. There are some other nitpicks, but overall it is very nice. If you’re looking for a powerful, good-looking notebook computer, I recommend the HP dv6t Select Edition. Especially if you can find any special offers from HP (the coupon I used has expired, but they seem to do a lot of coupons, so look around if you’re considering buying from HP!)

And finally, here is a view of the bottom, which is black plastic rather than metal. I had a hard time finding bottom views when I was shopping for laptops, so hopefully this will be helpful for others:


Review: On the Beach

July 11, 2010

Last week I reviewed the post-apocalyptic horror novel I am Legend. As it so happens, I am Legend was a rather short book, and I finished it only partway through a rather long weekend of traveling to and from a wedding in Wyoming. I was already in a post-apocalyptic mood, so I bought a copy of the classic post-apocalypse novel On the Beach by Nevil Shute for my Kindle.

On the Beach was a very different sort of novel from I am Legend. Where I am Legend is lots of action, On the Beach is a quieter story about people facing the inevitable. The premise for the story is that World War III has happened, and the many nations in the northern hemisphere have destroyed each other with nuclear weapons, particularly with Cobalt bombs designed to produce incredible amounts of fallout. Now, nearly a year later, the northern hemisphere is dead  and the fallout is drifting south with atmospheric circulation. The novel is set in and around Melbourne Australia, the southernmost large city in the world, and therefore the last to die.

Shute does a really nice job developing a handful of sympathetic characters, each of whom deals with the coming end in their own way. I was also impressed with how plausible the war in the northern hemisphere sounded. The end of the novel is no surprise, but it was still a tearjerker to read. I suppose my only complaint was that the characters all seemed to accept their end pretty gracefully. I think it’s true that some people would, but I am sure others would be frantically building fallout shelters and hoarding supplies, even in the face of certain creeping death from the radiation.

The scariest thing about this novel is that the only thing about it that is science fictional is that the cobalt bombs were actually built and used. The idea was there, and the nuclear arsenals of the US and the USSR were certainly large enough that the type of destruction described would be plausible if some of the bombs were cobalt bombs.

I should note that this novel, which was written in 1957, shows its age. It’s not a bad thing, for the most part, but it just “feels” like it’s from that era. Gender roles are the most obvious sign of the times. One of the main characters is a very independent (read: drunk) young woman who gradually shapes up and begins to take stenography classes. Men do most of the more active, interesting stuff in the novel. It was also annoying that the wife of one of the main characters was so ignorant. It served a purpose in the novel of course, because by explaining to her, the author was able to explain to the reader, but it still grated a bit.

Somehow, despite its very sad and grim ending, this novel manages to still not be as dark as I am Legend was. A constant theme throughout the story is how people come with the inevitable by pretending that it isn’t happening, and how really, maybe that’s ok. They continue to go about their lives. Society doesn’t devolve into violence the way that many post-apocalyptic stories depict. In a way, that was refreshing.

So, if you want an original, classic and touching look at the end of the world, I recommend On the Beach.

Review: I am Legend

July 5, 2010


Note: minor spoilers below.






Review: Bioshock

April 8, 2010

When Bioshock came out, I heard rave reviews about its revolutionary gameplay, deep storyline, tough moral choices, arresting visuals and general awesomeness. So of course, when I decided to give in to my old gaming addiction and get an XBox 360, it was near the top of the list of games I wanted.

Well, I just finished playing and sadly, I was pretty underwhelmed.

The premise of the game is that in 1960, your character’s plane crashes in the middle of the ocean. You survive and find a bathysphere that takes you down to Rapture: an undersea city built by a man named Andrew Ryan as a sort of Randian laissez-faire paradise.

Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?


I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something
different. I chose the impossible. I chose…


A city where the artist would not fear the censor.
Where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality.
Where the great would not be constrained by the small.
And with the sweat of your brow,
Rapture can become your city as well.

-Andrew Ryan

But immediately it becomes clear that all is not well in Rapture. Everyone you meet is insane and tries to kill you, thanks to rampant addiction to ADAM, a substance that allows people to regenerate and rewrite their genetic code using “plasmids”.

As you progress through the game, you collect various weapons as well as various plasmids that give you abilities like telekinesis, or the ability to throw lightning, fire, or even swarms of insects at your enemies. To gain plasmids, you need to get ADAM, which is collected from dead bodies by the “little sisters”: little girls who have been mentally programmed to extract ADAM with wicked-looking syringes. The little sisters are protected by “big daddies”, which are huge, groaning, heavily modified humans in armored diving suits.

The little sisters are impervious to all of your weapons, which made me wonder why exactly they need Big Daddies to protect them. But in any case, once you have dispatched a Big Daddy, there are two ways to get ADAM from the little sister. The first way is to “harvest” her, which gives you lots of ADAM but also kills her. The other way is to “rescue” her, turning her back into a normal little girl. This gives you less ADAM, but you are repaid with gifts and assistance from the rescued girls.

The decision whether or not to kill the little girls is really the only moral choice that you make in the game, and it doesn’t change much, other than the ending cinematic.

A little sister prepares to harvest ADAM from a corpse, while her Big Daddy protects her.

The plot of the game is almost entirely backstory. There are some interesting twists toward the latter part of the game, but really the game boils down to killing everyone in each level and perhaps collecting some items in the process that allow you to progress to the next level. In the process you come across various tape recordings from key characters that reveals some of the events prior to your arrival at Rapture. These eventually come together to reveal what sounds like an interesting story, but my complaint is that the player is not really an active part of that story! In fact, much is made in the game of how little the character has to say in what he does.

I would much rather have seen the game set before all hell broke loose in the city. The player could choose which of the various factions to side with, and there would have been lots of interesting moral choices to make that would actually shape the fate of the city. But instead everything has happened already and you just run around trying to survive and make sense of it. By placing the player in a mostly passive role, it took away a lot of the potential depth to the story for me.

The game’s strongest point was definitely the visuals. Rapture is undeniably a cool-looking place, with a neat combination of art-deco and steampunk influences. The environment is very “elemental” with lots of fire, water and electricity, and ice and this is mirrored in some of the plasmids that you can collect. And of course, the Big Daddy/Little Sister combination is visually striking.

Since this is ostensibly a science blog, I should say something about the science of the game, but really, this is more fantasy than science fiction. I think we all know that you can’t genetically modify someone to shoot fire out of their fingertips and that a city at the bottom of the ocean is not really practical. Also, you can’t genetically modify an organism “on the fly” by jabbing a syringe in its forearm. Any given individual is pretty much stuck with their original genes, at least as far as my understanding of genetics goes.

There is one glaring error that I have to mention, even though it is a nitpick. At one point, you encounter a bunch of ice, and you are told that the ocean water is so cold that when it leaks into the city it freezes solid. This is total BS. The bottom of the ocean is above freezing, and as you may remember, ocean water is salty so it freezes at a lower temperature. It’s true that supercooled water can be liquid under pressure and freeze when depressurized, but it doesn’t make much sense for it to freeze when it encounters the warmer environment inside the city.

Anyway, Bioshock was a very cool-looking game with an interesting backstory, but ultimately it didn’t live up to the hype. The game itself felt quite shallow to me. The moral choice was not particularly interesting or consequential and the gameplay boiled down to killing everything on each level. The main characters were all caricatures with little depth, and the player was essentially passive, with little choice about how to proceed. Without giving anything away, I’ll also say that I found the end of the game to be surprisingly abrupt and anticlimactic (and easy).

The plasmids basically just served as a different set of guns, so I didn’t think they really changed the gameplay that much. The enemies on each level didn’t offer much variety, and the ability to respawn every time you die made it easy to just throw caution to the wind and attack without strategy until they were all dead.

Maybe my hopes were too high and I expected too much from a shooter game. I think it’s clear that I’m more of a RPG person, and maybe that’s the main problem I had with Bioshock. But then again, I enjoyed the first two Halo games. In any case, Bioshock was fun, but ultimately for me it didn’t live up to the hype.

Review: Fallout 3

March 10, 2010



















Book Review: Revelation Space

January 24, 2010

I just finished reading Revelation Space, a hard sci-fi space opera written by Alastair Reynolds.

The premise of the story is that in the distant future, when humans have spread into deep space, they discover the remains of the Amarantin civilization that was wiped out just as it discovered spaceflight. The main character, Dan Sylveste is a scientist studying that civilization, driven by an unstoppable compulsion to solve the mystery of what happened to the Amarantin. Meanwhile, Ana Khouri is an assassin who has been hired by the mysterious “Mademoiselle” to kill Sylveste and prevent him from discovering the answer. A third main character, Volyova, is one of only a handful of surviving crewmembers on a starship that holds some of the most powerful weapons ever concieved. The ship is gradually being consumed by a virus emanating from their captain, who is kept frozen in stasis to slow the spread of the infection. Volyova hires Khouri as gunnery officer on the ship, but things get interesting when it turns out that Sylveste is the only person who might have a chance of stopping the virus.

Sound complicated? It is. And that’s basically just the set-up. That little summary leaves out many of the subplots and several other characters. This book is intricate and it takes concentration to understand what is going on. In fact, I really didn’t know what was happening for large portions of the first half of the novel. I am glad I pressed on though, because a lot of the pieces introduced in the first half end up fitting together into a very bizarre but somewhat more comprehensible whole by the end.

One of the main problems is that none of the characters are particularly sympathetic or even likeable. Dramatic events occurred throughout the novel and I never really felt any emotional connection to the characters involved. Heck, two of the characters fall in love and get married and, at least to me, there was no hint of real affection between them at any point. This lack of character connection makes events that already are a bit fuzzy even harder to follow.

I think part of the bewilderment that I experienced was deliberate on the part of the author. The real driving force behind this book is not the characters but the detailed vision of the future that it portrays. Reynolds has created a future full of fantastically detailed technological marvels and he wants you to be a little bit confused but impressed by them. The line between organic and inorganic, computer and brain in this vision of the future is very blurry, and Reynolds makes good use of this. For example, at one point, competing entities do battle with one another after finding themselves both downloaded into one of the main characters’ brains. Ships are capable of manufacturing their own components, or weapons, or other ships, using that universal magic of modern sci-fi: nanotechnology. Spacesuits are no longer bulky bags of breathable air, they are shape-shifting, heavily armed, antimatter-powered intelligent spacecraft in their own right.

What I really enjoyed about this book was that the technology described was always well grounded. Reynolds in an astrophysicist, and it shows. Most of the technology described is so far beyond our current capabilities that it might as well be magic, but Reynolds has enough scientific knowledge to spin some extremely convincing technobabble. He has clearly put enough thought into the ideas to understand some of the more subtle implications. Nothing goes faster than light, suits need to refuel their thrusters, relativistic effects play an important role, etc.

As a scientist myself, the tech-talk wasn’t what got me confused. The politics and the backstory were what left me scratching my head. I wish Reynolds had spent less time on the tech-talk and a little more time fleshing out the cultures and geography and political landscape, especially as they related to the main characters and main events. It doesn’t give away too much to say that there is a political assassination at some point in the book, and I had only the faintest understanding of why it occurred and what it meant. Sylveste starts off as a political figure of some power, but it was never really clear to me why or how he ended up that way.

Complaints about confusion and characterization notwithstanding, I liked the ending. A lot of the seemingly disparate pieces finally do come together, and they form a bizarre and mind-bending conclusion that was nonetheless pretty satisfying.

Bottom line, I would recommend this book to people who like their sci-fi mind-bending and “hard”. For deep emotional connections and characterization, look elsewhere. But if you want a nice long immersion in an awesomely imagined intricate and strange future that still manages to be surprisingly convincing, I’d recommend Revelation Space.

Avatar Review

December 21, 2009







Believe it or not, this is CGI.







Go watch it. You will too.