I kind of wondered how they did 3D without 3D glasses. I knew that a parallax barrier would work, but I figured it would have too small of a sweet-spot to be very good (i.e. shift a little to the left or right and the 3D would fail). I guess it’s big enough, though I haven’t actually tried it in person.
Based on their description, this system wouldn’t work for TV or movies – unless they dramatically increased the number of images handled by the system, creating a whole series of sweet spots.
Over the weekend, I discovered that my computer would no longer bootup. It would get most of the way through the bootup process, and right before displaying the desktop, it’d crash and restart. I couldn’t get in with safe mode, and couldn’t access my hard drive with an adapter, either. Everything on the drive was inaccessible. Even worse, I had forgotten to do backups lately, meaning I was potentially losing two weeks of work.
I’ve had the worst luck with hard drives getting corrupted lately. It took me about a day, but I was eventually able to get the Windows repair to work. When I finally got in, I found out that a bunch of files were corrupted. Some files could be repaired, and some were permanently lost. Fortunately, I had backups of all the corrupted ones.
Tonight at a local Starbucks, I realized the guy across the table from me was charging people to jailbreak their iPhones and install an application that would let them to pirate all their iPhone apps. He obviously set it up beforehand, because I saw a half dozen people come in and pay him $30 or $40 for each phone. Gee, that’s lovely. He pulled down around $200 in less than an hour. I felt like confronting him and his “customers”.
I’m obviously in the wrong business. Creating stuff for people is for suckers, the real money is in helping people screw over software developers. I would’ve taken a video of the whole thing and added it to this post, but my camera battery was completely dead.
A while back, I setup a system to track game-updates. It helps give me an estimate of sales on a day-to-day basis since my publisher only gives me monthly numbers. A couple interesting things: I’ve discovered that only about half the copies sold actually get updated. It makes me think I should do more to get players to update their application so they have the latest improvements and bug fixes. I’ve made it extremely easy already, but 50% of the players aren’t clicking that “Update Available” button. I completely understand why Windows does automatic updates by default. I don’t want to force players to update, although, it might not be a bad idea to start popping up reminder windows if players have gone a month without getting an update.
The other thing I’ve noticed is the horrible sales numbers I’ve had since Starcraft 2 came out a week ago. I hope it rebounds soon.
Congrats to Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy for getting a show on Discover.
Starcraft 2 got 4 out of 5 from PC-Gamer.
Empires of Steel got 4 out of 5 stars from Armchair General Magazine.
Just sayin’. 🙂
I just thought this was pretty interesting. The photo:
I understand that my chipmunk photography can seem unbelievable at times, and I’m used to getting questions such as “How did you do that?” and “Is it all Photoshop?”
As this video will show, it’s all happening right there in front of the camera. I get no satisfaction out of a composited photo—the challenge for me is to capture the chipmunk engaged in a real and rather extraordinary situation. And keep in mind that this is a wild chipmunk, not my pet.
Star Wars / Daft Punk Mashup:
Making a Daft Punk helmet:
This is pretty great.
A story came out the other day about George Hotz – the infamous hacker who released a hack for the PS3 a few months ago. His hack only works for an old version of the PS3 system, and Sony moved quickly to invalidate the hack using updates. It was the first time anyone claimed to have hacked the PS3, but now he’s giving up on the PS3, saying it’s just too difficult.
I think this hints at the direction companies will take in the future to bulletproof their systems against piracy – having tight control over the hardware. No doubt, companies will get more and more skilled at this as time passes. People will complain that “it’s their hardware and they should be able to do whatever they want with it” – citing their desire to create “homebrew” or run Linux on their machine, but they’ll be blocked on a technical level (not a legal level) from doing this.
The EFF has promoted exactly this kind of argument by analogy to a car:
“It is my automobile at the end of the day,” von Lohmann said, a reference that iPhone users should be allowed to do what they want with their phones, just like car owners do.
Of course, there’s also a major problem with that kind of argument. First, the laws do not recognize people’s legal right in all cases to modify physical objects however they want – even if they own them. For example, you cannot legally convert a gun into an automatic weapon. Your car must also conform to pollution and noise standards. In other words, it doesn’t matter that you own the gun or the car – there are limits to what you’re allowed to do with it. There’s also issues with copyright that run afoul of the “I should be allowed to do whatever I want with my property”. While some people might argue that owning a book, music, or software means they should be allowed to do whatever they want with it – including filesharing, this argument quickly runs into a problem: most people (even filesharers) dislike the idea of commercial piracy (i.e. selling pirated material for money). For example, if a guy goes and creates a thousand copies of some new DVD and sells them on the street for a couple dollars each, he’s involved in commercial piracy. Logically, “I should be allowed to do whatever I want with the stuff I own” means allowing people to engage in commercial piracy since they own the original DVD.
The other method that console makers use is what Microsoft is doing: while the XBox 360 has been cracked, they control the servers where people can buy new games or get online to play multiplayer games with other people. Microsoft can lock people out of their servers for running cracked XBoxes – and that’s exactly what they did right before the launch of Modern Warfare 2. They locked a million XBox owners out of their servers. Even the EFF had to concede that Microsoft had the right to do so because they own the servers. While this second strategy is less effective than the PS3’s hardware lockout, it seems to be pretty effective, judging from Modern Warfare’s piracy gap on the XBox 360 vs the PC – the numbers I’ve seen show that 86% of the people playing Modern Warfare 2 on the XBox paid for it, while only 6% of the people playing it on the PC paid for it.
Anyway, it’s still pretty interesting that the PS3 has weathered the attacks from hackers as well as it has. It shows the potential of technical methods to block piracy – despite the refrain of pirates that someone will immediately crack all piracy prevention systems.