Quotulatiousness

July 6, 2011

“Scouring your own Facebook profile for information your friends shared with you is in violation of Facebook’s terms of service”

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 14:55

Facebook really, really doesn’t want you leaving for Google+ — in fact, they don’t even want you looking too closely at your friends’ personal data:

With the introduction of Google+ last week, the search/ad giant is finally in direct competition with Facebook. Or it will be, once Google gets over the opening week willies and reopens the service to allow the teeming hordes inside.

The biggest barrier to Google+’s success? All the time and effort we’ve already put into building our Facebook posses. Personally I am too old and cranky to start over from scratch. I just want to be able to click a button and automatically add everyone from Facebook to Google+.

That is, of course, exactly what Facebook does not want you to do, as an open source developer named Mohamed Mansour just discovered.

[. . .]

As Mansour noted (on his Google+ page, naturally):

     ”This is what happens when your extension becomes famous :sigh: Facebook just removed the emails from their mobile site. They implemented a throttling mechanism that if you visit your ~5 friends in a short period of time, it will remove the email field.

     ”No worries, a new version is on the making … I am bloody annoyed now, because this proves Facebook owns every users data on Facebook. You don’t own anything! If I were you, I would riot this to the media outlets again.”

It turns out that scouring your own Facebook profile for information your friends shared with you is in violation of Facebook’s terms of service. Nice, eh?

June 28, 2011

Sony has a long track record of ham-fisted customer relations

Filed under: Gaming, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:06

Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent me this link all about just how insanely bad MMORPG players can be in their chosen game environments. I found this entry particularly interesting, as it isn’t the gamers being dicks . . . it’s the company running the game:

You’re playing a game where you kill things. What do you do with a giant dragon that kills things, can only be woken by killing four smaller dragons first and is now trying to kill you? If you said “kill it” you just surprised the hell out of Sony who, to be fair, have never claimed they weren’t wearing human-skin suits while studying these Earth things called “game-ers.” Kerafyrm the Sleeper was EverQuest‘s dragon-equivalent of Sauron, if Sauron drove the Death Star to work. It had a hundred times as many hit points as any other boss, was immune to most damage, had two spammable instant-kill attacks because screw you and didn’t work right because it was online and programmed by Sony.

It forced the three top guilds to co-operate, which makes herding cats look easier than getting Bollywood extras to move in step. It was Sesame Street by way of Lord of the Rings, specifically the end of the third movie, since for over three hours, 180 players turned themselves into a Sisyphean Zerg horde. Resurrecting each other faster than the monster could kill them, they put in Herculean feats of teamwork that cruelly mocked the concept of “fun.” They fought like warrior poets, they fought like Scotsmen and eventually ground the boss down to 22 percent health — at which point Sony turned the whole thing off and acted like it was the players’ fault. So if you’re wondering how they can keep the PlayStation Network off for a week and act like that’s fine, it’s because they’ve been practicing.

They took their ball and went home, where their ball was a giant harbinger of doom and the focus of the entire game.

Showing less regard for their users than an Iron Maiden, they released a rubbish (and later disproven) excuse about how Kerafyrm’s programming had been distracted by an NPC — and you’ll notice how even their own excuse is based on their incompetence — before simply apologizing and resetting the entire event, telling players to try again. It was like Lucy tricking Charlie Brown if Lucy was making millions of dollars making Charlie Brown miss, and if it took three man-weeks to run up to the football.

June 26, 2011

Skype’s PR problem over their sneaky options plan

Filed under: Economics, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:35

Over my career in the software industry, I’ve worked for several companies who provided a stock option plan as part of their employee compensation scheme. Exactly one of those companies’ programs ever provided me with any actual tangible benefit (the company was bought, and the options were bought back at market rate). It netted me a couple of thousand dollars. Options may have been a way to get rich in the early 1990s, but they’re pretty much a longshot lottery ticket now.

Skype has found a sneaky way of making that longshot chance even more unlikely to pay off:

Employees aren’t even able to keep the vested portion of their stock options. The vast majority of stock options granted to startups have a vesting period, typically four years, with chunks of those options becoming vested during that four year (or whatever) period. If options are vested you can exercise them, pay for the stock and own that stock. At least that’s the way things have been done over the decades.

Skype did things differently. With Skype stock options the company has the right to not only terminate unvested options, but also vested ones. And any vested options that you’ve exercised (meaning you paid cash for them) that were turned into actual shares could simply be bought back by the company at the price you paid, regardless of their current value.

Turning your potentially lucrative stock holdings (if the value was higher than your strike price) into a mandatory zero-interest savings account. Nice.

The fact that Skype adopted this plan in the first place isn’t in itself “evil.” But they’ve done two things wrong from what I can tell.

First it appears that employees had no idea what they were signing and they probably expected it would be a normal stock option type deal that everyone in Silicon Valley has done for decades. If Skype wasn’t crystal clear with them, and explained it in normal human language that they understood, then these employees were intentionally misled. Skype had an incentive to make things unclear, because employees would demand far more compensation if they had understood. The fact that employees are so surprised that this is happening suggests that they didn’t understand the agreement. This is what lawyers call fraud.

The second thing Skype did wrong was not to waive this clause with the looming acquisition. The company can deny all day long that they fired these employees for cause, not to save a few dollars on stock options. But the appearance is the exact opposite.

June 25, 2011

QotD: The game marketing game

Filed under: Gaming, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

. . . here’s the long and short of it: A PR flack complaining about unfair representation of a videogame is like a mugger complaining about unsafe working conditions.

They say advertisers sell the sizzle, not the steak. Videogame companies regularly sell not the steak, not the sizzle, but a recording of the sizzle of aged Wagyū steak, the audio captured under ideal acoustic conditions and sweetened with frequencies proven to make people hungry. Then, often as not, they present you with a microwaved hamburger and a promise to remove the bugs — which in this metaphor are actual insects — just as soon as they can.

I don’t write many reviews these days, but as far as I’m concerned, eviscerating shitty games with snappy sarcasm is a public service. If 500 words of my resentment are more entertaining than 10 hours of your game, then you wrote a crappy game.

And let’s get this out of the way: Don’t come crying to me about the hard work of the developers and how they’re being abused by reviewers. You know what developers really hate? Working on crappy games. Nobody enjoys feeling like they’re being paid to tie ribbons on manure. You want happy developers? Let them make the best games they can and present them honestly.

So here’s the deal. I’m all for civility. In any future game reviews, I will completely do away with venom and mockery, but only if the ad agencies do away with exaggeration and hype. If you start lying, I start making vicious, spiteful fun of you.

Lore Sjöberg, “Alt Text: After Duke Nukem PR Fail, Terrible Games Are Fair Game”, Wired, 2011-06-24

June 23, 2011

Yahtzee reviews Duke Nukem Forever

Filed under: Gaming, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

June 21, 2011

Would you pay $23,698,655.93 for a book about flies?

Filed under: Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

This link was sent to one of my various mailing lists. It’s an amusing little story about a very expensive book and how the price on eBay got so out of hand:

A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly — a classic work in developmental biology that we — and most other Drosophila developmental biologists — consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).

I sent a screen capture to the author — who was appropriate amused and intrigued. But I doubt even he would argue the book is worth THAT much.

At first I thought it was a joke — a graduate student with too much time on their hands. But there were TWO new copies for sale, each be offered for well over a million dollars. And the two sellers seemed not only legit, but fairly big time (over 8,000 and 125,000 ratings in the last year respectively). The prices looked random — suggesting they were set by a computer. But how did they get so out of whack?

Amazingly, when I reloaded the page the next day, both priced had gone UP! Each was now nearly $2.8 million. And whereas previously the prices were $400,000 apart, they were now within $5,000 of each other. Now I was intrigued, and I started to follow the page incessantly. By the end of the day the higher priced copy had gone up again. This time to $3,536,675.57. And now a pattern was emerging.

June 14, 2011

Duke Nukem Forever: “Duke, you’re a relic from a different era”

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:09

After all that time in “gestation”, gamers have been eager to see the final result . . . and it’s an underwhelming experience:

In a game bursting with 1980s macho-movie quotes and in-jokes, one line resonates far beyond Duke Nukem Forever’s puerile script. Besieged by an alien invasion, the President of the United States ignores calls to beg the eponymous meathead to save the planet, lamenting, “Duke, you’re a relic from a different era.”

It’s not just The Duke himself who’s from a different era. His repertoire of foul-mouthed quips might be ripped from the VHS reels of Commando, Total Recall and Aliens, among many others, but it’s the painfully dated gameplay that ultimately proves some relics are best left buried.

Everywhere you look, DNF is a testament to its infamously protracted and traumatic development. Long loading times, low-res textures and polygon counts, poor facial animations and lip-syncing, screen tearing, juddering frame rates, basic lighting and reflections, pop-up, jaggies and disappearing assets — you name it, DNF suffers from it. Every gaming advancement of the past thirteen years is undone; every conceivable design flaw evident.

Rather than play the actual game, you might enjoy Yahtzee Croshaw’s “review” of the game from May, 2009:

Verdict
Duke Nukem Forever is the sum of all its flaws – a truly terrible game with almost no redeeming features. It’s as if Gearbox simply swept the scraps off 3D Realms’ development floor and glued them together into this mess. Graphics, gameplay, narrative, innovation, there’s simply nothing to recommend this mangled wreck. Put simply, as The Duke might say, “This game is one ugly motherfucker!”

June 3, 2011

The right software tool for the job: Excel is not a database

Filed under: Britain, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:05

You know how some people, having mastered a particular software tool, keep trying to fit every task into the one tool they know even when it’s awkward to do? I’ve seen people using Microsoft Excel instead of Microsoft Word or another word processor to produce letters — and people using Word to do spreadsheet-like tasks. The old adage seems to still apply in the software world: when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

It’s apparently not just small companies that suffer from this sort of problem:

The London 2012 Olympics is set be a humanoid spectacle of the like never witnessed by the world’s population before. Or something. But disturbing information has reached us at Vulture Central that reveals the organisation’s entire cultural events database is stored in *gasp* Excel.

A job vacancy currently advertised on the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) website is offering a competitive salary to someone who can maintain and report on data held in Microsoft’s spreadsheet software.

Now, a small biz with few customer accounts might consider Excel to be fit for purpose. But surely housing an Olympic stadium-sized database on a standalone spreadsheet is bonkers, isn’t it?

That’s a mighty big nail for such a small hammer.

May 27, 2011

Powerpoint: it’s not presentation software, it’s visual assault software

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:54

I’ve attended lots of meetings where the Powerpoint slides have been really bad, but I’m happy not to have encountered anything quite as bad as this:

One of this year’s winners in the InFocus Worst Powerpoint Slide Contest.

Our “What Not to Present” contest was epic! Many thanks to all of you kind folks that submitted entries and spread the word about it. Many amazingly horrendous slides were sent in from all around the world. We laughed. We cried. We cringed.

[. . .]

We randomly chose our top 3 winners, but then quickly realized that we had to do more. So we are giving away ANOTHER projector to the slide we thought was the most horrendous. We passed the ugliness around the InFocus offices and to many of our partners pandering for votes — and we have a winner!

Update: While I’m busy poking fun at PowerPoint, here’s the Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation. H/T to Paul “Inkless” Wells for the link.

May 20, 2011

Next on the primary school curriculum: Minecraft

Filed under: Gaming, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

<voice style=”curmudgeon”>Back in my day, we didn’t have computers in the classroom. We had books. And we liked ‘em. Kids these days are just spoiled, I tell you.</voice>

At the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School, first and second grade computer teacher Joel Levin developed an experimental Minecraft teaching unit that was designed to let kids explore, build, and collaborate within the game. He wasn’t sure how it’d go over. Much to his surprise, the students took to Minecraft like they do to sniffing scented markers.

Levin allows his students to play in a modified Minecraft world that doesn’t include monsters. His classes aren’t so much focused on teaching kids to play Minecraft as they are on using Minecraft as a canvas for them to be creative with. In one situation, Levin had to take animals out of the game because students were just killing them all over the place, which wasn’t in the spirit of his lessons.

H/T to Victor for sending the link. Video at the linked site.

April 23, 2011

A neat way to address software piracy

Filed under: Gaming, Humour, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:52

I still find it hard to believe that Cracked, of all the media entities from the pre-internet era, is worth visiting (and linking to). However, this is good stuff:

The [Arkham Asylum] developers included a little bit of extra code to detect when the game has been pirated, a common tactic used to track a company’s losses or simply mess with cheap people. The game is mostly unchanged when hacked, with one seemingly minor exception: Batman’s glider cape is hilariously unusable and has the aerodynamics of a piece of cardboard riddled with bullet holes.

It’s not that the cape is faulty, apparently; it’s simply that your version of Batman doesn’t know how to use it. Instead of gliding from one surface to another, Batman simply opens his wings over and over like a total ass-clown, causing him to lose altitude and fall down. It’s like you’re being forced to play with the pudgy Batman copycat from the beginning of The Dark Knight.

All the other gadgets still work, so you can always fight your way across the level on foot, right? Well, yeah, except that without the glider cape you’ll be completely stranded in a certain room — you know, the one filled with poisonous gas. That’s right, in the pirated version of Arkham Asylum, the always-prepared Dark Knight is such an useless idiot that he gets himself killed due to his shitty cape.

This trick gets misconstrued a lot as a simple game glitch, so you have people like this guy asking what’s wrong with his game at the official Eidos message board … only for the forum administrator to explain the situation and tell him: “It’s not a bug in the game’s code, it’s a bug in your moral code [punk].“

April 19, 2011

Another commercial wargame used for professional training

Filed under: Gaming, Military, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:02

Back in 2005, I posted some information about a software package in use by the USMC called Tacops, which was a single-developer wargame that provided very high training value. The unusual thing was that the military was willing to adopt a commercial wargame for their own training, over internally developed simulations. They seem to have gotten over that inhibition, as Steel Beasts, another single developer wargame, is seeing similar use today:

It was a decade ago that tank crews the world over became aware of a computer tank simulator, Steel Beasts, that was different. Steel Beasts was created by a single programmer, but with input from several professional tank troops. The graphics weren’t the greatest, but it was very accurate, so much so that the professionals were starting to use it as a training device. The publisher and creator of Steel Beasts seized the opportunity, and by 2006 there was a version for military use (Steel Beasts Professional) only that allowed for the use of a LAN, an instructor watching over how all the players were doing, scenario and terrain building and AAR (after action report) functions so that everything that happened in a game was captured. This allowed the instructor to point out errors, and what should have been done.

So far, ten countries (Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Chile, Canada, Australia, Spain and the U.S.) have bought Steel Beast Professional (at $125 a copy) for training their armor vehicle crews. The troops find the vehicle controls, and tactical situations to be realistic, and compelling. The game really gets the pucker factor going, and even before the pro version came along, troops were buying the commercial version and playing it for the professional, and entertainment, value.

March 8, 2011

Lastest boon to spammers? The move to IPv6, apparently

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:50

John Leyden reports that with all the good things about moving to the vastly larger address space of IPv6, we can expect at least one negative:

The migration towards IPv6, which has been made necessary by the expansion of the internet, will make it harder to filter spam messages, service providers warn.

The current internet protocol, IPv4, has a limited address space which is reaching exhaustion thanks to the fast uptake of internet technology in populous countries such as India and China and the more widespread use of smartphones. IPv6 promises 3.4 x 1038 addresses compared to the paltry 4.3 billion (4.3 x 109) addresses offered by IPv4.

While this expansion allows far more devices to have a unique internet address, it creates a host of problems for security service providers, who have long used databases of known bad IP addresses to maintain blacklists of junk mail cesspools. Spam-filtering technology typically uses these blacklists as one (key component) in a multi-stage junk mail filtering process that also involves examining message contents.

“The primary method for stopping the majority of spam used by email providers is to track bad IP addresses sending email and block them — a process known as IP blacklisting,” explained Stuart Paton, a senior solutions architect at spam-filtering outfit Cloudmark. “With IPv6 this technique will no longer be possible and could mean that email systems would quickly become overloaded if new approaches are not developed to address this.”

March 4, 2011

Can you upgrade from Windows 1 to Windows 7?

Filed under: History, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

I doubt very many of you ever used Windows 1.0 (I certainly didn’t: 3.0 was the first time I used Windows). Charles Arthur writes about an interesting experiment conducted by Andrew Tait to test how well your system would work if you somehow needed to upgrade through all the major Windows versions:

The question is: how robust is it? Can you really do all that updating? You have to start with MS-DOS 5.0, of course, because early versions of Windows needed that.

It’s a bit hairy and config.sys-y in the early versions up to 3.1.

But what’s really impressive is that Doom 2 and Monkey Island — installed right at the beginning — work all the way through, right up to Windows 7. Well, apart from in Windows 2000, where it hung at the start (lack of DOS support).

Well done Andrew Tait, alias Rasteri, the YouTube/Reddit user who had the enormous patience to do all this. Especially for sounding like Sean Connery all the way through. “It is indeed possible to upgrade through every version of Windows… and have some settings remain. This is nearly 20 years of application compatibility and Microsoft should be applauded.”

Of course, the real stumbling block to doing this would be the hardware: nothing that was available in the Windows 1.0 era would be able to run the far more demanding software of the Windows NT family of operating systems. To get around that, Tait used VMWare’s virtualization software:

February 24, 2011

The truth about software licenses

Filed under: Humour, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:53

Dilbert.com

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