03/02/2006
IT Crowd
Looks really awful from the trailers, mainly because of Richard Ayoade.
So, how's the programme itself?
It's actually pretty good. It's a trad sitcom, shot on video with a
laugh track, which is also really good news - I loathe the
Green-Wing/Nighty-Night/Office style sitcoms that feel that just because
they're 'modern' means they don't have to be funny and seem to be
absolutely everywhere on TV right now. The writing, as we would expect
from Graham Linehan, is very sparky; Richard Ayoade is still awful, but
looks like he may well become more funny as the series goes on
(certainly, he seems to improve between episode 1, where he's
tooth-grindingly bad, and episode 2, where at least one of his lines
works). The set designers have done their homework (EFF stickers, Texas
Chainsaw Massacre poster, RTFM T-shirt), and the attention to detail
is really quite likeable. And, most importantly, it's funny.
The second episode is much better than the first, by the way, so do
stick with it. If you don't, Channel Four will recommission 'Balls of
Steel'. Please, think of your sanity.
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09/11/2005
Home computer Battlefront
I've just had a phone call from one of my brothers, who's just bought Battlefront
2. Having gone through the DVD installation process, he ran the game
only to get an error message complaining about "emulation software".
Now, this means stuff like Daemon
Tools or Alcohol 120%,
software which provides "virtual" CD drives based on hard-drive stored
images. This is actually an entirely legitimate use - having lots of CDs
on your hard drive means less scratching of your original discs, they're
faster, they mean you can keep a centralised "jukebox" so your kids'
copies of The Sims or whatever don't need to be replaced at EA
prices, that kind of thing. Unfortunately, like all good technologies
this can also be used for piracy, and as a result a lot of copy
protection systems now refuse to allow the game to be played even if
such a program is installed on your system. Doesn't bother checking
whether the game itself is mounted on the system, just quits out
if it even detects the existence of Daemon Tools or Alcohol.
This, of course, is stupid, but then so are most game copy protection
systems - they quite often fail on certain optical drives, to the extent
where many software companies actually release patches to remove the
publisher-mandated copy "protection" as the very first thing they do (a
la Epic on Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004 - the first
patch for both removes the protection check). Valve's Steam system,
although much maligned, is a better idea; because it is user-centred
rather than disc-centred, it doesn't care whether you installed HL2 from
your disc, a copy or your disc or just by installing the Steam client
and downloading it off Valve, just that the game itself is registered to
your account.
What's worse is that you absolutely cannot copy these discs -
meaning that if something goes wrong and you want to play the game
again, you're probably screwed. The new SecuROM 7.0 system, which Battlefront
2 is protected with, blocks all kinds of software; worse, it also
blocks software that has nothing to do with piracy. A good example is
the piece of software that was actually causing my brothers' problem: it
wasn't DT or A120, because neither were installed, it wasn't CloneCD or
anything like that...
...no, it was SlySoft's AnyDVD.
A piece of software that has nothing whatsoever to do with piracy
of computer games - it's used to work around region code issues with
DVD-Video playback. Now, either SecuROM just crashes out if it finds
something unusual has hooked the Windows optical-drive readout mechanism
(in which case there's a lot of legitimate stuff it could crash on, like
random SATA drivers), or Sony DADC, makers of SecuROM, deliberately
blocked this software because... well... uhm... it hurts their movie
business? Uhm... get back to you later.
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02/11/2005
EMI screw up again
The Kate Bush album, now titled "Aerial", has been awaited for ten
years. It is the most eagerly anticipated album in the history of recent
music. It has been kept in sheer secrecy by EMI, its distributor; music
journos have had to listen to it behind closed doors on EMI's equipment,
or on sealed tapes, or only hear single tracks and so on. It is meant to
be secret until the 7th of November, when its glorious release will
eventually make tonnes of cash for EMI; coincidentally, this is also
according to Popjustice the day on which they "Copy Control" all UK
product. I refuse to buy CC product (read problems on my separates
system, complete failure on my portable CD or on my DVD player, and it
still doesn't stop you from ripping it if you own the right CD-ROM
drive), so if they "protect" Aerial, it's not getting bought.
Yip, you guessed it; it's leaked, a week before release, in a nice high
quality LAME VBR rip. (Apparently the unprotected Canadian release, from
the artwork inside.) Nice advertisement for Copy Control - doesn't
actually stop piracy, just screws you and the artist over! Nice
work, EMI.
(Although if the final album isn't CC, there will at least be
some hope for the future.)
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14/08/2005
Never run an ATM on NT4
I've just had my debit card eaten by a Bank of Scotland ATM at the
Shandwick Place branch in Edinburgh (the second one as you head towards
Princes Street) and I'm not happy. Especially since the card in question
was from a completely different bank. Aaargh...
It was an interesting event, no doubt about it: I walked up to the ATM,
inserted said debit card into the machine, and watched as it failed to
put up the "Enter your PIN" screen, instead flashing to a Windows
desktop, logging off, shutting down to the sight of the NT4 Workstation
logo, rebooting for a suspiciously long time, loading an old McAfee
VirusScan and finally bringing up a "Sorry, this machine is out of
service" screen - all this while not even thinking about ejecting my
card (although whirring the cash motors during the reboot almost felt
like it was taunting me.) I thus rang the HBoS line, helpfully printed
on the front of the ATM, at this point, to be told there was no way the
machine would give me my card back, to go ring my bank's lost-and-stolen
cards line and get it cancelled, and that they really were so dreadfully
sorry. How infuriating.
Whilst the process of getting the card cancelled and reissued is just a
five-minute call to an 0870 number (although now I have to wait a week
for them to sent a new card back), it's still really annoying to have
this kind of thing happen to you because instead of using a fully
tested, reference platform environment (like, funnily enough, my bank's,
which has entirely text-based ATMs running on top of what appears to be
a custom operating system) NCR have just tacked some pretty pictures on
top of the now no-longer-supported-and-security-flawed-to-hell NT4, put
it on a local Intranet instead of a custom protocol just so they can
display "Buy Your Mortgage At HBoS" with graphics rather than text. I'm
sure custom-OS ATMs can crash too, but they seem a hell of a lot more
secure to me and at least they'll probably ask for my PIN first.
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13/08/2005
This new last.fm/Audioscrobbler site is rather good...
It's possibly the best use
of CSS I've ever seen. It's fluid, it works in IE and Firefox,
it uses tables only for what tables should be used for (lists of
items), and it looks rather good. So much so that I'm going to use their
journal system for specific music-blogging (articles mirrored on here,
of course).
Go on, join up. You know you
want to share your music taste with the world...
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07/08/2005
The unavoidable death of Time?
The recent collapse of the Granville Technology Group has been compared
by many to the MG Rover collapse, and in some ways they're similar - a
large company, poorly managed to death - but it is, however, a unique
situation. In the case of GTG, we have a company which seems to have
aimed to alienate customers by deliberately selling them shoddy kit -
something which even the Phoenix consortium would have baulked at - and
then locking the customers in just to annoy them.
Time Computers, the brand used by GTG for most of its life, was never a
particularly good company - it sold machines on the cheap through
newspaper advertisements with cut-back components, overreaching software
deals and financing agreements. It was, however, a profitable one -
right to the point when its founder, Tahir Mohsan, not only became so
rich he ended up on the Guardian's young Rich List, but became president
of the Federation of Asian Businesses into the bargain; in fact,
recently he was listed by the Manchester
Evening News, on 31st May this year, as being worth £80m.
What exactly happened between the point when they were able to buy the
charred remains of Tiny back in 2002 (Tough It's Now
Yours, according to computer-repair slang) and the bankruptcy of
today?
Well, as we all know, they started pulling stunts. Before this time,
they were only slightly worse than every other direct retailer; only
using slightly worse components, with a tendency to overload software
and charge for tech support. Firstly, they started charging extra for
reload discs - so you had to pay GTG £60 if you even wanted to restore
the computer to factory condition - even if the system had been damaged
by a virus, Trojan or component failure. Insultingly, all the £60 CD-ROM
did was unlock a partition hidden on the computer in the first place
which contained the restore software; this was a stunt pulled by no
other UK computer vendor. Most don't supply original Windows CDs (with
the notable, and unusual exception of Dell), so the only recourse is to
wipe the system back to factory condition using the restore discs -
which come in the box. Time didn't do that, and this undoubtedly gained
them a huge amount of adverse publicity; especially since they also had
the most expensive technical support number in the UK computer industry,
a £1/minute 090 monster, which considering that Dell use an 0870 seems
to be outstandingly poor value.
I started to write about Time when the company pulled its most visible
and outrageous stunt, in late 2003. They had taken a practice previously
seen amongst US computer vendors (but not their European offshoots)
of locking the system's modem so it could only dial particular telephone
numbers, locked it to the numbers of their ISP offspring company - the
still-running and must-avoid Supanet (Internexus Group) - and
then for a time smugly told customers to go buy a USB modem if they
wanted to dial their own ISP. The modem was always a standard Conexant
HSF software modem - a piece of kit you can buy very cheaply online -
and all that was ever locked down was the driver; the modem was not
locked in hardware, it was entirely Time/Tiny's creation and definitely
not the "optimisation" their PR people later tried to claim it was. This
got me to put up my now-mostly-useless Time page
- in its original form, just a somewhat vitriolic "10 Reasons Not To Buy
From Time" list, which then quickly expanded as solutions to the locking
problem started to come out, GTG found a way to lock the driver harder,
and more solutions came through.
Later, Time put up a page containing software to unlock the modems,
which I'm sure was due to Internet pressure; but it still required the
user to create a Supanet account to access, if they weren't lucky enough
to have a mate with a knowledge of what to do, and had several
suspiciously unnecessary restrictions. These meant that if a user has
one of the last Time PCs, they cannot unlock the modem using Time's
software even if they find someone that's kept it - the unlocking
software has a challenge-response protection which requires a key
generated by Time's now-nonexistant website. (Plug: my Time page still
has the registry-based unlocking method, despite pleas from GTG to
remove it, which should hopefully still work.) It's almost like they
wanted to give their customers one last screw.
I received many emails from Time employees during the page's existance,
which were the main reasons it was kept up - the company was not only
screwing customers, it was screwing its employees too. I also had the
entertainment, on occasion, of GTG's Internet PR team showing up in the
page comments (having followed the link from the pro-unionisation ITEF
site) - now sadly lost by HaloScan, I promise you I didn't delete
anything - making occasionally salient points about the page's vitriol
but otherwise parroting a one-note "We didn't do it" song, easily
disprovable with Romulus2 and Watchdog. I'll leave it to an ex-employee,
posting recently, to give the gist of much of the commenting:
I am not sorry nor surprised to hear of the collapse of Granville
Technology! I worked for the company for 2.1/2 years, 3 months in the
Legal Dept, the rest of the time on the front line customer service team
and the Supanet Dept.
In 40 years of employment,(I resigned voluntarily in January 2001) I
have never worked for a worse company - it was difficult to decide who
was treated worse: customers or staff. The management were abominable.
(Neil Foster, 31st July 2005, comments)
Many of the comments before this, now lost in HaloScan's black hole of
doom, were in the same vein.
I made a comment on the 21st of April update that I hoped Time wouldn't
become "the MG Rover of the British computer industry" as long as they
fixed themselves. At this time, I really didn't know that Time were
going to become the MG Rover of the UK computer industry - they'd been
losing £2m a month since January and it's been suspected by some that
they were insolvent even at the time I wrote it (they were taken down by
defaulting on a HSBC loan, taking out their credit card facility for
their High Street stores and killing off the company.) They'd sold a
dodgy line of plasma screens under the Tiny brand name that had a
lot of people very, very angry (AV Forums thread - I hope you don't
need registration), they were pulling all the usual stunts, and people
weren't taking the bait anymore. They'd finally started to run out of
marks; but too late for many. And that's what's so sad about the demise:
the fact that unless you bought using a credit card (which should always
be done for >£100 purchases, but too many people don't realise this),
you will have paid hundreds or even thousands of pounds for either hot
air, or faulty kit, and there's nothing you can do about it except
complain at somewhere like tinycon.com.
It's the biggest shame of the entire affair - that the people most
responsible for the death of GTG are those who will be least affected by
the consequences. Isn't that just so sad?
[EDIT: Grammar and sentence construction corrected. *Sigh*.]
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18/05/2005
The real winner of the 2006 Console War will be...
...IBM. No question about it. Three cut-down, speed-emphasised PPC970
cores in the XBOX360, one cut-down PPC970 core and several vector
arithmetic units in Sony's 'Cell' PS3, and some form of PPC in the
Nintendo Revolution.
So, now they're all announed, where do the awards go to?
Design: Unquestionably Nintendo Revolution - that's one SLEEK
puppy, and it might even get smaller.Take
a look over at that and say it's not truly beautiful...
Second place: PS3, which might look nice in its black version. 'Nice
try' award goes to XBOX360, which might look a lot better in the flesh
than it does in pictures.
Games: Who the hell knows? Unreal Engine 3.0 looks amazing on the
PS3, though, and that was pretty much the only actual in-engine demo
there.
Feature list: It's well known that the PS2 is a pig to code for,
and Sony look like continuing that tradition with PS3 - which uses a
completely different paradigm to that used by most game developers, and
requires HiDef to boot. OTOH, now dual-core is coming to PC it's more
likely that games makers will make parallelisable engines; Unreal 3.0,
in fact, will probably be the first mainstream example of this, and
hence Cell might not be such a pig to code for if you're writing a lot
of maths-heavy (and especially physics-heavy) code in parallelisable
form. And the NVIDIA G70 graphics core they're using in the PS3 looks to
be another speed-demon; almost as big as the GFFX-6800 jump again
(says a 6800GT owner), so will be capable of the huge HDTV resolutions
Sony will demand of it. Also, it's got Blue-Ray, GTA and Gran Turismo.
XBOX360 may or may not be backwards compatible, but its aim is to become
your home media centre - it has MCE Extender built in, it also gives
HiDef, and it has Halo 3. It's tri-core, but they're all the same
(3.2GHz and watercooled) - so it's just like programming SMP on a PC.
And, like PS3, it has wireless controllers. Never underestimate the
power of the Vole.
Nintendo is being vague about what's actually in the Revolution, but we
do know it'll be able to play the complete Nintendo game library through
an Internet service, and have direct GCN compatibility. This is a Unique
Selling Point - a lot of geeks own modded XBOXes for XBMC and emulators,
and Revolution will make that second option unneccessary (while XBOX360
makes the first unneccessary, unless you don't have Windows MCE). There
is also a rumour going around that Revolution will provide a fan-game
capability, which could quite possibly be huge - take a look at the
homebrew GBA scene and realise exactly how vital it is, and take a look
at what's happening with the DS even so soon after release. Could
Nintendo finally have worked out that these people are to be cultivated,
not legalled out of existence? If they have, it could be, indeed, a
revolution.
Pricing: With the consoles being of such power as they are - 3GHz
RISC processors, watercooling and all - I don't expect them to come in
at any less than £299 for 360/PS3. Sony don't lose cash on consoles -
they made humongous profits on the PS2 right from the start, and there's
a shop down the street from me selling PSP Value Packs at £199 (which
isn't that far away from the official Sony UK price when it comes out) -
so this is almost certain. Revolution might come in less, because it's
almost certainly a much less powerful machine; but it will be the most
intriguing one. And XBOX360 will be out the gate first, coming out this
year; PS3 is a paper launch, and Revolution was just a sneak peek.
So fasten your seatbelts... it's going to be war.
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23/02/2005
Spyware-shilling scum threaten Spyware Warrior and others
Suzi at Spyware Warrior has
received a legal
threat from the people behind the iSearch spyware toolbar, spread-blasted
around a load of spyware information sources (note her letter threatens,
dumbly, her domain registrar, because they're offering a cloaking service
where her name doesn't show up on the domain). Nevertheless, it's a
fairly scary move - especially after both Aluria and Lavasoft's hijinks
with WhenU, who also have threatened people who claim their spyware
is.
iDownload/iSearch, of course, claim that their product is not malware,
despite the fact that the licensing
agreement (warning: link goes to iSearch, although the page doesn't appear
to contain an installer) contains this:
By installing the Software, you understand and agree
that the Software may, without any further prior notice to you, automatically
perform the following: display advertisements of advertisers who pay a fee
to iSearch and/or it's partners, in the form of pop-up ads, pop-under
ads, interstitials ads and various other ad formats, display links
to and advertisements of related websites based on the information
you view and the websites you visit; store non-personally
identifiable statistics of the websites you have visited; redirect
certain URLs including your browser default 404-error page to or through
the Software; provide advertisements, links or information in
response to search terms you use at third-party websites; provide search
functionality or capabilities; automatically update the Software and install added features or functionality or
additional software, including search clients and toolbars, conveniently
without your input or interaction; install desktop icons and installation files;
install software from iSearch affiliates; and install Third Party Software.
and this:
However, to enable iSearch and/or it's partners to provide and operate
its Software, iSearch and/or it's partners may collect certain types of non-personally
identifiable information about individuals who install the Software. This
information may include your Internet protocol (IP) address, your domain,
your operating system, your browser version, type and language and your Internet
Service Provider.
[...] iSearch and/or it's partners may also collect
and may use certain other types of non-personally identifiable information,
including: certain of the web pages that you view, the
amount of time that you spend on certain websites, your responses
to ads served by iSearch and/or it's partners, certain
software installed to your computer and software characteristics
and preferences [isx: like Spybot S&D, maybe?] ,
non-personally identifiable information on web pages
and forms, software usage characteristics and preferences, and
your ZIP code.
Gee, sounds like spyware to me. Sounds like a Trojan to
me. And, of course, with your IP, domain, webform entries and postcode,
you are personally
identifiable, so they're lying to you.
This
amusing thread at Wilders Security shows that Microsoft AntiSpyware
(actually a rather good piece of software - it's what used to be GIANT
AntiSpyware, it's going to be free, and it's permanently resident)
spots and stops iSearch installation, so iScum are going to have
to go up ahead the world's biggest software company if they want
to stop their piece of shit software being 'libelled', he he. So
instead they're threatening a blogger, one who doesn't even
make a software product.
Way to go, iSearch. Now, can you piss off?
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