Tag Archives: internet

Belle de journalist

Posted by under Uncategorized

Regarding the whole Milliways info-release fiasco, I would like to thank Simon Wistow for writing the post I was going to, and thereby saving me an hour or two of what looks like it’s going to be a very busy weekend.

I particularly want to thank him for the line: “Sadly, at this point, the screaming fucktards from the Queen’s own 1st Royal Batallion of Internet Dicks arrive on the scene like a thousand drooling, poop flinging monkeys.” Hyphen needed between ’poop’ and ’flinging’ but otherwise splendid.

To summarise: there’s more to being a journalist than including the word ‘journalist’ on the info-box of your weblog; and Andy Baio is no Michael Bywater.

Body text

Posted by under sex

According to a trusted friend, apparently Websense is blocking its users from seeing this website.

Under the category ‘sex’.

I am frankly nonplussed.

I mean, I don’t think I’ve referred to any particular game as an “abortion” recently.

Idle thoughts

Posted by under Uncategorized

Big post in the works. Meanwhile, some brief updates:

Motorstorm (PS3) is very pretty but Excite Truck (Wii) is more fun. I was quite surprised how much fun Excite Truck has turned out to be.

Have you noticed how some driving games don’t include any human beings at all? Excite Truck and the Burnout series too. No visible drivers, no spectators, not an actual human anywhere. I tell you, it’s not a lack of processing power or development time. Hint: it tends to be games with big vehicle crashes.

I downloaded Mozilla Firefox yesterday in order to try out a game-based plugin, of which more anon. I now understand the point of distributed open-source projects like this: it would be too much work for me to find everybody who contributed to it and punch each of them in the face. For the record, for more than a decade I have been using Opera, which is what you get when you decide to build a browser like Firefox but hire professionals to do it.

The updated Internet channel on the Wii is very nice. Coincidentally, it uses the Opera browser.

I know I’m not going to have time for a full review of the nice-try-no-cigar RPG Contact for the Nintendo DS, not least because I’ve lent my copy to a friend, but I can’t remember the last game that included breaking the fourth wall as such an integral part of the gameplay—to the extent that when your avatar discovers you’ve been controlling him throughout the game, he picks a fight with you and you have to beat him up. Which, with the DS touch-screen, is a uniquely physical experience. The game has a lot of interesting ideas (different art-styles for upper and lower screen, a Tamagotchi element, you can continue playing after defeating the game, you can find and win girlfriends by giving them the right attention, there’s a whole level of otaku jokes, and you heal by having a nice relaxing bath) but at its heart it’s basically a succession of dungeon-bashes in search of a magic jigsaw and never transcends “interesting” to reach either “intriguing” or “involving”.

(‘Magic jigsaw’—a magic football that has been separated into pieces. ‘Magic football’—the object of a journey, search or quest, and without which the game will not progress. A plot token, but larger and often more fatuous.)

Fold

Posted by under Uncategorized

Sony has just released full details of the Folding@Home software that’ll be available for the Playstation 3 from the end of March. Folding@Home is a distributed-computing project that uses a computer’s or console’s idle-cycles to process chunks of data relating to the behaviour of folding-proteins related to forms of Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Huntingdon’s, cystic fibrosis, and various cancers. Once processed, the data is sent back to a central server for collation. It’s a very cheap, very efficient form of supercomputing.

That said, there are two problems with having it run on the PS3. First, a PS3 is not a PC. It shouldn’t have idle-cycles. There is no reason to leave your PS3 running while you’re not using it: its boot-times are fast; apart from downloading there are precious few applications that need to run when the machine’s unattended; and F@H won’t run if the PS3 is doing anything else.

Second, the PS3 is a massive power-hog. It sucks up 380W, around twice the wattage of an Xbox 360 and more than five times the consumption of the PS2. According to VNUnet, that means four hours of PS3 play will cost almost a quid in electricity. So will four hours of letting the machine run Folding@Home. That’s not counting whatever your TV drains, and saying nothing about the carbon emissions.

So the question has to be asked: is Folding@Home on the PS3 a genuine piece of altruism on behalf of Sony, or a cynical attempt to pump up the console’s feelgood factor at the expense of customers’ fuel bills and the environment? Put it this way: Sony doesn’t pre-install Folding@Home on its less-fuel-hungry but not-in-need-of-a-PR-boost Vaio PCs.

Wii want Wiinformation

Posted by under consoles, technology

In all the hubbub and furore about the commercial success of the Wii, its strengths as a games machine and its viability against the PS3, one thing’s been missed. Nintendo is about to snatch a huge crown out from under the noses of Sony and Microsoft. While the Xbox 360 and PS3 fight it out to provide the best online play, movie downloads and iPod playback in the name of being not games consoles but Home Entertainment Centres, the Wii is making a stealth approach on the position of market leader in a different space: the Home Information Hub.

When you switch on a Wii, you see a brief text screen and then you’re at the system’s front end. This is a grid of 12 boxes like massive desktop icons, six filled and six waiting for downloads either from the Virtual Console (retro games) or in the form of ‘channels’. Your out-of-the-box Wii already has two (Photos and Forecast, meaning weather), plus the News Channel (not up yet but video here) and the optional-download Internet Channel. That leaves space on the main screen for five more. Scroll right and there’s another grid of 12 boxes waiting to be filled—and another, and another.

A Wii desktop. My Wii desktop, in fact. Would you believe there's no other images of one on the net?

I believe Nintendo’s intention with these channel-spaces is to make the Wii a one-stop at-your-fingertips centre for all the information you want at the touch of a button or flick of a Wiimote. When you think about whether you should take an umbrella, or what happened in the cricket, they want your primary source for that information (and by primary I mean easiest and fastest to access, most convenient and after a while instinctive) to be the Wii. It won’t download movies, it won’t hold all your MP3s, but barely a day will pass without you consulting it. That at least is the intention.

I’ll go further. Wii channels you will see before long will include: sports news; business news and share-price checking; travel news which remembers your regular journeys; family health; food, diet and fitness, probably tied to the shopping channel and maybe even to the fitness section of Wii Sports; and (longer shots these) online grocery shopping with delivery in association with a major supermarket chain; online pizza delivery; and more.

How can I predict this? Because I’ve been here before.

Six years ago I was part of 3Com’s short-lived internet appliance division. We brought one product to market, called Audrey. With 50s styling and a 10″ touch-screen, Audrey was a cross between a grown-up Palm Pilot—more of a family organiser than a personal one, it could sync two Palms and combine their calenders and address books—and a dedicated net-machine, with IR keyboard, web browser and a sweet email client that would record and embed audio and pictures at—literally—the touch of a button. It was, in a word, sweeet.

Audrey. Gorgeous, wasn't she?

But it was more than that. Directly below the screen was a dial, like an old TV. Settings corresponded to six basic information channels, updated regularly throughout the day so that whenever you touched the dial, you had access to information no more than a couple of hours old. And those channels were, in rough order: weather, news, sports, business, showbiz news, and space for us and users to add more. To people who remember five paragraphs up, this may sound a bit familiar.

One of my jobs was choosing and creating the information channels for the European launch, so I was intimately involved with this end of the business. And while the Wii is very far from an Audrey knockoff—Audrey didn’t play games for a start—I recognise many of the thought processes underlying the look and feel of the Wii’s interface design. Time-to-data, for example. An Xbox 360 takes 22 seconds to boot, even with no disc in the drive. To get to its desktop the Wii takes less than half as long, and that includes pressing the (A) button to synch the Wiimote.

This is crucial. The Wii is not the only device that can give you this kind of information on demand. Opera Widgets and Firefox Extensions can put this functionality in your browser, as can Google if you’re prepared to type a couple of words. Avantgo will put it on your smartphone or PDA. The Apple iPhone will have it built-in, judging by the early screenshots. But the key point is the time between demand and delivery, and it’s my bet that the Wii will beat all of them on speed and ease of accessibility.

(This was something Audrey did astonishingly well. It had an instant-on, and though it was pre-broadband it logged onto our server five times a day to get updates, so the information you saw was never more than a couple of hours old. If Nintendo is smart—and the name it’s chosen for the Wii’s internet connection, WiiConnect24, indicates it has been—the Wii channels will do the same. In other words, when you want the weather forecast the device won’t need to retrieve it from a server because the latest update will already be stored on board.)

Nintendo clearly considers time-to-data so crucial that it’s done away with any Wii splash screen at startup. This is, if you’ll pardon the geek-pun, revolutionary. When was the last time you switched on a console and didn’t get the brand-name front and centre? By removing its own logo to save a couple of seconds of load-time, Nintendo has signalled that it considers the Wii to be more than just the next generation of games machine. That may turn out to be its biggest play of all.