1. No 3rd party browsers on Windows 8 for ARM
Microsoft have made some excuses about battery life and security, but with IE’s track record this seems quite laughable. Unsurprisingly Mozilla and Google are not happy.  I worry about where this indicates that Microsoft thinking is going.
source: DailyTech

2. Windows Media Center is now a paid for extra, despite being unchanged!

Microsoft have done nothing to update Media Center, but have removed it from all editions, and it is now only available as a paid-for addon for Windows 8 Pro.  So if I upgrade from Windows 7 Pro to Windows 8 Pro it sounds like I stand to lose my perfectly working and paid for Media Center – and have to pay extra to get it back, unchanged!  A total joke.
source: AnandTech

3. Audio codecs going missing

Lost along with Media Center are various audio codecs.  The excuse this time is that “ultrabooks” don’t have optical drives.  Yes – and that’s the major reason I have no plans to buy an Intel approved “ultrabook”.  Again – paying extra for what previously came as standard is regression not progression.  If the price has come down then it will be a different matter, but that’ll happen around the time hell freezes over.
source: AnandTech

So, I’ve finally got back to OpenTTD and got back to scenario making.  I’ve spent a few weeks tinkering with different ways of generating the best heightmaps and have settled on a cubic function.  The basic problem is that OpenTTD only supports 16 different heights.  If you scale this evenly to your overall terrain then you get rather large increases in height before you actually go up a level in the OpenTTD world (e.g. – the UK’s highest point is Ben Nevis at 1344m.  Divided into 15 this is 90m per height increase).  This doesn’t produce a terrain that seems realistic (e.g. the pennines between Manchester and Sheffield are only 5 OpenTTD tiles high at maximum – it is easy to build a rail line right over this!).  The first solution is to use more appropriate height increases for each level, but this results in the top of all hills and mountains appearing “carved off” which is far from ideal.  I realised that as you get highest, the amount of land at that height decreases dramatically.  E.g. there is a lot of land between 0m and 50m above sea-level, but very very little between 1000m above and 1344m above.  Giving each height equal importance isn’t necesary.  I realised I could use a scaling factor which has the effect of reducing this sharp peak effect.  Basically what this means is that the heightmap is more sensitive to real height changes at low altitudes – so we get lots of detail at low altitude where most of the land actually is.  We still take account of higher peaks though and don’t carve the top off anything.

The real heights which results in an OpenTTD level increase in the cuba heightmap are

20, 70, 120, 170, 230, 290, 340, 410, 490, 570, 670, 780, 900, 1090, 1610

As you can see, 5 levels cover the first 250m real meters, 4 levels cover the next 250m, 4 levels cover another 500m and the final 2 levels are for heights above 1km.  From both a visual and gameplay perspective this seems to provide a optimal solution

Hopefully feedback for this scenario will be positive (and so will my own playing of it) – if so I will be use this improved system for a new release of the UK scenario

Links

• The Scenario, Heightmap, Heightmap for Google Earth, the original DEM and the excel spreadsheet used for calculating heights as explained above are all available on our downloads page.
• The Scenario (v 1.00) and the Heightmap (v 1.00) are also available from BaNaNaS, or via the in-game interface
• Discussion thread on TT-Forums

Release 1.00, 3rd April 2012

• Licence – CC-BY-NC-SA v3.0
• Populations 1/250 of real figure
• Uses enhanced (cube function) heightmap from SRTM4 data
• Compatible with OpenTTD 1.1.0 upwards
• Requires ECS Vectors
• No other NewGRFs enabled

• Approx 80 cities

• 4 Banks – in the only towns with big enough populations
• 5 Breweries – http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/breweries/brewers-directory-0-54.htm
• 0 coal mines
• 3 Oil refineries – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_refineries#Cuba (Havana, Cienfuegos, Santiago de Cuba)
• 1 Oil rig – off north coast – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-16642286
• 0 oil wells on land
• 3 gold mines (placetas, santiago de cuba, Pinar del Rio)
• 1 steel mill (las tunas)
• 0 iron mines
• lots of farms / fruit plantations – 30% of land area used and 20% of population work in this
• 3 shipyards (havana, santiago de cuba, guantanamo)
• 2 tourist centers – varadero beach, cienfuegos
• 0 vehicle factories
• 0 power stations

• Animal Farms?
• Chemical Plants?
• Factories?
• Fishing grounds?
• Forest?
• Furniture factories?
• Glass works?
• Paper Mills?
• Printing Works?
• Sand Pits?
• Sawmills?
• Textile Mills?
• Tinning factories?
• Water Supplies?

Firefox 11

• Not many changes of significance
• Addons can by synced and firefox can import from chrome
• Changelog

MPC-HC 1.6.1.4235

• Mainly bugfixes
• Support for RealVideo/RealAudio, SIPR, VP30/31, WMV3 DXVA, ALAC
• Changelog

LAV Splitter 0.50.1

• Various fixes
• Changelog

Media Center Master 2.0

• Lots of new features

MCEBuddy 2.1.5

• Dymanic Range Compression levelling
• Drag n Drop support
• audio and video stream selection
• Changelog

Adobe Flash Player 11.2

• Multithreaded video decoding

1. Start menu without button, without 3rd party software

• Right click on the taskbar
• Go to toolbars and “new toolbar”
• Paste the following: %ProgramData%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs and click “select folder”
• Right click on the taskbar again and select “Lock the taskbar” (which will unlock it)
• Use the vertical line of dots to drag the “programs” entry across to the far left
• Double click on the vertical line of dots to shrink the menu
• Right click on the taskbar again and select “Lock the taskbar”

2. Full start menu, via 3rd party utility

• Download ViStart
• Install.  You’ll need to give it permission to run

Credit to AskVG

Simply put – Microsoft have taken the excellent Windows 7, torn off the well balanced and integrated desktop UI and stitched on some awful Windows Phone 7 type interface.  Given that Windows 7 for desktop PCs has been considerably more successful than Windows Phone 7, you have to wonder what Microsoft were thinking.

Another way of putting this is to wonder why Microsoft seem so desperate to put a Phone/Tablet UI into a laptop/desktop PC environment.  They don’t seem to realise that the very BEST thing about a proper PC is precisely that it ISN’T a phone or a tablet.  People that want those kind of interfaces will buy those kind of devices.  Furthermore – people that want limited choice and childish shiny interfaces have already all bought Apple products and wont be coming back.

Unless they change course I suspect that all microsoft will do is alienate the power users and amateur techies and drive them to Linux (or in a few cases Apple).  In the longer term this may prove a bigger miscalculation than MS realises.  If you have moved to linux yourself what are you likely to do when you friends, family, neighbours and all those other people who rely on you for tech support ask you what they should run on their PC in the future?  If they have to learn a totally new UI they might as well learn the one that you yourself use because you can help them with it.  And assuming that is linux, it wont be all that hard to persuade people to move to a FREE alternative, esepcially given that current linux UIs are much more similar to windows 7 than windows 8 is.

As far as Windows Server is concerned, I don’t know if the same crackpot changes have been forced on the UI there, but I can only hope sanity set in.  I’ll be trying it soon and will update this post accordingly.

In the meantime, I recommend sticking with Windows 7, and hope by the time Microsoft pull the plug on Windows 7 support they have decided to go back to a proper desktop UI.

Update

I have posted an update with details of how to restore the traditional start menu

• MCEBuddy 2 final got released.  Since 2.1.2 it supports remuxing without recoding and offers various features that MC-TVConverter doesn’t.
• Firefox 10 got released.  11 is due in 2 weeks time.
• Hack7MC published a nice article about a replacement for Media Center Studio called Media Center Themer and how to port MCS themes over to it.
• VLC 2 got released with full BluRay support.

The Blackgold does a great job at getting freeview HD and its a dual tuner.  The Compro is a single tuner and only supports DVB-S, which means many freesat channels are now unavailable.  I’ve been really impressed with the Blackgold, and I like having a mix of freeview and freesat so that a problem with one doesn’t mean no TV, so I decided to look for a DVB-S2 and DVB-T2 card.  The obvious option was the blackgold BGT3600 which has a dual tuner for both (along with a cable tuner).  I’ve pre-ordered one which should turn up towards the end of February with luck.  This will provide me with a total of 7 tuners which should be more than enough for the foreseeable future.  When I’ve had the card in use for a week or 2 I’ll write up some thoughts about it and drop a link in here.