Friday, December 31, 2004
Remembering Einstein’s “Smart Streak”
From The Economist: Miraculous visions - A century after Einstein’s miracle year, most people still do not understand exactly what it was he did. Here, we attempt to elucidate.
A good piece about Albert Einstein, his place among the recent science timeline and what/how he was thinking.
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
NBA Rejects EA’s Bid for Exclusivity
IGN wrote about the NBA rejecting EA’s bid for exclusivity, plus more dealings behind the scenes in the sports game arena.
However, unlike EA’s dominant Madden franchise, their NBA Live games doesn’t have the same sort of market share and there are multiple basketball games that compete with it and most likely would have been a moneyloser for the NBA.
After the NFL deal one non-EA publisher was able to extend their MLB deal to at least three more games, quieting rumors that EA was trying to get an exclusive deal with the MLB as well.
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Toshiba Satellite Review: First Thoughts
First thoughts: I received my Toshiba Satellite today. I ordered the massive P30 with most options upped. Huge, beautiful screen. The machine itself is a bit larger than I expected, but it’s not quite as heavy as I thought, quieter than I thought and I haven’t had it on long enough to let you know how hot it gets.
New machines are great. They always feel empty, but are fast and waiting to be filled and used. A nice, fresh start, or so I thought…
When I ordered it I called up by phone instead of ordering online for one major reason: I don’t want anything pre-installed on it. So I asked, “can nothing be installed on this machine?” “Nothing?”, the rep replied. “Just the operating system [XP Pro], that’s all I want. Can this be done?”
“I’m not sure, I’ll mark down the request.” Ok, no guarantees here, and I still expected some factory stuff, but not nearly as much as I received.
I understand that they probably have a series of pre-loaded images to slap onto a machine when someone orders it - but I know I’m not the only one who wants “nothing” - why can’t they just have one barebones image ready to use? I don’t care how many sponsors you have, this machine is still too much money to have my desktop pre-loaded with “special offers”.
I spent some time removing a good deal of crap from the machine in hopes that some of my pre-bloated registry can be cleaned up and it can load a bit faster (after I get rid of that annoying “Start Navigation” click-sound).
I then flipped on the wireless connection (has a neat little on/off switch on the side). I searched for my wireless network. 23 wireless networks found, most insecure. Fun stuff, but I logged onto my own and went straight to Internet Explorer for a Windows Update.
Windows Update found five critical updates I needed. Not bad, but from the time I ordered this to when I received it they all didn’t come out. Toshiba should either update their image or update these machines before they send them out. It’s irresponsible nowadays to send out a computer that’s not updated.
So now I use IE to download FireFox. Get a little more secure here.
Out of sheer curiousity I go download SpyBot - Search & Destroy. I update the definitions right away and do a scan.
Besides a cookie or two, it finds 5 reg entries for the DSO Exploit. Nice. I guess that’s another nice pre-loaded special offer for me.
So this got me thinking - what else is on here? Time to head over to Trend Micro for a free virus scan. So you might be thinking - with all those pre-installed programs, one has to be a virus scan, right? Yup, it’s got an evaluation of Norton, which I don’t feel like starting right now. Luckily Trend Micro says it’s virus-free.
So now I’ll continue cleaning this machine. Shame I have to clean a brand new machine that I just paid a good amount for.
A few other thoughts about it:
- I wish they did have a picture of it relative to something else on the website. It’s a big, big machine. I probably would have gotten it anyway, as this is will mainly be used at home, but I wouldn’t have been so shocked when I first saw it.
- The touchpad buttons aren’t responding all too well. Maybe they just need to be broken in, but I’d hate to have to send this thing back. I’ll give it a few days to see how it goes.
- While it’s big, it certainly uses all that room, this thing has almost everything built-in. I guess this would be more of a “desktop replacement” than a laptop. Maybe more like “a desktop that’s easy to move”.
- The sound is very nice on it.
Time to continue setup…
Edit: Yes, I realize formatting is an option, and still one I’m thinking about.
Update: Too much wasted time. Formatting.
Monday, December 20, 2004
No more BitTorrent Links on SuprNova.org
In a follow-up to: MPAA Wants BitTorrent Sites Shut Down, I point you towards The Register, which is carrying a story about SuprNova.org ending, at least in the way we know it now.
Update: the Unofficial SuprNova.org Closure FAQ
Sunday, December 19, 2004
Trillian 3.0 Released
Trillian 3.0, a multi-service instant messaging client (works with AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ, etc…), has been released today. It’s made by Cerulean Studios and is Windows-only.
It appears they’ve already released an updated build after making 3.0 final. They fixed many bugs during beta testing, but things slip, so no biggie. Still, if you don’t want to possibly upgrade soon after installing/upgrading now, you may want to wait a week or so, as I’d most likely suggest with any piece of software that was just released. I plan on installing it on my laptop “fresh” in a few days, looking forward to it. I’ve been a fan of ver 2, and some of the plugins available for it.
If you’re looking for some in-depth nerdy feedback on it, here’s the Trillian 3.0 Released Slashdot thread .
Friday, December 17, 2004
Have Fun With That Yap
CNNSI is carrying an AP story about an interview Pedro Martinez did with the Boston Herald. To sum up what they’ve titled “Burning Bridges”, Martinez criticizes Red Sox management, specifically calls General Manager Theo Epstein “arrogant”, says he’s better than Curt Schilling and he said he’d like the Mets to sign Jason Varitek and move Mike Piazza somewhere else.
Here’s the Boston Herald article: Pedro pitches his side—Ace explains move to NY Mets
This is going to be fun because if/when the Mets are a losing team again Pedro is going to start to run his mouth, and he won’t be treated any nicer in Queens than he is in the Bronx.
One has to wonder: where’s all the “he won’t be the same in the National League” junk we heard when Clemens went to the Astros? I realize, of course, Martinez has pitched in the NL before, but he’s been plunking more batters for the Red Sox. Since 1998, when Martinez went Boston, only two players have hit more batters. Tim Wakefield and Kerry Wood have each hit 78 batters, 1 more than Martinez (Clemens has 36 in the same time frame if you’re curious). But one thing Wakefield and Wood, and even Clemens, have in common - they all have more walks and wild pitches than Martinez. That and you just watch him throughout the year and it’s not hard to tell - he hits more batters on purpose. Now, I’m not judging that as a good or a bad thing. Some think you should never, ever purposely hit a guy; others call it old school depending on the situation. You can say Martinez throws at someone at the appropriate time - but that’s not the point here - it’s simply that Clemens, having less than half of hit batters as Martinez since Martinez as been in the AL, was given heat that he wouldn’t pitch the same way in the NL - where is that for Martinez? IMO, Clemens didn’t change his approach at all, and I don’t think Martinez will either, I’m just pointing out one of the differences in media reactions about each pitcher changing leagues.
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
MPAA Wants BitTorrent Sites Shut Down
Wired is reporting Hollywood Wants BitTorrent Dead and that Hollywood movie studios launched new legal action against the operators of BitTorrent and eDonkey sites.
BitTorrent megasite suprnova.org is not down at the time of this posting.
NFL and NFLPA Ink Exclusive Deal with EA Sports
ESPN is carrying the story about EA Sports signing an exclusive rights deal with the NFL and NFLPA. What this means is that team names, logos, uniforms and stadiums along with player names and likenesses are EA Sports-only now. Contrary to what some are writing it doesn’t mean it’s Madden-only, just EA-only, as EA Sports also makes NFL Street (under “EA Sports Big”).
Personally, I’ve always been a Madden fan. I skipped last season for the first time in a long time, but now that EA added support for Xbox Live and all of my friends picked it up, so did I. The game has some nice improvements over two seasons ago in all aspects of the game, but it’s hard to say it was all self-motivated.
Sega and ESPN teamed up to make a rival game a couple of seasons ago and has put together a solid product that rivals Madden in all reviews. Madden carried brand name, like Coca-Cola outselling a supermarket brand cola, and dominated the marketplace for years. ESPN wisely slashed the price of all their sports games this season in order to compete with EA. $20 compared to $50 was obviously enough of a difference to start making a dent in EA’s marketshare and EA slashed the price of Madden to $30 early in November. So now they have a rival gamemaker dipping into their sales and putting out a competitive according to most reviews. Instead of dropping price on the game permanently EA was able to slash ESPN’s jugular in regards to marketability by getting the NFL (and the NFLPA) to sign an exclusive deal for all things NFL.
Anyone familiar with the NFL is familiar with their exclusive deals. Visa, Pepsi (along with Pepsi product Gatorade) and DirecTV are all exclusive NFL partners. Anyone in a large metro area with no possibility of satellite or just anyone who prefers cable over satellite knows how irritating the DirecTV deal is. You’re a consumer with no options. It’s DirecTV or nothing (but broadcast and ESPN games). Not good for the out-of-market fan or the guy who wants to invite all his friends over each weekend.
So what good can come of this for the football video game fan? Probably nothing. I don’t think EA is suddenly going to scale back development on it’s Madden football product (or NFL Street, although with Midway not releasing a new NFL Blitz, there’s no current product comparison anyway); but without competition burning the speed of development can certainly slow down with little worry of a superior game coming out. Innovations in a competing product won’t appear for EA to mimic (and vice versa, as it could have been).
ESPN meanwhile is left to ponder whether or not they’ll even release a new football game. If they do decide to continue they’ll have to change the franchise name. “NFL” obviously needs to be dropped from it. Look for some nickname to appear in the title, like Pigskin 2K6. Phrases don’t fit well in titles and can misrepresent the game. For example, you can’t name a realistic football game “Two Minute Drill” unless you want everyone to think the game is all about the long passing game and speeding through your plays.
ESPN would then have to make up 32 team names, shouldn’t be too hard, just pick some “tough” names and some animals not used by NFL teams (example: how many times did you see the NY Knights in a generic sports video game?). Player names aren’t too hard either - but you do have to make sure that your generic Johnson on your made up Tampa team doesn’t accidentally match a position played by a Johnson on the Bucs, whether it’s Brad or Dexter.
What you do need to have, in order to have any hope of competing, is a fully customizable game, including at least these features:
- Stadium names and attributes (dome, no cover, movable roof, turf, grass, capacity, etc.)
- Player names and attributes (besides skillset, the look of the player)
- Team names and attributes (logos, uniforms, possible history)
However - that’s not the complete selling point of it - the ability to share your customizations has to be. This means you can put it on a memory card or swap with a friend online or even possibly allow people to set up spaces online to download from. Don’t worry - someone will do it. It’s the nature of sports fans. You might even see a loyal ESPN fan base split up the work and each swap a team or two until someone’s compiled all the correct NFL teams and rosters to allow others to download from.
Despite all this, it would still be tough to sell a game with generic teams and players. Besides having to do a little work to actually get the real ones in there, even if it’s just downloading them from a website, ESPN would likely need to fall back on to the generic rosters to keep online gaming fair.
In the end, fans do have to wonder about what will come from new Madden games over the next five seasons, and what they would have been like with some real competition.
Monday, December 13, 2004
RSS Feed Considerations
My biggest question right now has been whether or not to add feeds to hockeyfights.com.
I set up the first feeds over a year ago, but never released them. At the time I was trying to decide between formats. RSS/Atom, and if RSS, which version? I was planning on putting out static versions of multiple feeds in multiple formats. After observing for a year and seeing that most use RSS 2.0 - and that seemingly all readers support it, I’ve decided I can start with just that and probably run into no problems.
There are three major RSS feeds I’d be posting: articles (which should see an increase in frequency), news (which can be slow or very active depending on the day), and a forums feed for new hockey threads (should be some pretty good activity there as well).
My issues with these all revolve around traffic. hockeyfights.com receives a good amount of traffic and RSS traffic concerns are becoming more and more well known. There are too many readers out there that all schedule to ping at the same time and some people configure their own to ping non-stop. I have little desire to waste tons of bandwidth and server resources to test out RSS services (something which I do not want to take away once I add, unless the technology progresses to something different).
My issues are these:
- Should I only produce static files? My assumption is yes. No reason to have dynamic feeds and waste the resources for it.
- Should I have “smart urls” for the feeds? In other words - should I do what I do now with the rest of the main site in having the urls be extensionless? The benefit of it is being able to change site structure and feed extension without changing the url. Example: USA Today uses a flat xml file (or at least appears to be, as you can always change the extension to use a scripting language): http://www.usatoday.com/repurposing/NHLRss.xml ESPN uses a “smart” url: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/nhl/news The problem with having a smart url is that my server needs to process it. While it’s super fast and doesn’t consume many resources now - that can change if I start getting pinged by tons of people.
- Do I have the type of audience that will actually use these feeds? The largest demographic for the site is the coveted tv audience - males 18-35; stereotypically you’d think they’d be up on technology, but I’d say the crowd is pretty mixed in terms of tech-savviness.
- Do I circumvent this problem by using a service such as FeedBurner? I’m always hesitant to use outside services. Besides the possible non-professional appearance depending on how you view using domain names other than your own on your site (I’m never a fan of it for anything outside of a personal site); things like up-time are never guaranteed and I have no idea about the direction of the service. Will it remain free? If not, will there be ads in my feed or will I have the option to pay and remove them? And if that cost is more than the bandwidth I’d use hosting it on my own machine, could I move it back and have the FeedBurner url pointed to my site correctly?
Other considerations of mine:
- Currently I plan on having “teaser feeds” - that is not putting the full text into the feed. The idea of these feeds is to have people come to the site when interested. Along with that, I should point out I do not plan on having any ads in a feed such as that.
- I’m considering having the forums feed be members-only.
- If I could swing it, and make sure login security is tight, I’d like to have full-text feeds for premium members.
- Having an XML feed for team and player fighting major leaders along with a feed for the last few fights. If a site is interested, I could always design a premium (read: cost) feed for them. This would be useful to a bunch of sites out there, although I wonder how well some would be able to translate the XML and how much I would have to do to support it.
In the end it’s just trying to figure out how many subscribers and visitors I would get from the feeds compared to the cost of the feeds (and compare that to the cost of a “normal” visitor).
I’ll update with whatever decisions I come to, and if you’ve had any experiences where you’ve had to make similar decisions I’d love to hear them.
Finally Bombed
I was comment-spam-bombed yesterday. Fun stuff. Glad I’m quick with a sql statement.
I suppose I could be flattered, but I know it’s just about finding a new target, not caring how many read it, just wanting Google to crawl and help bump up their search engine listing.