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Alcatraz

I haven’t written much about the time I spent in the United States, and I’m not really sure why. Waiting for the right time, perhaps, or just happy to let that time stay as a memory instead of being written down and recorded. But it’s been a few weeks since I last wrote something on this here blog, and in the absence of anything else interesting to write about, here goes.

It was an incredibly warm evening in Portland when I realised we still hadn’t figured out what we were going to do in San Francisco. With The International 5 behind us and our time in Oregon rapidly coming to an end, I began flicking through the pages of my Lonely Planet guide, looking for interesting things to do. I began reading up about Alcatraz, site of the notorious prison and also the location of one of my favourite films of all time, The Rock.

There was just one problem: the Lonely Planet guide recommended Alcatraz bookings weeks in advance, as the site was a tourist magnet. I quickly jumped on the laptop of my primary school friend Martin to check on booking dates, only to be disappointed at the rather sparse selection of dates available for tours. The only really suitable tour available was one a few hours after we were due to arrive in San Francisco, which would give us just enough time to get settled into our AirBnB and then make the trek over to the area of the bay where the tour began. With our options limited and us not wanting to miss out on one of the quintessential San Francisco tourist experiences, we booked tickets, and that was that.

We arrived in San Francisco on the 13th August 2015, and according to the sign posted at the Alcatraz tours information booth, the next available tour was on the 31st of August.

I’ve never been on an audio tour before, and while Port Arthur is a pretty cool prison experience, Alcatraz is an entirely different experience. While the audio tour was good enough, I kind of felt as though I was there simply to find places I recognised by their scene in The Rock. As I walked through the cell blocks and outside I kept having these flashbacks to different scenes from the film: the cell blocks that the soldiers walk through at the very start, the older cell blocks that Connery and Cage escape from later in the movie, and the outside courtyard scene where Connery confronts Harris. Granted, the last one is at night, but the shape of the building in the background and the steps in the foreground are unmistakable.

Right down to the grates on the windows that Cage and Connery hang off to observe a missile launch, there were so many recognisable details that all I could think about were scenes from The Rock. My only disappointment is that, as tourists, we weren’t given completely free reign of the facility. Understandable, but finding the shower room where things go to hell in a handcart would have been the holy grail. Or even the operations room where the bad guys setup their command post would have been cool. Or the morgue, if it actually looks like how it did in the film.

So yeah, Alcatraz was pretty cool. Remembering scenes from one of my all-time favourite movies and being where the scenes played out was even cooler, though.

The Mac Pro Performance Question

Through some fortutious mechanism I’m not entirely sure I’m allowed to disclose, one of my worldly possessions just happens to be a pristine Mac Pro case, to suit the 2007/2008 model Mac Pro

Note: this all makes a little more sense if you read this post first.

Hypothetically, if I were looking at switching to a single or dual-CPU Mac Pro as my daily driver and gaming rig two-in-one, I’d want to make sure it performs up to the standard of my current PC. At the very least, it would have to be close enough to make me feel somewhat OK about buying into a 6-year old platform.

Before we get into this: for the purposes of all discussion below, none of this is very scientific, but in an attempt to at least have a level playing field I’m using Geekbench as the benchmarking tool of choice. I would’ve like to have seen the CPU comparison from Anandtech, alas their Xeon benchmarks don’t go very far back. While they have the Xeons available in the current model of Mac Pro, we’re not really looking for a comparison between a quad-core CPU and one that has four times as many cores.

This is the Geekbench of my current PC. Comparing it using Geekbench’s Benchmark Charts tells an interesting story. The i7 6700K scores higher than any available Mac on the 32-bit single and equivalent (i.e. quad-core) multi-core benchmarks, even beating out some early-2009 Mac Pros which have double the number of cores. Predictably, the quad-core 6700K loses to the 8 and 12-core variants of the Mac Pro in the 32-bit multi-core benchmark.

So then the question becomes, what kind of Mac Pro configuration would I have to have in order to equal or beat my current Geekbench score? The bad news is, there’s no Xeon chip currently on the market that beats the 6700K in terms of raw, single-core performance. And if we’re looking at multi-core, we really have to jump up to a dual-Xeon configuration before we get to the same ballpark figures, and if we’re looking at eight or twelve cores, we’re also looking at the kind of power consumption that brings.

Good thing we’re well past the point where CPU performance matters for day-to-day tasks, right? A single-CPU Xeon X5690, a six-core, 3.47GHz unit, scores a paltry 2423 on Geekbench’s 32-bit single-core test. That’s not a whole lot higher than the i7-930 that I upgraded from, which scores somewhere in the mid 1900s. The X5690’s 32-bit multi-core test is a little more respectable, bringing home a Geekbench score of 16627, which is at least within striking distance of the four-core 6700K, but still short.

The fact of the matter is, no matter which way you try and slice it, no CPU configuration you can put into a 2009 or 2010-era Mac Pro will measure up to Intel’s latest and greatest, at least not without incurring an extra power or heat cost. I’d expect those 130W Xeons to get mighty toasty on occasion.

But what about current-generation Xeons? Hypothetically, what if I built my own Hackintosh, put the fastest Xeons I could in it, installed OS X on that thing and called it a day? Then I’d be poor, because top-of-the-line Xeons are not cheap, and the whole reason we’re doing this is so I can technically have a Mac as my daily driver and all-in-one gaming rig on the cheap.

Secondhand Mac Pro Pricing Is Ridiculous Now

If money was no object, my dream Mac would be the Mac Pro. Back in high school, we’d have these impromptu competitions to find the most expensive computer possible. And since the Mac Pro was both insanely expensive and able to be configured to an eye-watering level of performance, ticking all the boxes meant you could get your Mac Pro configuration towards the $30,000 mark without breaking a sweat.

I’ve never actually owned a desktop Mac before. No desktop Mac has really appealed to me, and as someone who’s had a separate PC for gaming for years, having two desktop machines means I lose out on any potential portability I wish to partake in. So every time I’ve had to decide on a new Mac, the only real decision that makes sense is a MacBook Pro, upgraded as much as I can afford it to be.

So here’s the deal: I use a Mac as my primary machine, and at the moment, it’s a Late 2013, 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. It does everything, from composing blog posts late at night, to writing the daily new summaries in the morning. General web surfing, media playing, and, on occasion, I’ve played the odd game of Dota 2. Although it’s a portable machine, it almost never leaves the spot on my desk where it’s hooked up to my 4K external display, Thunderbolt dock, and all the other peripherals you’d expect to be plugged into your daily driver.

Which brings us to the other side of the equation, my gaming PC. I recently put together an almost-entirely new gaming rig for the purposes of upgrading to a more modern platform, but it’s been pretty lacklustre as far as upgrades go. For what I’m using it for (i.e. gaming), there hasn’t been any real noticeable difference in performance, which is kind of disappointing, and kind of makes me feel like I upgraded in order to keep up with platform changes, instead of upgrading because my old PC was getting a little long in the tooth.

PC performance (Mac or otherwise) has long passed the point where CPU performance makes a difference, which goes to explain why buying a machine from 2010 doesn’t faze me. In terms of general, day-to-day PC performance, the number one thing that matters these days is a fast SSD. Even then, you’re going to be hard-pressed to notice the difference between any modern SATA-based model or the newfangled PCIe-based ones, despite PCIe SSDs have much higher throughput. Again, it all depends on the kind of workload you’re throwing at them, and for gaming, the only thing that matters is GPU and to a lesser extent, CPU performance.

Which is just about where my dilemma begins. The portability on my MacBook Pro is nice and all, but I almost never use it that way. And having such a highly-specced PC that I only use for gaming seems like a bit of a waste. What if I could combine the two? I’d go from two separate computers to one, and I’d have the best of both worlds — a machine that runs OS X for my day-to-day, then reboots into Windows when I want to play some video games.

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Less Plays, More Good Clean Dota

I can unequivocally say that this was not the play required. Even though I had uphill vision of the Lion, there was an Invoker there which did his usual combo and destroyed me, and my team that followed me in.

Every now and again, when I find myself with more losses than wins in my latest matches list on Dotabuff, I’ll ask myself what I’m doing wrong. Or doing differently, as the case may be. And every now and again, usually during a particularly depressing six or seven game losing streak, I’ll contemplate giving up Dota altogether.

Seeing as we both know that isn’t an option, I’ve determined that the only way to get better at Dota is not only to play games, but also to lose them, learn what I’m doing wrong, and then improve. Sounds crazy, I know. Sometimes, part of the learning process involves looking back at replays to see what happened in a game that led to a loss, or recording a snippet of Shadowplay footage to celebrate a bad engagement turned into an eventual win.

Recently, I’ve been asking myself what I’ve been doing differently that leads to losses. And this time, I came to the conclusion that I’ve watched too much pro-level Dota, to the point where it’s influenced my own play that I no longer go for the safe kills, but go for the low-percentage, only-possible-with-perfect-execution plays that don’t work out because I only have mediocre skill.

Don’t get me wrong, watching pro-Dota is a great learning experience when you’re starting out, especially if you have no idea what’s going on and what you’re supposed to be doing during the game. But as much as you can learn from the pros, you also have to recognise, that pro-level Dota is an entirely different world from the trench.

When all your games are classed as “Normal skill”, stuff that happens in pro-level Dota are the hopes and dreams of us mere mortals. Besides most people having a tiny hero pool, we farm slower, last-hit less efficiently, frequently miss combos, take bad engagements, and perhaps the most heinous of all, are incredibly inconsistent at all of the above, which means that even without the variety of heroes and item combinations, game-to-game we can play entirely differently, as evidenced by these two recent Bounty Hunter games (the Witch Doctor was the same in both games).

So instead of trying to make “the big play”, the idea is that I play it safe, taking less risks and carefully calculating about what I’m doing. Less flashy plays, more good clean dota.

Which is all harder than it sounds, because everyone likes being the flashy player, the one that dodges skillshots with a well-timed Euls, smokes at the last second to avoid a sniper ult, or uses Aphotic Shield to avoid most of the damage from some burst ability. Pulling off an X-mark into Sacred Arrow combo might look good, but if you can only do it once the entire game, what’s the point? Might as well try and get arrow without the X-mark.

Admittedly, plays are required some of the time in order to bring your team back into the game. But it’s better to take them early game, rather than throw the game later on, and if you can’t make the play, then it’s probably better to play to your strengths at that point in time – avoiding teamfights until your carries get more farmed, or baiting out skills/items in order to secure a favourable engagement later on.

“Toxic”

When you’ve played as much Dota 2 as I have, or even if you’ve lurked the Dota 2 subreddit, you’ve probably heard of them. They’re referred to as toxic players, people who constantly flame their team mates, both due to the competitive nature of the game, the need for five individuals to work together towards the common goal of winning the game, and because everyone thinks they’re better at Dota than you are.

I’ve been there. Everyone has. When you carry has no items and it’s 30 minutes into the game, you can point this out as nicely as you want, but chances are you’re going to get an unfavourable response from someone who thought his supports should have warded better, fed less, or executed combos like your team was playing at The International.

And I get it, I do. Dota is all about winning, and there’s a chain of events that need to occur before that can happen. Your team gets ahead in farm, they take teamfights, objectives (although perhaps not in that order), and eventually, when you take the enemy’s ancient, you’ve won. But when any mis-step puts you behind and makes the game harder until the next engagement or objective, emotions run rampant and often, the response is to take it out on your teammates instead of what you should be focusing on: good, clean, Dota to get you back into the game.

you can suck at dota it's not a sin but just at the very least be a decent human being.

— Meracle (@Meracleeeeee) February 28, 2016

I’ve been told before I have a poor attitude when playing. I’ve been told I take the game too seriously, and that I’m always angry when playing. I’ve flamed team mates — both people that I know and those that I don’t, and I’m no afraid to admit that. But it makes me ashamed of myself, to think that I could say those things when “it’s just a game”, even if that game is the only thing I play with any kind of regularity, and will probably be so for the foreseeable future.

People think memes about winning via friendship and teamwork are all a joke, when in fact they’re the key to success. I had a game recently where three of us picked three different heroes at random, then proceeded to eventually win the game due to not taking losses too hard, sticking it out as a team, and coming back to win the game on the back of some good strategy and play. Obviously, not every game is going to turn out like that. Chances are you’ll lose as many games as you win, but what’s the big deal?

So before you decide to flame your team mates, puffing yourself up about how you just went toe-to-toe with the enemy carry and came out on top, maybe recognise that it was your support that put the enemy carry out of position in the first place, your offlaner that took most of the damage, and one of their supports which stuffed up before recognising that you’re the best carry in the world. And even if you where, why would you need to prove that to your team mates? We know dude, we know.

As for myself, I’m working on it. I suggest things to my team mates instead of telling them what to do, based on what the enemy team has been doing so far. I say “it’s fine” when it feels like we’re behind, and I try not to give up so easily when I know we are — after all, everyone likes a good comeback.

Display thoughts

For this photo, I tried to mirror the image quality of the display as closely as possible.

I’ve been thinking about pulling the trigger on a new display. Not because there’s anything wrong with my current one, but after the kerfuffle that was made by Dota 2 players at the Shanghai Majors over not having 120Hz monitors to compete on, I figured I wanted to see what all the fuss is about.

(There’s also the vain hope that it will somehow improve my game by a few percentage points, but that’s a story for another time.)

A little back story: since December 2014 I’ve been running with a Dell P2715Q, a 27-inch, 60Hz, 3840×2160 IPS display that was a substantial upgrade from the U2711 display I had previously. It’s pretty nice, with a few caveats: since my primary usage is with the display attached to my MacBook Pro, running it a native res means things get pretty unreadable unless I’m pumping up the size of everything. It’s fantastic when using a scaled resolution (I use a tool called EasyRes to switch between resolutions quickly), as it gives the quality of a “Retina” 2560×1440 display (3840×2160 downscaled to half that), making everything as crisp as the freshest iceberg lettuce.

But I don’t usually use it at native res, because things tend to slow down a bit, and the fans are audible all the time. I bought the best graphics card that Apple offered at the time, so maybe the Oculus CEO has a point when he says he’ll offer VR on the Mac when Apple decide to put a powerful enough GPU in their machines. (Stringent heat and power requirements mean that probably won’t happen in the MacBook Pro lineup anytime soon, as much as it pains me to say that.)

So I run my wonderful series of pixels at a non-Retina 2560×1440 when plugged into my Mac, even though text looks worse that way, and I have no more screen real-estate than I did with my previous screen.

My PC is a different story entirely. I like to think I have a pretty great graphics card in the GTX 980, which lets me run whatever resolution I like a a near-constant 60 FPS. And because I hardly play anything other than Dota, which runs on the Source 2 engine, it means I can run that game at the native res of my monitor without getting any noticeable frame-rate drops. Newer games like Dragon Age Inquisition, Fallout 4, or The Division are more of a toss up – I can either choose between maxing all the settings at a lower resolution, or turning down the fanciness for more resolution, and what’s “better” mostly depends on the game.

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Benny Ling's Bling

Computers are like a bicycle for our minds.