Starman’s Geek Fridge

NBC/Universal shows their spiteful side

According to PC World this morning, NBC/Universal has moved to the Zune platform after abandoning Apple’s iTunes Store, the most successful online digital retailer in the world.

I generally don’t post profanity on here, but WTF?

I just don’t get it. Not only is the Zune a complete joke (it doesn’t even have a clock), but it’s selling very poorly compared to the iPod. It gets lukewarm reviews, and the Zune Marketplace software is one of the worst pieces of junk I’ve ever used.

Another point I don’t understand is that NBC/U went from a dual-OS platform (Mac/Windows via iTunes) to a single-OS platform on Windows. With Apple gaining marketshare lately, it seems like a poor decision to pidgeonhole yourself with one OS, even if Windows is #1.

NBC/U also claimed that they wanted Apple to charge $4.99 for each of their episodes and Apple refused to budge from the $1.99 price. Well, the episodes are now $1.99 on the Zune Marketplace which says to me that Microsoft is giving NBC/U much more of a profit just to say that they have exclusive content from NBC/U. I wonder if Microsoft is making any money off this at all.

A few months back, NBC/Universal pulled their catalog from the iTunes Store, claiming that Apple wanted too much of a percentage of the sales of their TV shows and movies. That in itself was an odd move because there was nowhere else to go. I figured that NBC/U would be happy that people were spending money instead of pirating their content. Last year, nobody took the Zune Marketplace seriously, and today, people still don’t.

I don’t see how this is a win/win for both Microsoft and NBC/U. Something tells me that this is a rather lopsided deal, and it smells of someone at NBC/U doing it out of pure spite. If that’s true, it’s the customers that suffer. Does NBC/U seriously think that their content is going to move Zunes? iPods are a phenomenon and both Microsoft and NBC/U are daft if they think this partnership is going to help in the slightest.

Posted in Geek Stuff, Zune, iPod | 3 Comments »

Why I preorder my games

This article on Ars Technica brought about a lot of comments about why preordering videogames is a stupid idea. I’d like to defend the notion of preordering and explain a little bit about why I do it.

Preordering started with laserdiscs. There were so few printed that if you didn’t get one on release day, you were doomed to find one on usenet or eBay as early as the following day. Preordering from Ken Crane’s was something I started to do religiously and to this day I’m happy I have my copies of laserdiscs and DVDs which are long out of print.

Invariably, in the days before preordering videogames, I’d forget a game was coming out, or I’d miss the release date. Now, normally that wouldn’t be a problem but several titles in the past have become rare and if you don’t pick them up on release day, you’ll have a lot of trouble finding them.

Two perfect examples are Rez for the Playstation 2, and Tetris for the Nintendo DS. I preordered Rez thinking nothing of it. A few months later I found that not many copies of the game were shipped and it got amazing reviews. The consequences were that the game was going for over $100 on eBay at the time. The same goes for Tetris for the DS. I believe that game was discontinued and started commanding silly money on eBay as well.

A game I regretted not preordering was the collector’s edition of World Of Warcraft in 2004. Since I was such an Everquest junkie I didn’t think I’d be playing WoW at all. Come February 2005, I had to pay $175 for my copy of it.

Another aspect of preordering are the goodies that come with them. If you preorder certain games, you’ll sometimes get a beta key for them! That allows you to play the game early for free and give feedback to the developers. Sometimes you get art books, soundtracks, keychains, etc. Some of the stuff may be trash to people, but I keep some of it. I love art books, I love soundtracks. I’ve kept every one I’ve gotten over the years.

And then there’s the advantage of having the game the second it’s released. Most of the time I really don’t care, I just like to get things out of the way. For games like Final Fantasy XII and Halo 3, I just felt I had to have them in my hands the instant they came out.

So while some cynics may think of preordering as a scam, I see it as an opportunity.

Posted in Video Games | 1 Comment »

Social media: are we the pioneers or a niche?

Podcamp NYC 2.0 was amazing. Apart from finally meeting a lot of people in person, there were a lot of ideas thrown around about how to improve what people are working on, and bring it to the next level.

I can’t stop and wonder if this is the kind of thing that’s going to spread to the common person. Oh sure, people can videotape themselves on Youtube looking like a complete ass, but that’s not social media. I see the people that are working on social media to be people that want to use audio and/or video to communicate with others, and I don’t see the common person doing that. Most people don’t even know what social media is, and I would say that even in 10 years when more people are made aware of it, it’s still not going to be a big hit among most people simply because they’re afraid of being on camera or using a microphone. The perception of how you look and sound to others could be a serious factor in the acceptance of social media in the mainstream.

Which brings me to the point of this blog post: will social media stay a niche or am I wrong and we’re pioneers in a realm that will explode in the years to come?

Posted in Social Media | 2 Comments »

Are Collector’s Editions “a bunch of crap”?

Watching “Cranky Geeks” this week, John Davison said that items like the Grand Theft Auto IV collector’s edition and the Halo 3 Legendary Edition are “a bunch of crap”. I have to disagree here because the “crap” is actually insight into how games and movies are made.

Back in the days of laserdiscs, Criterion uses to release special editions of movies like Blade Runner and Robocop which had running audio commentary by the cast and crew, documentaries on the making of the films, and other goodies not found on regular editions. These special editions weren’t marketed to the masses, they were marketed towards people like myself that were big fans of seeing “behind the curtain” about how films were made.

So now we’re getting the same treatment with videogames. I try and buy the collector’s editions of anything I’m interested in because I want to see everything I can about how the games were made; especially the art books. It’s fascinating how concepts go from pencil to screen. Funcom put out an art book for Dreamfall, Blizzard put out an art book for each of their World Of Warcraft versions. Back in college I was going to go into CGI, so I eat all this special edition material up. I read every page, I watch every documentary. I always like to see voice actors delivering their lines, and how much effort went into doing voices.

So the next time someone tells you that collectors editions are “crap”, ask them why. Collector’s editions aren’t for everyone, but the ones that do buy them are probably the people that are interested in how games and movies are made.

Posted in Movies and Video, Video Games | No Comments »

My Tweetcloud

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of Tweetclouds. It’s a web site that takes all your tweets from Twitter and shows you which words you used the most.

You can find it at tweetclouds.com

Posted in Geek Stuff | No Comments »

Has Twitter changed how we blog?

In the last few months since I started using Twitter, I found that if I wanted to throw an idea out to the ‘net, I could do so in 140 characters or less and get feedback from other people directly. This was a satisfying way of having a small, isolated conversation about a particular topic I had running around in my brain at the time without the need to write several paragraphs on the subject.

Take this blog post, for example. I could have simply taken the title and sent it out via Twitter and gotten my responses back that way. Would that have been enough? Not really. I found that by sending tweets out for topics that warrant a blog post, I’m essentially being lazy. By not taking the time to throughly write out what I want to say about a subject, I’m not only cheating myself out of a potentially good piece of writing, but I’m lessening the value of what I write.

Has anyone else found themselves using Twitter as a quick and dirty blog post?

Posted in Blog, Geek Stuff | 3 Comments »

Could technology kill Santa and the Easter Bunny?

Sitting here on Easter eve, I had a thought: what if some tech-savvy kid decided to set up a webcam to catch Santa or the Easter Bunny pop in, and instead saw their parents putting out the presents? Sure, the parents could lie and say “Santa was in a hurry and told us to do it”, but not-so-fast parents could sit there dumbfounded with nothing to say.

Now, this isn’t a post about whether or not people should or shouldn’t believe in these things, it’s about how technology can conceivably kill a belief we’ve given children for hundreds of years. Technology seems to be breaking down a lot of barriers of late. First, it gave people the ability to send messages around the world instantly, to talk to them without the use of a phone, send pictures, videos, and now we chat in real time which was possible 20 years ago through IRC, but it wasn’t as prolific as it is now.

So, if technology could break down all these barriers, could it make children aware of the truth about Santa and the Easter Bunny earlier than we want? Could these icons become a thing of the past?

Posted in Geek Stuff | No Comments »

iPhone dev status: denied….for now?

Dear Registered iPhone Developer,

Thank you for expressing interest in the iPhone Developer Program. We have received your enrollment request. As this time, the iPhone Developer Program is available to a limited number of developers and we plan to expand during the beta period. We will contact you again regarding your enrollment status at the appropriate time.

Thank you for applying.

Best regards,

iPhone Developer Program

This makes me worried. Apple is not telling me whether or not I’m in the running to get selected. Also, they’re teasing me with this “free” SDK which allows me to waste time writing this app which may or may not be allowed to be on Apple’s iPhone store in June.

It’s discouraging. Yes, I completely understand that Apple’s overwhelmed with requests, but there should be some deciding factors in the selection:

Apple developer status Apple should give priority to those who are in, or were in the Apple developer program. At minimum, this costs $500 a year.

Past development work If you’ve written apps in the past, or in my case, since 1989, and Apple has recognized you as they did with several of my apps, they should let those people in first.

My biggest concern is not being able to get my app ready the day the iPhone app store is opened. As everyone knows, the internet is full of good ideas, and even though the first person to do something isn’t necessarily the best out there, it does give a serious advantage to that developer.

Apple is not communicating to the people that signed up if in fact they’ll be able to get their apps on the store in June, and that deflates my enthusiasm for the project.

Am I worrying about nothing? We won’t know until June, but in the meantime, I wish Apple would be more forthcoming about how they’re making selections.

EDIT: Soon after I wrote this post, I found this article on arstechnica.com:

Apple to iPhone App Store applicants: Just hang tight

This sentence sums up exactly what I conveyed in this post:

“Still, a letter like this complicates the decision to begin or continue developing an iPhone application.”

Posted in Development, Mac Stuff | 2 Comments »

Am iWasting my time writing iPhone apps?

A week ago, Apple introduced the iPhone SDK to us mere mortals. It was a wonderful gesture by Apple to allow us to write apps for one of the best phones ever made. However, the SDK’s limitations and other issues are killing my enthusiasm for developing for it.

The $99 entry fee doesn’t bother me. I understand why Apple’s charging that much for it. You need a digital signature so that malicious code can be traced back to the owner, and technical support from Apple was never free. Also, Apple will be hosting the app for you.

The problems come with what the SDK is incapable of doing. You can’t interface with the dock connector, you can’t record audio, and you can’t record video. This is a serious detriment to what I wanted to develop, and I’m sure there are many people working on social networking apps such as seesmic and qik that are pretty ticked off about this as well. If you wanted to post audio to utterz, you have to use the dial-in method, but you still can’t post video. There’s also no GSM on the iPhone which makes geotagging impossible.

One other issue that bothers me is that when the phone rings, your app has to quit right then and there. Now, what if I don’t want to answer the phone? Granted, I don’t expect the iPhone to be running mission critical apps, but the user should decide if they want to answer the phone or not.

There’s one last issue that’s been gnawing at me. I signed up to be an iPhone developer a week ago. I have this app that I’ve been writing for Mac OS X using Cocoa which will port very easily to the iPhone. However, I haven’t heard back from Apple yet. Now, let’s say you’re an independent developer and want to write some freeware apps for the phone. You get all excited to write for it, you hunker down and start coding like a madman, and what if Apple thumbs their nose at you and says “sorry, you haven’t been selected”? So far, I don’t know anyone that’s been selected, but I’ll bet there are a lot of people out there that are expecting to be. This would be a serious slap in the face to the developer community and really needs to be addressed very soon. Apple needs to start sending out developer approvals 10 minutes ago.

Still, I feel bad for the developers that Apple refuses to make the iPhone more social media capable. Maybe iPhone 2.0 with 3G will be what we always wanted, but in the meantime, I’ll have to use my Nokia N95 for social media.

As for the iPhone vs. the N95, that’s a different post.

Posted in Development, Geek Stuff, Mac Stuff | 9 Comments »

Second Skin trailer is up

Back in March of 2007, Ren and I were filmed for the documentary “Second Skin”. It’s been along time, but the guys at Pure West Docs finally got the trailer together. It looks better than I expected it to, and I can’t wait to see it.

It follows the lives of seven gamers, and how MMORPGs have affected their lives.

I have no idea how much of the cut we made, or if we’re in it at all, but I think that if the film is as good as I think it will be, all gamers should watch it.

Get the trailer here.

Posted in MMOs, Movies and Video, Podcast | 4 Comments »