Paul O'Flaherty

Am I “Old Skool” or just old?

It’s a sad fact but at 25 years of age I am starting to feel very old when it comes to the computer games that appeal to me.

I started out with computers at the tender ages of 5 and have owned everything from a ZX Spectrum, VIC20, C64 all the way up to the wall of PC’s here in my house. My primary interest in computers has always been coding, but I’ve always been a gamer as well.

There must be community of people who, like me, have been using computers for 20 or more years, and could be considered the old timers of gamers. Now, what I was to know is the old timer “old skool” or just old.

I find that when I’m playing games today, they look great, sound great and generally play OK to crap (with some very notable exceptions!). But I miss the times when games were great. Not good, but great! When all you had was 16 colours, and 2 or 3 tracks to mix 8 bit audio with. You had 64k of memory.. Hardly enough to store 64 desktop shortcuts on todays PC’s.

They looked bad (for the most part), they sounded bad but they had something that most of todays games don’t. Playability! The were simply great fun to play. And you wanted to keep coming back and playing them even though they took up to 30 minutes to load in off of tapes that sometimes didn’t work.

In general todays games don’t have that. And in general most people don’t want to wait for the game to load, if 30 seconds went buy without it loading they’d think it had crashed, much less 30 minutes.

What people seem to want is the quick fix of instant action. I like that too, but I prefer to make an investment of my time. And that’s what playing computer games is.. An investment. You spend money and buy a product and then invest your time in it. Well I like a good return on my investments and back in the “old days” that investment required waiting 30 minutes for it to load, so you wouldn’t just boot up for a quick game… You’d boot up and go make a cup of coffee while it loads because you know you’re going to playing this all evening.

Maybe I’m just getting old, and games don’t hold the same appeal for me (and I just don’t realize it) but I want that again today… The investment. The money I spend on the product should not just get me pretty graphics and sound, but something that I’ll spend hours of my time on.. will lock the door and pretend I’m not home, just so I can try “that bit” again… sleepless night… cold sweats.. the addiction of an enthralling game with great gameplay..

Now don’t get me wrong, I still love playing games, and I play everything from MMORPG’s, to FPS, to C&C style games, and there are great examples of truly awesome games with everything I want in all categories… It’s just that considering the money we spend in games, I don’t want to have to find the exceptions in order to play a great game.. They should all be good…

Take a lesson from the time when we had no choice but to have crap graphics and sound. When code had to be had optimized to maximize the amount that could be gotten into 64k… Just forget about the 30 minute loading times, okay!

So which am I? Old or “old skool”?

Digital Envoy wins goetargeting patent

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted Digital
Envoy a patent for its IP
Intelligence technology, the company said Tuesday. The technology pinpoints the
physical location of Web surfers down to the city level, based on their Internet
Protocol address.

Digital Envoy is currently in a legal
dispute with search leader Google over use of its technology. Google
licensed Digital Envoy’s IP Intelligence for delivering targeted advertisements
on its Web site. Digital Envoy charges that Google, which has counter sued,
overstepped the bounds of their agreement when the search company used its
technology to deliver ads to third-party Web sites.

TI and Arm beef up cell phone security

CNet
News has a story about Chip maker Texas Instruments and chip designer
ARM are working together to beef up security for handheld’s following the emergence
of the first virus to target cell phones.
The two companies, both dominant suppliers and designers of cell phone chips,
are “”burying the security into the hardware”" where it’s tougher to get at,
Dave Steer, ARM director of segment marketing, said in an interview Tuesday.

The two companies, both dominant suppliers and designers of cell phone chips,
are “”burying the security into the hardware”" where it’s tougher to get at,
Dave Steer, ARM director
of segment marketing, said in an interview Tuesday.

Much of this is following in the wake of the first “”proof of concept
virus”"
called Cabir which we reported on in TechShout
Radio and the fact that crackers are becoming increasingly capable of
cracking the software that encrypts subscriber
identity or the unique ID number of the phone.

Court Blocks Law Regulating Internet Access to Pornography

The New
York Times is reporting on how the Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected
Congress’s latest effort to curb children’s access to sexually explicit material
on the Internet.

The 5-to-4 majority kept in place an order that the district court issued
in 1999, blocking enforcement of the Child Online Protection Act until its
validity can be resolved. The six-year-old law, which imposes criminal penalties
of as much as $50,000 a day on commercial Internet sites that make pornography
available to those younger than 17, has never taken effect.

The Courts seem to have made a judgment that blocking all access to pornography
would be against the “”Freedom of speech”" and believe that filtering content
so that minors can’t access it but adults can is the more correct approach.

And of course, where does the responsibility to filter content for children
start? Well, in my opinion it starts with the parents. If you want to stop
your children accessing inappropriate material then you need to start taking
responsibility for it, and you children yourself.

Microsoft settle another law suit.

Microsoft are set to pay out another $34 million in software
vouchers to settle a class action in Massachusetts, the latest in a series of
suits claiming it broke laws on unfair competition and consumer protection.

This comes on top of them settleing a case in
Arizona
earlier this week for $105 million dollars. When will we see the
end of these cases?

Microsoft release free ”Express” developer packages

In an attempt to entice more casual programmers into the fold, Microsoft has
released lightweight “”Express”" editions of it’s Visual Studio 2005 developer
tools and made the available for free
download.

The tools include Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++, Visual J#, Visual Web
Dev and SQL Server 2005 Express. All of the products are in beta, and if you
pop over to the channel 9 forums you can learn how you can use these products
to win some prizes, such as an XBox etc…

I can’t comment on the quality of the products at the moment, as I’ve been
unablt to get them to download properly on my machine. Downloads can be anywhere
from 25mb for the package you want and another 84mb for SQL Server. Also about
136mb for The MSDN Express Library. SQL and the Library are one time downlaod
which all the other products can use.

I suspect the reason I couldn’t download was because of the high volume of
people downloading the packages. You can get to the downloads
here.

New Xeon runs 32bit & 64bit software

The new Xeon, which had been code-named Nocona, comes
more than a year after Intel’s rival, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) released
its Opteron processor, which takes the similar approach of extending Intel’s
32-bit x86 processor instructions so they can handle 64-bit computing.
It achieves this using Extended Memory 64 Technology
(EM64T) which allows the processor to run both 64-bit and 32-bit software.

The microprocessor vendor also released a chipset for
workstations based on the new Xeon processor, called the E7525, that includes
a faster 800MHz system bus, DDR2 (double data rate) memory, as well as Intel’s
next-generation PCI (Peripheral Component Interface) Express interconnect.

Intel plans to move all its x86 processors to 64bit extensions over the next
few years.

Microsoft Arizona suit setteled with $105 million in vouchers

According to Info
World, Microsoft has reached a preliminary
settlement in a class-action lawsuit in Arizona, which alleged that the company
abused its Windows monopoly to overcharge customers for its software.

The settlement provides Arizona software buyers with nearl $105 (104.6) million
in vouchers which can be used to buy software and hardware.

In order to be eligable the customer must have indirectly
purchased a certain Microsoft operating system, productivity suite, spreadsheet
or word processing software between Jan. 12, 1996 and Dec. 31, 2002. If any money
remains unclaimed from the settlement, half of it will be donated to public
schools in Arizona.

Tiger copies its stripes

Mac
Minute is reporting on a story which claims that
developer Arlo Rose is outraged that Apple’s new Dashboard feature in
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger
is so
similar to his Konfabulator, which allows quick access to small programs called
Widgets. “”It’s insulting, is what it is”".

Of course thsi isn’t the first time we’ve heard about Mac doing this kind of
copying. It happened before with Mac OS X’s Sherlock search feature.

Steve Jobs keynote speach highlights

This was posted on Mac
Minute… It’s a list of highlights from Steve Jobs keynote
speach at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco.

• Video in Tiger’s iChat will be based on H.264 for better quality
• New iChat to allow video/audio conferencing with multiple people
• “”Automater”" is a visual scriptng application for repetitive tasks
• Tiger will feature “”Dashboard”" — “”Exposé for Widgets.”" (like
  Konfabulator)
• Tiger will include much tighter .Mac integration
• New “”Core Image”" graphics technology coming in Tiger
• New version of Safari to include RSS newsfeed support
• H.264 MPEG video standard to be part of Tiger
• Major OS search upgrade called “”Spotlight”" allows powerful searching
• Tiger will offer full 64-bit processing, over 150 new features
• Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger will ship in first half of 2005
• More than 12 million OS X users; over 12,000 apps
• Jobs moves on to Mac OS X
• 30-inch model ($3,299) requires Power Mac G5 with $599 Nvidia card
• 20-inch model costs $1,299, 23-inch model costs $1,999
• FireWire and USB on new displays; require DVI instead of ADC
• New models feature one piece aluminum stand
• New 20, 23 & 30-inch Apple Cinema Displays
• Jobs gives overview of iTunes, iPod, AirPort Express, Power Mac G5
• 3,500 developers at this year’s conference (17% increase over 2003)

To blog or not to blog?

When do you blog? When do you not?

Do you blog when you have nothing to say, and just do it because it’s become a habit? Or do you have something profound to say to the world?

Who do you blog for? For an audience or for yourself? Do you edit what you say so as not to offend, or are you yourself and speak your mind, no matter the consequences…

These and many other questions need to be considered before you can blog successfully and truthfully!

As for me, well I blog as much for an audience as I do for my own sake, but I will never edit what I say for the sake of being within the status quo. What difference does this make to you? Probably none! To me? Well let’s just say that if it meant nothing I wouldn’t be blogging…