17th May 2008: Games With A Purpose, Nintendo Sued For Game
Controller, HP And Microsoft Beg Customers Not To Install SP3, More
People Download Illegally Than Legally Shocker
Welcome to today's edition of The Minimalist Blog, a blog and podcast
offering you the opinions and insights on the day's technology
news. The Minimalist Blog is brought to you today by
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There is a new game out there, and for once, parents will encourage
their kids to play! GWAP.com (short for Games With A Purpose) is
designed to help computers figure stuff out. Now, as with
everything, there is a downside to all this. It was designed by
the guy that invented Captcha. You know, the annoying letters and
numbers combination over a pattern that is sometimes damned near
impossible to read? Yeah. Him. From someone who made
something I go out of my way to avoid, as my eyesight isn't what it
was, this stuff actually sounds pretty interesting. Tag a tune
matches two players and gets them to tag a noise or a song over the
duration of said noise or song. Every time you match what your
opponent wrote, you get a point. Another game called Matchin lets
players judge which two pictures of the same thing is better.
Verbosity amasses facts for use by AI. Squigl gets players to
trace around an object so that computers will be better at recognising
objects. I really like the sound of Matchin and Verbosity.
I kind of like the sound of Tag a tune, but I think after a while it
would bore me. Also, I think it would frustrate me if someone got
more tags than I did on a song I loved. And Squigl just sounds
horrible unless you have a Wacom tablet. Let's be honest here, we
all know that mice aren't good for drawing with, hence Wacom tablets
existing.
Nintendo are having to pay out $21,000,000 to a company in Texas after
losing a patent court case. Anascape have won their case that
they hold the patents to technology which powers the Gamecube
controllers and the Wii Classic Controller. Nintendo are planning
to appeal, if only to reduce the damages they will have to pay.
Now this interests me, because apparently the guts of the argument is
that Anascape own the patent on analogue pressure sensors on a stick
shaped controller and a Gamecube shaped controller. But I am
certain that I remember playing games on the PS2 which required you to
vary the pressure you put on buttons. And the sticks on the PS2
controller were referred to as analogue sticks. And you could
push them down. So, surely this means that Sony were the original
violators of this patent, not Nintendo. My other point is, what
about the third party manufacturers? Do they just get away with
being able to do this too? Perhaps I should create a company
where all I do is sit in an office and think, ok, this would be a great
idea, I'll patent it! And then patent it, and when someone
violates my patent, I will sue the pants off them. I mean,
seriously, we are talking about one company sueing another company over
controller designs. So are Nintendo now going to sue Sony for
putting an accelerometer in a controller? Maybe Sony are going to
sue Microsoft for having a box shaped console? And Atari could
sue Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony for creating a video game
console. And then retrospectively sue Sega too. Ridiculous
lawsuit, and ridiculous that it actually got to the point where The Big
N have to pay money out.
Microsoft and HP are begging customers not to install the new SP3 patch
for Windows XP. The problem occurs when an AMD powered PC
installs SP3, which contains an Intel specific power management
driver. The driver isn't supported on the AMD chipset and causes
a constant reboot problem for AMD customers. It eventually causes
a Blue Screen Of Death. I was actually discussing this exact
issue last week. At the Linux User's Group I attend most
months. Even by Microsoft's standards, this is a pretty big balls
up. Come on, how can Microsoft not have tested this patch on AMD
and Intel machines not to make sure? I will give you an example
of testing processes I personally use. For this blog and podcast,
I write it in Seamonkey Composer. Not the most advanced web
design tool, but it works. I then view it in Seamonkey (a Mozilla
based browser), Firefox, and Opera. The idea behind testing it in
Opera is that Opera claim if it works in Opera, it will work on
anything, which takes care of Safari and IE. And this is just a
blog. I test my code on three different platforms, and it's just
a blog. It's not like if I mess up the HTML someone's computer is
going to die and they are going to lose all their work and data.
But this is what has happened at Microsoft. Someone has said
"Works on Intel, let's roll". Stupid. And as we said at the
Linux group last week, someone in Quality Control at Microsoft has been
fired, and you know it. The thing that made me laugh about this
report is that customers have been complaining that Dell, Gateway,
Lenovo and some Asus chipsets have been failing under SP3. No
they haven't. AMD processors have. Gateway, Lenovo, Dell
and Asus don't make chipsets, they make desktops and laptops.
There is another huge argument within that one, but, let's just leave
it at this; Linux users are really happy this week.
Music Ally have been studying people's music downloading habits and
have found that the same number of people who download music legally
also download music illegally. 28% of people have illegally
downloaded music. 14% of people regularly use the licenced
services, but 22% of people regularly use filesharing services.
The biggest complaint about paid downloads is the price. 50p a
track for an MP3 download, and 34p a track for a mobile download.
The figures speak for themselves. Roughly 3 tracks are downloaded
from services likle iTunes, but 12 tracks are downloaded from services
like Isohunt or The Pirate Bay. Maybe it's because The Pirate Bay
works on any computer and is really easy to use. Just saying is
all. However, The Register point out that 86% of users aren't
downloading music from filesharing sites. And The Value
Recognition Strategy in the UK said that illegal downloads weren't the
main cause of the music industry failing. My take on it is as
thus; I don't download music at all. I used to pay for it, but
then I discovered streaming and stopped downloading at all. If I
want to listen to a specific song, I just find it on Youtube and
listen. The rest of the time I listen to a station on
Last.FM. Or I listen to online radio. The thing is, a lot
of people aren't downloading not because it's expensive (50p a track
isn't a lot, it makes it £6 for an album) but because they don't
understand the technology. And they probably visit a friend who
does understand the technology and they give them the music, or rip CDs
for them. I know that's what my friend Mike does. He just
bought an iPod and brought a huge stack of CDs over, I ripped them
using Windows Media Player, and then transfered them using
iTunes. With drinking and listening to music from the CDs, it
took us an evening, and 1 gigabyte of his iPod's 8 gigabytes.
So, the observant of you will have noticed that yesterday's podcast
didn't appear. It should have, we thought we had done everything
that we needed to do to make sure that the podcast would be able to be
downloaded. This didn't happen and by the time we figured out
what was wrong with the RSS file (an unclosed item tag for those who
know about these things) we didn't have a chance to fix it. This
is now fixed as you can see, and we are planning to make the podcasts
available a few hours after we post. This is because we need to
give Odiogo time to process our latest post and convert it to
speech. However, we're not planning to stop there. We
actually have a lot of really great ideas that we will be rolling out
over the next few months. Those who know the history of The
Minimalist Blog know that we have been on a difficult road to this
incarnation. We've had so many launches and relaunched, mostly
due to a lack of interest in what we've been doing. What we are
doing now is an idea that we've been planning and playing around with
for a long time over many meetings. This is just stage one.
More and more will be rolled out over the next few days and
weeks. Expect big things. And if we get enough interest
from you guys, the readers, and the listeners, we are planning
something massive.
It's interesting to read a guide about linkbaiting. The art of
putting up a story or article for shock value more than anything, with
the aim of getting people to link to your blog or site.
Personally, I'm not hugely in favour of this. I believe if you
need to do something like that to get your blog across then it's not
particularly good for you. My theory is this; if your content is
good, and consistently good, then people will come. That's the
idea behind this site, hopefully you find our content really
interesting, and you keep coming back, or you keep downloading the
podcast. Whether or not this actually works, I have no
idea.
And now, it's time for today's top five list. Today's top five is
our top five 80s artists. Unlike most days, I really cannot put
these in any order, because I think they are all really good, if a
little cheesy.
Men at work. Ok, so they only had one huge hit, but man, what a
hit. Everyone knows Land Down Under. It has to be one of
the catchiest songs ever written. Whenever I hear it on the
radio, I just have to sing along to it, even the parts of the song I
don't understand.
Wham. The great thing about Wham is that they launched one of the
biggest stars in the world, George Micheal. But before he went
solo, they launched hit after hit. Club Tropicana. Young
Guns. Wake Me Up. Last Christmas. Everybody knows
these songs, everyone can sing along to them if you're under the age of
25, and it's just really fun, really innocent music, which everyone can
get into and it sounds great, if a touch camp in the warm summer sun.
A Ha. Now these were a really innovative band. Who can
forget seeing the video for Take On Me for the first time?
They're making a come back, which I don't think is a bad thing
whatsoever. Some of my favourite songs are Take On Me, The Living
Daylights and The Sun Always Shines On TV. Also, in
the 80s, sad as it is now, Morten Harket was one of the coolest guys in
the world.
Paul Young hasn't ever really gone away, but I think anyone under 25
has heard Wherever I Lay My Hat. I really like that song and I
actually have quite a few of his albums.
Bros weren't exactly huge on the hits front, apart from When Will I Be
Famous, but, that one hit was really great. Again, these guys
looked the coolest in the world in the 80s with their spikey blonde
hair, and their leather jackets and attitude. Of course, now one
of the Bros guys has now gone into acting and was in Blade 2.
Lastly, you cannot review the 80s without putting Chesney Hawks.
Cheesey, cringeworthy and annoying. And that was in the 80s, but
now he tours universities in the UK belting out The One And Only.
Finally for this slightly shorter edition of The Minimalist Blog is our
TV guide. As I said yesterday, we are going to review things from
BBC iPlayer, as anyone in the world who can operate a Geolocation
cheater can watch the BBC iPlayer.
First up is Dr Who. I know I plugged this yesterday as well, but,
come on, Dr Who is great! Tonight he is visiting Agatha Christie,
who has mysteriously disappeared. This episode I have looked
forward to for such a long time. It's going to be a comedy
episode, which is the first since the Children In Need episode.
Secondly tonight is Casualty. I know most people are going to say
that it's boring, and it's an old series which doesn't move with the
times, but I think they have dealt with some dark storylines, and I can
see the whole John's Family storyline coming to an explosive head
soon. Same with the Jessica and Adam storyline. Plus,
Jessica and Alice are both absolutely gorgeous. There are another
10 episodes before the end of the series, and I cannot wait to see what
else the BBC has to offer in this series and the inevitable next series.
Tonight is also the end of Love Soup. I have to admit, this
wasn't my favourite when I began watching it, I found it a little too
surreal, but once you get into the humour and realise every loose end
is tied up by the end of the episode. Plus, Tamsin Greig is just
the right age to play the neurotic single (loved seeing her in her
underwear a few episodes ago) and Sheridan Smith is another actress who
I love seeing. James Cordon, you are an idiot for leaving her.
Lastly is Click. Ok, so they may not have the most up to date
news, and the presenters acting and presenting skills leave a lot to be
desired, but their best of the web section more than lives up to the
name. Worth trudging through the sometimes boring show just to
see their best of the web section.
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