Archive for August, 2007
On game save points and the tyranny of console game prices
Dear game developers: could you make it easier to save game progress, please?
I’ve gone from loving Resident Evil 4 on the Wii to loathing it, the people who wrote it, and anybody who’s met anybody who knows the people who wrote it. The culprit is a section where you’re inside a house as the zombies attack, and to date I reckon I’ve been killed a few hundred times there. Restarting that section every time is annoying enough, but when I’ve had enough and turn off the Wii it means when I come back, the save point is so far back it may well be in Resident Evil 3.
This is one of my pet hates with games, particularly console ones: the combination of a slightly too difficult set-piece and inconsiderate save points sucks all the fun out of a game very quickly.
And my other pet hate: console pricing. Bioshock’s out on the 24th, and it’s £29.99 on PC or £44.99 for Xbox 360. I can only assume the difference is the razor blade model of the console business: sell the kit at a loss and make up the difference in licensing fees from the games. But a 33% price difference between PC and console is taking the piss.
Attack of the unsinkable rubber ducks
The new Christopher Brookmyre novel, Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks, is top fun. Unless you’re into psychics or Intelligent Design.
I’m ashamed to admit I got the geeky in-joke on page 124 immediately.
Google’s giving away StarOffice now
Meteor showers
The worst thing about the current bad weather isn’t the constant rain: it’s that it means I don’t get to see tonight’s meteor shower.
I love meteor showers, and a few years before I moved to Glasgow I got to see a really spectacular one. I lived in a small town in Ayrshire at the time, and the combination of insomnia and curiosity drove me out of the house to have a look. I figured - correctly - that the nearby hills would be the perfect vantage point. Conditions were perfect too: the skies were crystal clear, and because I lived well away from any city light pollution wouldn’t affect the show. And because it was a weeknight I could be reasonably sure the back roads wouldn’t be populated by shaggers.
I jumped in my car, drove out to the hills and parked in a lay-by next to a farm gate. I opened the sunroof, wound down the windows, reclined the seat and lay back to enjoy the show.
The night was utterly silent (it was 3am, or thereabouts), and the shooting stars were fast and frequent. I think the silence made it more impressive, and before long I’d drifted into a kind of trance as the meteor storm became more and more intense. Watching the trails flare and disappear, seeing the long-delayed light from distant suns that may no longer exist, I was struck by the magic and beauty of the cosmos and the realisation that
MOO!
Jump? I damn near ended up in orbit.
It was, of course, a cow (as opposed to, I dunno, a mouse that’s really good at doing impressions, or a fox having an identity crisis). Just an ordinary cow, which had spotted my stargazing and decided to take a closer look. After watching me for a while, it decided to say hello. Hence the moo. Hence me jumping halfway out of the sunroof, cracking my knee off the steering wheel and filling the night air with the sound of a Scotsman swearing.
I’m sure that kind of thing doesn’t happen to Patrick Moore.
Google news: where the truth lies?
Google News is introducing a new feature: people and firms named in news articles will be able to add their own comments to the articles in question. Besides the obvious - how can you be sure the people claiming to be article subjects actually are the article subjects? - I wonder, what’s in it for us, the readers?
Headline: Cigarette firms “knew about cancer risk”, leaked documents show
Response: No we didn’t! The writer made it all up! Cigs are good for you, and tasty too!
Well, that’s just dandy. I certainly feel better informed now.
Surely unless Google fact-checks the rebuttals, it’s just creating a Spin Palace for, ahem, news management professionals?
Shouting “fire!” in a crowded theatre
Whenever free speech is being discussed, the old saw “you’re not free to shout ‘fire!’ in a crowded theatre” pops up. But what about discussing the best ways to start a fire in a theatre? Is that irresponsible too?
The Freakonomics blog over at the New York Times is asking, “If you were a terrorist, how would you attack?” and some people aren’t happy. TB’s response is typical:
Brainstorming clever ideas for terrorists is hardly the most effective use of your blog. You are a very clever researcher, why lend your brains to the terrorists cause? Perhaps it is true that they would think up these ideas themselves. But even if they learn one new idea, this is irresponsible.
I’m interested in this for two reasons: firstly, because I’m interested in this stuff anyway, and secondly because occasionally I write about electronic terrorism, the way terror cells use the internet, that sort of thing. So for example back in 2001 I did a piece for .net about electronic warfare, and 9/11 happened as the piece was being sub-edited. We took some things out - there was a section on bringing down planes - but that was more to do with taste and timing than a belief that terrorists subscribed to .net and would think “aha!”.
Elsewhere, I’ve blogged about or been in online discussions about terrorism and security, and long before the Glasgow airport bombers decided to target the terminal I’ve had online chats about the way in which airport queues make a much softer target than anything airside, post-security. To me, this stuff is so obvious censorship (or self-censorship) isn’t an issue - any would-be terrorist with half a brain could see it, and the likelihood of a blog or messageboard post being on their reading list is pretty remote.
That said, the current climate makes discussions about terrorism dangerous. Not so much because there’s a risk of giving mad bombers ideas (it isn’t hard to find and download all kinds of heavy-duty terror stuff), but more because of the way in which perfectly decent documents are seen as terror manuals in the eyes of the law.
Under UK law, you can go to jail for ten years for possessing a document “containing information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”. I’ve possessed documents like that - detailed stuff on cyberterror from the Chinese intelligence services, US documents outlining terrorism threats, EU research into the Echelon surveillance network, etc etc etc, all of which is widely and legally available online; they’re published documents from government agencies and related groups, not how-tos put together by cave-dwelling crazies - and I’ve written articles discussing some of the things in those documents. Under section 58 of the terrorism act, could those articles be “useful”? Could a blog discussion about potential terror targets fall under that law? Could an article naming forums where terrorists hang out fall under it?
What do you think? Is talking about terrorism useful to terrorists? Does your right to free speech stop when you discuss the best ways to start fires in crowded theatres? Should anybody writing about security or just discussing the plot of Die Hard 4.0 be scared shitless by the word “useful”?
(sorry if this is a bit rambly btw - it’s early and I’m not fully coffeed up yet)
The best health and safety video… ever!
Yes, it’s been online forever, yes, it’s been on Tarrant on TV, but it’s still brilliant: teaching health and safety through the medium of comedy gore.
It takes a while to get going, but as Pootergeek says: “it gradually turns into a comedy gorefest to rival Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
Bye bye white iPod?
iMacs go aluminium, iPhone already out… pretty obvious what the next iPod’s going to look like, isn’t it?
Quick notes on the Apple keynote: iMacs are pretty but there’s a bit of a price jump there (cheapest iMac yesterday was £679, now it’s $200 more in the US. UK prices aren’t up as I type this); iWork seems to have taken a big leap forward and will make hay while MS Office languishes in delay hell; iWeb’s new features seem to be Google, Google and Google although its new support for personal domains falls into the about-bloody-time too category; it’ll be interesting to see how the new keyboard feels, because it looks like an RSI disaster area; big leap forward in iMovie, iPhoto looks a bit better and .mac gets a long overdue upgrade; reports of Mac Mini’s death premature; iMacs going aluminium is yet another sign that the white iPod’s going to be replaced with something like the iPhone.
As for the Q&A: no questions about Fake Steve Jobs? Sheesh.
Truth in vandalism
In the small Scottish town of Girvan there’s a small shop selling tourist tat to an audience of old people: shortbread with pictures of Scottie dogs on it, plastic figurines made in China, that sort of thing. And rather wonderfully, vandals have knocked two letters off the shop’s signage so that it now appears to be called TARTAN AND WEE.
Fake Steve Jobs Strikes Again
You’ve had sixteen years to try and build a desktop operating system, and you still can’t get your shit together. Nobody wants your software. It’s not Microsoft’s fault. It’s yours. Because trust me, if you truly developed a kick-ass OS with tens of thousands of drivers and easy installation and reliable performance, you’d be winning. But you’re not. Firefox caught on, right? Why? Because it rocked.
Most consistently entertaining tech blogger? I think so.