Archive for March, 2010

Ugh! I totally forgot something important in my article about Google this morning. Though thats okay because it was a pretty long rant already, however at this point I am posting an abnormal number of times in a single day…

Some Italian high school students uploaded a video of an autistic classmate to Google video. Let me start by saying this is terrible and cruel, and I cannot even imagine how cruel bullying must be in a post internet world. Google complied with the Italian law enforcement and handed over the details of the users who uploaded it. This is correct practice. If someone breaks the law, even if its over the internet, they are prosecutable, and content hosts are responsible to comply with law enforcement. I have done this many times and complied with Canadian law enforcement on some very interesting cases.

Apparently though this is not enough in Italy. Four Google Italy employees, including one who had left the company in 2008 were arrested, of which 3 were convicted of violating the videoed boy’s privacy rights. The courts demand that Google should have vetted the privacy of the content that was uploaded before sharing it with the world. REALLY? I mean are they serious? I’m sure they must realize how many videos are uploaded to Google/Youtube/etc every minute of every day? And to check to make sure EVERYONE in the video has signed a release as to their privacy? Heck its not feasible at a few videos per day, let alone the 20 hours of video uploaded to Youtube alone every minute of every day. This would be stupid coming from an armchair politician bitching on an internet forum, let alone the policy makers of an entire country. Seriously this worries me about the sanity of the law makers and future of the country.

It doesn’t stop at video, it could be pictures uploaded to Facebook, of which there are over a hundred million PER DAY. Should Facebook check EVERY photo to make sure nobodies privacy is being encroached upon? Get a clue!

My other complaint is why does every local government think they should be able to police the internet? I think Google should just pull its local offices out of Italy and then just let Italy decide if they want to block Google or not. Let all these insane countries play internet nanny for their citizens, maybe they can get a bulk deal on Cisco gear along with China and Australia… Hey Italy thanks for Ferrari but no thanks for your draconian attempts at internet policy!

Read Google’s own blog post on the matter…

So I didn’t think I had an essay in me today, but after reading about how Ubisoft’s new uncrackable DRM was cracked in a day I just had to rant a bit.

A bit of background first. Ubisoft is a game developer who makes games that I largely don’t care about. Their most recent DRM (Digital Rights Management, previously known as copy-protection) required a constant connection to Ubisoft’s server farm while playing. If the connection dropped, your game would be paused until it came back. That means if your connection is flakey, you aren’t going to have a good time; if Ubisoft connection is flakey, you aren’t going to have a good time; if there is a major internet deroute, you aren’t going to have a good time. I chose to ignore those who don’t have a persistent internet connection because this is 2010 and thats just barbaric! It’s awful DRM and makes for an awful user experience.

DRM in the PC world is largely anti-user. PC game publishers deliver games with compatibility issues solely due to DRM, and in that sense, DRM is awful. However I have a problem with the crowd that thinks DRM is bad because piracy is good and that software should be free.

More background though. I spent my early years in the pre-internet days trading cracked games on BBS’, followed by my high school and university years spent in a top-level cracking group releasing video games. This may seem hypocritical to now have a problem with software piracy but let me explain. Back in the day, the cracking scene was a very small group of individuals, at first hundreds, then thousands. They were kids competing to see who could crack a game first. It wasn’t really about free software, it was a game itself. A mere drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of millions of people who steal software nowadays. Thats the problem. Piracy is ubiquitous with software and media amongst the current generation of high school and university students.

A generation of kids have grown up consuming all the software and media they can handle for free. Movie rentals? Why bother, just hit up a torrent site. Borrow a friends CD to see if you like it? Why bother, hit up any number of p2p sources. Need a new distraction from exams? Just download a dozen new games and see if you like any of them. The problem is that people expect everything for free on the internet. Many people argue that these people stealing the software/media wouldn’t have purchased it anyway. This is partially true, people now consume a lot more media and software than they’d purchase, but they would have purchased some. The problem is that piracy has become so pervasive in the internet culture, many people aren’t buying anything. Adults who pirate games will buy the ones they like, but thats our generation. The younger generation has grown up not buying media, they will continue to buy nothing. Thats right, I am asserting that this current generation is not pirating games as a form of try-before-buy, they just want free games…

People get angry that PS3/Xbox360 games are too expensive, they are not. SNES and N64 games reached $90-100+ CAD in the mid 90s. $100 10-15 years ago was a lot more money than it is today, so $70 in 2010 money isn’t really that bad… It is suggested that another business model is required. High quality games cost money to develop, a lot of money. More money than could be generated through ad supported software, so that model won’t work. The open source model has worked for amazing software packages like Linux, Apache and MySQL, and indeed would work for decent games given you could find talented artists, musicians and writers with enough free time; but the bulk of people are going to reach an age where they want to use their free time for something other than another job.

So my argument is that people nowadays just steal too much, and too many people just buy nothing. Maybe another business model is required for software sales, but that model does not exist. We are a capitalist society, most of us earning a living enjoy that, whether we are empathetic or not to those who don’t. The real problem is that PC DRM in its current incarnations are not the answer.

DRM on the PS3 is great. People argue that it stops homebrew and personal backups, but these are niche. Homebrew is nice, but there are lots of great platforms to write emulators and run linux on. The greatest of these is known as the PC, you already have one. After all, your PS3 was sold to you as a video game console, not a personal computer. Personal backups is a term heavily abused. Some people have this notion of personal backups that dates back to the time of floppy discs, which did readily wear out. DVDs, don’t, unless there is something drastically wrong with your hardware. However the majority of people who claim to desire personal backups just are saying they want to pirate games.

In the end I obviously don’t have a solution. My only point is that both sides demonize the other stupidly. Wide spread piracy is not acceptable, nor is DRM that does nothing but hurt legit consumers. Another sales model for games would be acceptable, but changing the culture that demands everything for free is likely a better solution. Until then, PC gaming will continue to die.

(Sorry for the bold, I just feel ranty)

I don’t have a really good idea for an essay like blog post, this week has been quite busy and my brain is a bit scattered. I’ll throw out some short anecdotes and blerbs about Google though.

First off, I migrated my personal email over to Google’s hosted domain service. This is something I had wanted to do for a long time, but laziness had prevented the migration. To be fair I had been forwarding my email through Google for their superior spam filtering prowess for years anyway. The interface for creating and maintaining services in Google Apps is, as expected, very polished. I was mostly impressed with the way Google handles distribution lists, which they call groups. A lot more powerful than our old vpopmail alias. And as anyone who has ever used Google’s hosted mail will tell you, they have seven MX servers, a touch more reliable than my single qmail install on an ancient webserver. Plus admining mailservers is rubbish work! Just ask anyone who has had the misfortune of doing it professionally…

So one of the things I’ve enjoyed for years is vanity searching, ego searching, whatever you want to call Googling (previously Altavista’ing and previously Yahoo’ing) my own name. Sarah, Tom and I also have a bit of search result rivalry. I generally win the top search result for Kavassalis (though this differs depending on search location). This is mostly due to the fact that Google likes me hoarding and cross linking all the Kavassalis.* domains. It also loves me due to some links from blogs and stuff like flickr and other social networking junk. Amusingly though, Sarah is the top search suggestion, followed by Tom, followed by a conspiracy nut who’s name is unfortunately often dislexic-ally misspelled as Kavassalis. This by my logic means that Sarah’s site should come up first, since thats most likely what someone will be looking for. So obviously Google’s metric is not quite perfect. I am pleased however that (in .ca) kavas is enough to get kavassalis as a suggestion. Ah the joys of having a last name that really does just belong to members of your own family…

Now onto the buzziest Google product of late, the Android. I really don’t like the Android. Well maybe thats a bit harsh. I am disappointed with Android. Let me start by explaining why before the cult of (XYZ phone/operating system/game console) groupies flood my inbox with emails telling me how stupid I am. Lets segway to video games for a second. Console gaming and PC gaming have always had a vast gap in overall experience in a post DOS/Amiga world. Simply put, console games just work. There is no weird artifacting because you a strange video card, there is no slow down because you don’t have the newest CPU, and there are no random crashes because it doesn’t like some random driver. Common hardware, common resolutions == better development and user experience.

Back to phones though, Android’s spec should have included classifications on CPU, GPU power and screen size. Maybe call those early 320 x 480 528mhz devices Android Class1, and these 600 x 854 600mhz devices Android Class2. Device capability fragmentation is going to make the overall Android experience limited, and certainly will not allow it to become a casual gaming and consumer software consumption platform the way the iPhone has. Some phones like the Motorola Droid are absolutely phenomenal. But even if you follow the proper non pixel based UI procedures, you may produce apps that are unreadable or too slow on something like a lesser HTC Dream. (I mean the res gap on some Android phones is the same 2x factor between most netbooks and some higher-end 15″ laptops) For tech savvy users this won’t be a problem, we’ll understand why something isn’t working well or looking right, but we aren’t the bulk of consumers, we don’t push a platform to prominence. Remember, where there are consumers there will be good software. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the Android has bad software, Google’s first party apps are fantastic in fact, but I’m not going to see the plethora of high quality third party software without a big user base willing to buy software. Android will become the #1 phone platform, without a doubt, but if users don’t feel confident that software they buy will work right, they aren’t going to bring the dollars. Open source projects will always be more prominent on the Android platform than others due to the nature of how the Android project is maintained, but before I am flooded with hate mail from the Slashdot crowd, the majority of open source mobile/desktop apps are just not up to UI snuff with their commercial counter parts. Fact. (GIMP sucks, ok?)

I’m very interested in seeing how (if) Apple will tackle this problem, and I think it may end up causing some heartache in iPhone land. Already there is a good memory and small CPU bump between the 3G and 3GS, while developers can detect and profile their code for each phone, most don’t. And frankly doing so is a great deal of added work, plus users really aren’t going to like a heavily degraded experience either. This means that on most cutting edge apps, there will be tons of bad reviews from 3G and a plethora of iPod touch owners complaining of lag and stutter. Fast forward to the next gen iPhone. I full well assume Apple is going to up the game and release a phone with the same chip as in the iPad, the 1ghz ARM7, Apple a4 or whatever it’s called. I believe they will have institute requirements/recommended flags in the Appstore, which sucks, but frankly leaving it completely up to developers isn’t really going to be a very good user experience either. This problem is 10-fold more difficult on the Android since there are TONS of third party phones. I’m not sure there really is a good solution. The phone market unfortunately won’t be happy with the same CPU/GPU/screen size in a device for 5-10 years like handheld gaming markets…

Really I’m not slagging the Android that much, there are great Android phones, and I’d certainly love a Motorola Droid as a dev platform, ssh client, email platform if it weren’t CDMA… The experience will be frankly no issue for savvy users, but I’d not buy my mom an Android, but I do plan on buying her an iPhone.

I guess thats all I have to say about Google and Google products for one day. I’ll close by saying my car shopping is weighing on my mind. However a new and stand-out choice in the world of very fast, 50/50 weight distributed, RWD sports vehicles has arisen. 2007 550i are only slightly more expensive than 2007 335Ci due to the magic of disproportional depreciation, packing in more power and WAY more tech and luxury. I’d definitely be happy with a 550i, nothing says eco and gas friendly like a big v8… nothing quite sounds like it either!

(Included photo is IEOY winners, illustrating they’re all either small and economical or wonderful BMW engines :P)