Who started this OPML thing anyway?
Far be it from me to speak heresy, but this OPML thing doesn't seem terribly well thought out: if instead of sticking everything in attributes, the data was present in perfectly normal XML elements, then you could view OPML quite sensibly just by using CSS. Instead you have to use XSLT to display OPML in a nice way.
OK, well you can still make sense of OPML using XSLT, so it's all good right? Well, maybe not. Opera doesn't support XSL translations, so chances are your viewers just get a blank page in Opera. Less than ideal. (They helpfully suggest you do the transform on the server ... hello?)
While the creators of OPML might have thought it was a bonus that the text attribute didn't show up when you applied a stylesheet to the untranslated page, it isn't always what is required. If you don't want to see something in css you can always set display: none, so why put anything in attributes at all? Clearly, it's not so you can outline XML because XML is already inherently outlined.
I guess it's too late to stop the bandwagon. OPML is out there and being used, and probably isn't going to go away. One day Opera will support XSL translations. Until then, a whole range of rather nifty XSL techniques for maintaining pages in XML require server side transforms that could have been pushed out to the client.
Telstra's level playing field
Tomorrow we collect the keys to our new house, and as the phone is essential for work, my wife arranged a new phone line through Telstra. When she signed up for the line, they also offered her the chance to instantly sign up for their Bigpond ADSL broadband service. She declined Telstra's helpful sales offer. Our current home ISP is Netspace, and we chose them because (arguably) they offered the best speeds and download limits for the money at the time.
When we contacted Netspace, they were unable to get any information about the new line from Telstra, and Telstra even informed them (incorrectly I hope) that it was not a Telstra number. Due to reliance on Telstra, Netspace will only be able to begin connection of our ADSL once Telstra actually admits the line exists - whenever that might be. We can already phone the number, so you'd think it would be in their database. It's a new exchange in a mainly commercial area, you'd hope things would proceed smoothly? Apparently, it's not in the database they use to answer enquiries from external companies.
So, where's the level playing field for ISPs? Netspace can't even begin the connection process, but BigPond can start right away - and it's being marketed to you at the moment you connect your line. Similar issues apply to using an alternative long-distance carrier: most people will sign up with Telstra because it's quick and easy. I'm guessing that most people who want to get a phone line, or an internet service, don't want to wait a long time for it to be connected.
Netspace have been an adequate provider. Their service so far has been fine, though I am not thrilled with they way they terminated their 'unlimited' service when I was barely two weeks into my subscription to it, replacing it with a capped plan. They did this to everyone, but they must have known they would do this before they even sold me the service. Why were they selling a service they planned to immediately cancel? Does look a little strange doesn't it? I suppose they will do anything they can to make a sale, and no wonder when you look at the handicap they have to operate with compared to Bigpond.
Netspace's replacement capped service is still competitive on price/performance, but when you consider the way the cap is split into peak and off-peak usage, it's not quite as good as it sounds - but I see the logic in the system, and even with the split it remains fair value.
In contrast, Bigpond's offerings are very expensive indeed, and you have to wonder why they can charge more than their competitors and keep market share? I don't believe it's because of their quality of customer support, because it's not noticably different to anyone else's. Sure, you can call Telstra 24 hours, but try calling their broadband support line at 4am in the morning and see what sort of answers you get: they might be of the 'its broken and nobody will be in to fix it until 7am' kind.
If the playing field isn't level now, does the government really imagine it will be after the sell off? My guess is that Telstra will simply swallow fines and penalties for anti-competitive behaviour as part of its business strategy, as it has done in the past. As for whether the shares are a good bet, it will depend on who they get to run the company in the future. With good leadership they could go up and up ... or they might not. However much they are milking it now, the Australian domestic phone business doesn't offer much potential for business growth, and they will need serious growth to push share prices up.
Hyper New Games Hype
The gaming press is currently awash with hype about the forthcoming consoles. It seems that people can't resist articles about new hardware and the wonderful specifications it may or may not have. Commentary ranges from the ill informed and speculative to the 'insider' tech news genre. I contend that the main thing being overlooked in all these articles is that none of this new hardware's specification matters at all.
We can take for granted that the next generation of console gaming will deliver more rendering performance than the last. We've learned that it will also bring us wireless controllers as standard, but we could already buy those anyway. What's left is mainly spin and hype. However, make no mistake, there will be changes for gamers, but the hardware specification is almost completely irrelevant to them.
Developers make games, not hardware
So, what about Cell and all that jazz, isn't that going to bring us to a new gaming nirvana or something? Will games now have lovingly crafted, amusing and involving physics? Well maybe, maybe not - the PC has been quite capable of this sort of thing for several years now, and yet games that make any proper use of it are few and far between indeed.
What about the rich world of emotions and story that Cell will open up to us? Oh wait. REALITY CHECK: since when has a CPU made stories more involving, game designs better, or characters more emotive? There's more emotion in the textureless little midgets of the original PS1 Final Fantasy VII than in <pick latest Unreal Engine game of your choice> with it's shadertastic rendering system with its cathedral scaled bells and whistles.
In the end, what we get from the next generation of consoles will depend on developers: game designers, artists, programmers. Publishers and what they dare to do will also matter enormously: every single fancy feature costs time and money to develop. Those who take time to put these things in properly will be later to market and will spend more money developing the game. These things really matter, especially to publishers, who are under the impression that if your game is available on a console in its early life, with a shortage of titles, then people will buy it no matter how poor it is. This has never been true, but they usually rush products out anyway, with the same old consequences.
There are a lot of factors that make people buy a game, or not buy it: a popular license, a proven history, good marketing, good graphics, good gameplay, cult status and occasionally a product becomes so popular that people just buy it because everyone else did.
As you can see, only two of the key games 'sales' factors are related to hardware at all, and those only tenuously.
The quality of game graphics is determined very much by the artists that work on them. No amount of rendering technology can make up for bad art, but the reverse is true - good artists can do an enormous amount to compensate for weaknesses in a rendering engine.
The quality of game 'play' is supposed to be enhanced by increased CPU power, but usually it doesn't happen. Most of the CPU is used to drive the rendering side of the game anyway, and the 'game' gets the tiny slice that is left. This will not change. It doesn't matter how many execution units you've got on your Power Processor, most of them will be tied up doing something to do with rendering.
It's a simple fact that good graphics are instantly identifiable in a game: in reviews all you can see are screenshots, in the demo reel, all you really see are graphics. The gameplay won't show up until you get the game home and spend solid hours grappling with it. In a really good game, some of the best experiences won't show up until you are a long way into the game. This is the tragic dilemma: the part of your game that brings the most joy and lasting pleasure doesn't help sell it directly - only through word of mouth is the excitement conveyed. As so many reviews are full of glowing joy and satisfaction, it won't show up there at all.
So, the end result is that pubishers and developers devote most of the hardware resources to graphics. It doesn't matter how much power there is, it can always be directed at graphics to achieve a flashy effect rather than used for 'gameplay'. The companies that do this best have the best looking games. If you played the beautiful looking Final Fantasy X, did you look at the graphics and then wonder why the game mechanics were ten years old? They were still good enough to keep hundreds of thousands of gamers happy, but they weren't exactly pushing the hardware.
There will be teams that bring us great new gameplay, physics, AI, and all that stuff, but in the end they will do it mainly because of a gradual evolution in software devlopment, game software libraries, middleware and know how than because of simple hardware power - that's why we haven't really seen the 'physics revolution' on the PC yet: the software and the developers both need to mature in this area. Powerful new hardware may give them a nudge, but it can't take them all the way.
High Definition Hype
Microsoft, desperate to find something new for Revolution to revolve around is telling us it's all about high definition. This isn't going to make much of an impression, as there are still plenty of people who still watch 4:3 ratio television, which should give pause for thought about how many people actually have high definition televisions.
A few people with expensive DVD players may have genuine high definition televisions (capable of 1080 progressive scan) in the UK, and for practical purposes the penetration of high definition into Australian market is insignificant. The US penetration is probably the best, but much of that is still not 1080 progressive capable.
Really, all this talk about fancy televisions is boring. It's a small evolutionary step: high resolutions already exist on the PC and they don't make the same games an order better than on the consoles. Xbox was just about capable of delivering this stuff already, so it's not much of an innovation. As a programmer, I would rather avoid a high resolution that most people can't exploit, because you are always short of fill rate and higher resolutions only make this problem worse. Supporting silly resolutions five years ahead of their time seems only to handicap the machine.
And in the end it's all yesterday's news
When the fancy console hardware actually gets into living rooms in sufficient quantity to make a difference, it will already be behind the desktop PC. The graphics processors will probably lag top PC cards at launch, it's realy no big deal either way.
As for CPU power: no matter how Sony spins it, a Cell with a few specialised signal processing engines is not going to 'blow away' a dual core AMD64, or even Intel's latest clunky Pentium-D, or whatever they hope to have by then. By the time the PS3 hits volume in Europe, we'll be looking at quad core AMD64s for the motivated wealthy. Solid general purpose computing power (with stuff like good branch prediction), coupled with a big cache and lots of memory means that PCs will still be able to compete with the specialised gaming CPUs.
A technology lead has never brought genuinely better games to the PC, though the platform does have some different games, the differences are related more to culture, input device and display technology than anything else.
Bogus Sony Backtrack
It would seem that Sony have made a token effort to support their malware based CD protection system. You can now go to the Sony site and get a patch for it. But how easy is that, and what does the patch actually do?
Of course, if you actually are a music pirate and downloaded your music from the internet, you won't have any bother from the Sony system - it only troubles ligitimate and honest purchasers of original CDs.
So, I thought I'd try to download this alleged patch, just out of curiousity. I thought I'd start with www.sony.co.uk, given that I'm naive of Sony's gigantic corporate structure an' all...
From sony.co.uk I found a link to www.sonymusic.co.uk. I located a search box on their site and typed in 'cd protection patch'. Guess what I got back?
Unable to find any results for the given search criteria
say Sony... Oh dear. Maybe there isn't a patch after all, or could it be they don't really want you to find it?
Well, I thought of some other things I could type, but the search box does claim to be an artist browser, so I don't really expect it to work. However, there's no other means of search on their site, so you really don't have much hope of success. There's no mention of any protection patches in the news section, so where am I supposed to look? There's no support area, so it seems sonymusic is a dead end.
Next I tried www.sonybmg.com, which Google located for me when I tried searching for Sony BMG (two words that just love to be together). Something about that site made me think I wasn't going to find any computer support there. I resorted to more Googling: "sony bmg cd protection patch support", but all I found were people complaining about it.
Looks like that the patch is either not real, or fairly well hidden. I don't fancy your chances of finding it without either getting lucky, or spending hours looking.
As for what it does when you get it, if it actually exists, well that's anyone's guess.
As for what Sony are doing, it's now well documented:
Mark Russinovich's article takes the whole sorry mess to pieces and explains exactly what it does (and how to get rid of it).
Doom Movie Review
Somewhat unexpectedly, last night my wife suggested that we go to see the Doom Movie. Tuesday is cheap night at the local cinema, and while I would probably rather have watched Wallace and Grommit, Doom was an acceptable alternative.
I don't really know why my wife was interested in seeing Doom, as she is usually not very keen on anything with gore, or horror content. My only guess is that she was somehow hoping to figure out what the Doom game is all about without having to make the effort of playing it.
We arrived early, and the cinema was crowded, but whatever it was people were there to see, it wasn't Doom. The cinema was almost empty, with the only other people in the place sat right in front and behind us - so much for the cinema's assigned seating policy.
The movie itself left me somewhat bored, and my wife complained about the dire shortage of monsters in the first half. When things finally did start happening, it wasn't a great deal more interesting. There were moments where it picked up, but most of the time you could see everything coming so far ahead that you got sick waiting for it.
The effects are decent, and from a technical standpoint there's nothing to complain about, they're not the effects I wanted to see. Also, much like the Doom 3 game, it's dark for far too much of the time, and you can't see anything. This isn't scary at all, it's just dull: looking at a black screen for five minutes isn't fun.
The direction and acting ranged from average to somewhat above average, but they weren't good enough to save the whole thing from the cliche riddled script with its woeful shortage of Doom. If you've seen Aliens, Starship Troopers, Final Fantasy Spirits Within, or most importantly Resident Evil, then you've already seen most of what Doom has to offer - except all of those films had more pure fun about them - well maybe not Final Fantasy: that was dreadful.
The decision to try and make some kind of horror movie rather than a solid action thriller didn't really work out for Doom. It so badly tries to be Resident Evil and just doesn't pull it off. Resident Evil has so many more interesting things going on, along with better monsters, a plot that actually twists slightly now and again, and it's just so much better written.
The most disappointing thing about Doom (for I didn't really expect much from it) is the almost total absence of DOOM in the movie: the backstory details seem to owe as much to Resident Evil as to Doom, and the monsters presented barely scratched the surface of the Doom menagerie. All the time I was watching I was waiting for the really cool monsters to show up, but they never did.
There is a stretch near the end where it tries to go all FPS on us: more of a joke than good cinema, yet it's probably one of the most memorable things about an otherwise unmemorable movie - it's only about two minutes long and really doesn't make up for the rest of the dullness. Pinky is also pretty decent, and works on several levels: he's a great effect (alive or dead), and he's a good joke, it's one of the better fights in the movie, there's a chainsaw, and he's actually a proper Doom monster, but beyond Pinky there aren't many more memorable moments.
In the end you walk out of the movie thinking, 'that wasn't Doom', and also thinking that you just wasted your time watching a really long and mostly forgetable trailer for Doom the Movie 2, where presumably the proper Doom monsters will show up. This completely cynical attitude to use of the license doesn't impress.
So, whether you are a fan of Doom the game, or of action or horror movies, you are better off leaving Doom for DVD rental, if you bother wasting your time on it at all. If you don't see it, you will not have missed much. I would recommend you spend the time watching Resident Evil instead.
Do you want Sony to own your computer?
If I was going to take a guess, I'd say you probably don't. Apart from the obvious invasion of your privacy, and the compromise of your hardware, which looks indistinguishable from 'illegal tampering with a computer system', there are real practical reasons that you don't want Sony invading your computer.
Are you wondering what I'm talking about? If you haven't guessed by now, I'm referring to Sony's underhand technique of installing malware on your computer when you put a copy protected Sony CD in your computer's CD drive.
Of course Sony are not exactly pioneers in this field, the copy protection specialists have been pushing this sort of 'copy protection' onto CDs for a few years now. It's just typical of Sony's bungling attempts at software development that they would produce a package so badly written that it has the characteristics of a virus.
What else can you call software that installs itself secretly and without your permission, can cause your computer to slow down or malfunction and can totally destroy your system if you attempt to remove it? Oh, I'm sure there is some really, really tiny small print in white on a nearly white background somewhere on the CD liner that describes the protection mechanism as some kind of benefit or added feature that you are implicitly consenting to when you purchase the CD.
I'd like to hope that the security software vendors will add this menace to their list of detected malware. If this package had been produced by Russian or Chinese black hat hack hackers it would be stopped by Symantec, Trend Micro, AVG, McAfee, Sophos, Antivir, etc. within days. I wonder how they will choose to react to the Sony attack?
Even when it's functioning normally, the Sony software (as well as the products of other vendors that preceded it in the hall of shame) interferes with the proper playback of CDs on your computer. In the case of 'protected' CDs, it doesn't play back the high quality CD audio tracks, but instead plays extremely low quality compressed audio through a special crippled player. The player itself is shaky enough to bring your system down in some cases, and interferes with the proper use of other applications due to its bad handling of 'low level' messages from the operating system to the windowing interface.
Because it intercepts access to your CD drive, the software can also interfere with the proper operation of other software, particularly CD and DVD authoring packages, playback of unprotected CDs, games and so forth. If you have a slow computer you may also notice a performance hit on any CD access, or just a general slow down of your computer due to lost memory and CPU cycles.
Naive attempts to remove this package will render your CD drive a dead lump of plastic, as your CD drivers will no longer function. Restoring proper function to your OS may require a reinstallation of Windows. If that isn't malware, I don't know what is.
In many countries, the right to make a duplicate of music that you own is enshrined in law. This right is being consistently undermined by the media publishers, based on unreasonable precedents set by the Digital Millenium Copyright act in the US. Often American companies have attempted to enforce US law outside their own country. In some cases their legal threats have been scary enough for them to get away with it. We (once again) have a media publisher performing acts of vandalism against personal computers that would see any individual hunted down, arrested, and likely imprisoned for some years.
The fact that there is some kind of warning, or secret hidden contract squirreled away on the CD liner (that most people will probably not even glance at) is allowed to justify this action as legal, but it should not. It has all the look and feel of an illegal contract. If you picked up a loaf of bread in the supermarket, and then after eating it, found yourself poisoned, wouldn't you feel a little cheated when your complaints fell on deaf ears because: "a warning was clearly printed on the packaging" - yes a warning written in unintelligable euphamisms that makes it sound like the poison is actualy a vitamin supplement, or barely visible to the naked eye. Then to cap it all you find your only legal recourse is a refund of the price of a loaf of bread - this after three days in hospital recovering from poisoning. I might be slightly overstating my case, but not by far.
This bullying act, allegedly justified by lost media sales that would likely never have been made in the first place, has been continuing for some years now. Sony are not the first to try this particular course, and it's not even the first time for them, but this could be their most bungled attempt at it so far.
Yet again, it seems big business have ridden roughshod over democracy and the ever eroding rights of the individual. The people who put a CD in their computer, or who make MP3s to play in their car from CDs they own, are not pirates, they are not thieves - they paid for the music - and they are not killing music, which we can observe continues alive and thriving despite promises of death at the hand of the compact casette.
If you buy one of these corrupted Sony CDs, or one from another publisher with similar technology on it, I suggest you take it back to the shop where you got it and make appropriate complaint and demands of refund. You might also be wise to disable autorun for CDs on your computer, and refuse to purchase any future operating system that denies you that alternative.
Or you could write to your MP or senator. You can be sure Sony and Warner will be forward with their attempts to put their case to the politicians.
Alas no more, browser wars
The days of the great browser wars are long gone. Most people would probably say this is no bad thing. I would have to largely agree. Microsoft's determination to produce a product good enough to make it too much bother for users to download and install Netscape resulted in a better browser experience for everyone.
Today, the browser authors seem to rest on their laurels. Even the newcomer Firefox doesn't seem to have added anything new since launch, and some old bugs remain unfixed. Opera makes the claims of being foremost in innovation, but in practice this doesn't amount to a great deal.
I find myself hankering for the days when competition between the browsers led to improvements for everyone. It looks like we've reached a position where IE is entrenched in its own bugs and quirks and will never need to change: it's the de-facto standard. Set against this is the W3C with their actual standards, which the other browsers attempt to follow to the letter, not always successfully.
Or maybe I'd just settle for a few improvements to Firefox or Opera. The latter would be a great browser apart from the lack of any useful plugins. It ends up missing a lot of the functionality of Firefox, and ultimately is not really better at emulating IE.
While it might be a bit of a retreat of principles, it would make perfect sense for the authors of both Opera and Firefox to incorporate a mode that can be toggled on called 'IE emulation mode'.
I suppose there will always be people who think it's a good idea to write things in .asp so Microsoft have ultimately bundled their way to victory with that one. Perhaps with Linux usage rising, the .asp camp might start to rethink their position. Is it really necessary to run a proprietary plugin system when there are so many open script languages? jscript as quite powerful enough to begin with, and the install for java isn't such a big thing for broadband users.
This raises the old ghost. Did Sun do the right thing by stopping Microsoft from introducing arbitrary and proprietary extensions to their Java vm in breach of the licensing terms? Did MS do the right thing by turning on Sun and refusing to distribute Java? Certainly, from the cynical position, Microsoft did the best thing for themselves. It is rather doubtful that it was best for their users.
Despite Microsoft's ire, Java is still around. It's by no means a perfect language (what is?) and it might even be that C# is somewhat better, but it remains one of the better languages available for multiplatform development today. Could a future deal between Google and Sun see a resurgence in Java? There's certainly no evidence that's likely to happen right now, but I suppose some of us are hoping...
