Universe’s Tech Blog

In many ways Australia is seen as a laughing stock by the world’s gamers. We seem to ban more games than even those fun-hating Germans do, usually with the sort of reasons people laughed at when they were first brought up in the 80s. I mean really, refusing classification to a game about graffiti? What next, banning flat-tops and breakdancing gangs?

It now seems Australia isn’t getting some obscure Japanese game called Rule of Rose, apparently because there’s been some outcry about the game on television here. It hasn’t even been submitted for classification, it’s just not being released. A similar thing happened in Europe last week, with the developer announcing it wouldn’t bother releasing the game after outcry.

Over the past few months I’ve seen a few trailers for it and I can’t work out what the heck is going on. It’s weird, and has a sort of psilocybin induced Alice in Wonderland unreality to it - but theres nothing that indicates outcry or scandal beyond the shamefully emo nature of the whole thing. It’s a horror game, its not targeted at children.

But it’s a horror game involving a young girl and that must be evil. It’s these kinds of ‘it lets you graffiti so people will graffiti’ assumptions that turn the depressing mess that is the Australian game classification system into high farce.

I honestly think you could get any game pulled this way, so I’m starting my own campaign against Microsoft and Rare’s pokemon-esque attempt a mass media franchise, Viva Pinata.

For those unaware of this game, it’s premise is that the gamer - in this case a small, impressionable (they are never non-impressionable are they?) child is tasked with nurturing a race of creatures whose sole aim is to breed with random strangers and eventually be smashed open so their peers can feed on the sweet goodies inside. Not only is it telling children sex-slavery is A-ok, its encouraging cannibalism.

Now, all someone needs to do is dangle that paragraph in front of one of those public interest groups that will give negative public comment on anything you tell them is ‘evil’ - you know, the ones that push for stronger ratings then complain when a game rated the maximum MA15+ is unsuitable for small children. Get this picked up by a few media outlets and before you know it Microsoft’s PR agency will be sending out press releases explaining why their kids game has been refused classification for ‘cannibalism and sexual depravity’.

It would be hilarious if not for the fact it’s not that far from reality.

Microsoft is so keen to get Vista and Office 2007 into the hands of early adopters, it is giving copies away.

If you can handle sitting through three videos on each of Vista and Office 2007 explaining their new features, Microsoft will reward you with a free copy of Vista Business and/or Office Professional 2007.

No, it’s not a joke. The promotion, which is running till February, is called PowerTogether, and it is obviously designed to ensure that tech enthusiasts have a thorough understanding of the new functionality in both Vista and Office 2007 so they can convince neanderthal “Office 97 is good enough for me” managers to upgrade.

As a result, there’s also going to be a heck of a lot of people out there running Office 2007 and generating (and emailing) documents in its new, and non-backward-compatible file formats.

Blind Freddy can tell that there’s going to be corporate resistance to takeup of Office 2007 because of the dramatically changed user interface and file formats that are incompatible with the rest of the world.

We might be cynical, but this seems like a clever way to get a large corpus of people generating documents that everyone using an older version of Office won’t be able to open. (Caveat: there is an Office 2007 compatibility pack for Office 2003.)

It’s not a bad little marketing idea from Microsoft though – getting people to watch tutorials and how-tos about a product and then send them a fully-functional copy. However, the length of the promotion — three months — is a rather extraordinary risk to actually, you know, selling the product.

There’s a very weird video on YouTube promoting the promotion: it’s weird in a kind of way that only one of the world’s largest PR companies could think up. You can watch it here.

There’s a teeny-weeny catch though: it’s only available to those who live in the US. If you’re not fortunate enough to be a citizen in the Land of the Free don’t feel too miffed – even Canada missed out. And all of Europe too – you know, the place where all the history comes from?

We asked Microsoft Australia what it was doing for us yokels, and the answer was a deafening silence. But then again, Microsoft was gearing up for its media and analyst launch of the two products in Australia tomorrow (featuring Uncle Vamos and the senior executive crew), so our enquiry may not have gone straight to the top of the list.

It strikes us that using a US-based mail forwarder could work around the US-only limitation entirely. Not that we’d suggest playing the system like that in the absence of an equivalent offer for Aussies…

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One of the challenges for developers working on Xbox Live Arcade games is the 50MB size limit Microsoft has mandated for the Xbox 360’s digitally distributed titles. Size won’t be quite as big a concern for developers of PlayStation 3 downloadable games, as Sony Computer Entertainment Santa Monica director John Hight told Firing Squad in an interview.

“We’ve arbitrarily set a limit of 500MB to keep download times reasonable,” Hight is quoted as saying. “Since we’ve got plenty of HD space we can accommodate even bigger games and a lot of them.”

While Sony hasn’t announced an upper limit for its downloadable games before, it’s been clear for some time that it would allow larger digitally distributed games on the PS3. The company had promised that it would be releasing original PlayStation games–which can be hundreds of megabytes–on the service.

According to the ever reliable Taiwanese news-source DigiTimes and its ever-stealthy sources of super-secret information, Windows Vista will increase the uptake of SATA optical drives.

No reason was provided as to why Vista will have this effect over any other supported operating system, such as Windows XP.

Instead, DigiTimes’ sources obscurely said Intel’s P965 chipset will have something to do with it, almost as if to say ‘Quick, look behind you!’

This sounds more like the respective manufacturers clutching at straws and desperately trying to gain momentum by making some noise about the stagnant SATA optical drive market.

You see, there is a reason why even Blu-ray and HD-DVD 5.25-inch drives come in PATA flavour. Basically, there’s just no one buying SATA optical drives.

It may have something to do with paying up to double the amount for something that isn’t going to perform any faster nor deliver any immediate value other than a thinner cable which might allow for marginally better airflow in your PC.

Admittedly, the SATA and PATA prices are fast growing more-commonly comparable.

The potential speed boost is there in the form of a faster connection, but this will never have an effect on current optical media. CDs and DVDs can’t even get close to such a speed — even high-speed hard drives drool at PATA’s bandwidth ceiling.

The only throughput benefit for hard drives is faster access to the cache built into the drives, but that’s irrelevant for optical drives which have no such cache. Other benefits of S-ATA like Native Command Queuing also have no benefit with optical drives.

All of this is unlikely to ever change, due to a physical limitation which involves speed, an imperfectly balanced disc, and an explosion. Totally awesome as it may sound, this has been an unavoidable problem.

In the short-term, it’s rather pointless to upgrade your PATA disc spinner to SATA, ignoring the slightly tidier case and vaguely better airflow.

However, there is a good, long-term reason and I’ve mentioned this previously. With a SATA optical drive-saturated market, motherboard manufacturers will be able drop PATA ports from at least some of their mobos. This, in turn, produces cheaper boards, thanks to one less controller and two or so less ports.

But the (non)buyers already seem well aware of this.

Many of us have an Apple Remote Control for Front Row laying around at home. Many of us never use it. A nifty piece of software called Mira lets you dust it off and make good use of it to control a Keynote presentation, to operate VLC as you watch a movie from the sofa and more.

The first thing to do is find the remote control. Like me you may also need to dust it off and remove the cellophane.

Mira installs as a System Preference pane. It comes with built-in profiles for 55 apps although you can easily construct more or use it to launch applescripts remotely.

The demo is limited to six items in the master menu (right), which is launched by pressing the menu button on the remote control.

Plus and minus buttons on the remote control navigate through the options and switch to the selected app. If it’s not open, Mira opens it for you.

Mira doubles the control it offers by distinguishing between short presses and longer “duo-presses”. In VLC, for example, the former starts and pauses the movie and the latter switches between normal and full screen view.

The function of each button on the remote control is configurable through the preference pane.

Again, in VLC the defaults do a good job:

It also turns your remote control into a device to control a Keynote presentation remotely (well, from within 33 feet):

The recently updated version of mira has fixed a problem with the recognition of external IR ports, which means you can now use it trouble-free on older Macs as well.

Mira is shareware — US$16.95 ($21.78) — and is available from the developer’s, (Twisted Melon), web site.

While Sony said it would have 400,000 PlayStation 3 systems ready for its North American launch, Nintendo consistently refused to put a comparable figure on its own efforts with the Wii launch. Instead it would say only that it would ship 4 million systems worldwide by the end of the year.

Now that the launch has come and gone, Nintendo has finally tallied up the number of Wiis it has sold. Today the company said that more than 600,000 Wiis were sold in the Americas in the console’s first eight days of release.

“We’ve shipped retailers several times the amount of hardware the other company was able to deliver for its launch around the same time–and we still sold out,” Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime said in a statement. Leading up to the PS3 launch, one analyst predicted that Sony would fall well short of its shipment goal, suggesting that fewer than 200,000 PS3s would be available on day one.

First-party software and accessory sales brought in more than $190 million on their own. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess in particular rang up strong sales of more than 454,000, or three games for every four consoles. Nintendo said the system’s downloadable game service, the Virtual Console, was also a hit, though it gave no figures to describe how big a hit it was.

Earlier this month, the PlayStation 3 launch was accompanied by a handful of reported robberies, with an Elk Grove, California, GameStop reportedly having four PS3 systems and several Xbox 360 systems stolen by a pair of armed men.

Now The Sacremento Bee, which originally reported the story, is saying that police believe that two of the store’s employees were in on the robbery. Two 19-year-olds who were employed by the store were arrested last week on charges of suspected embezzlement, burglary, and conspiracy, according to the paper. One of them has also been charged with filing a false police report.

Police have not yet recovered the stolen systems, and it’s unclear whether or not others were involved in the heist. As for what tipped police off to the scheme, one officer was quoted as saying, “Our detectives were able to gather information that wasn’t consistent with a robbery…They felt there was more to the investigation than meets the eye.”

By all accounts getting your hands on a PS3 in North America has been quite difficult, and here’s the reason why. While Sony orginally planned to ship 300,000 to 400,000 PS3s during the launch weekend, according to statements by American Technology Research, Sony actually shipped somewhere between 125,000 and 175,000 units. It’s unlikely that Sony will meet its 2006 (calender year) North American/Japanese target of 2 million units.

On the other hand, American Technology Research stated that Nintendo shipped between 425k to 475k Wii units to North America for its launch, and is on track to ship between 1.5 to 2 million units to the North American before the end of 2006.

What this means that if you want to buy a games console during the holiday season, you’ve got a far better chance of picking up a Wii than than you do a PS3.

Given that product availability can play a role in deciding who wins this round of theconsole war, the production planners at the Sony must really be feeling the heat. It is surprising that a company of Sony’s stature couldn’t get its supply chain working efficiently enough to meet its own initial production targets.

Maybe this hick up for Sony will encourage more consumers to give the Wii a go, and that might just be the break that the Wii needs to establish itself in North America.

Apple researchers have built a full working prototype of a Mac tablet PC and three Companies in Taiwan are now costing a product for a potential launch in mid 2007.

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Sources in Taiwan have said that the focus has been more on the home and the education environment than the enterprise marketplace. Several months ago I was told that Apple was exploring a neat new device that is basically a touch screen that links to various source devices including a brand new media centre that Apple is planning to launch next year.

The Mac tablet has been designed to handle third party applications such as home automation software that will allow users to control lighting, audio, entertainment devices and security feeds. It also acts as a full blown PC has wireless linking for a new generation of Wireless Hi Fi speakers that are currently being tested by Apple.

One set of speakers which are similar in size to the small Bose speakers have been developed by an Australian Company.

Also taken into consideration was the use of the device in educational environments where presenters often want to walk around while having access to source material being presented to a screen or auditorium speakers.

The new MAC tablet has Intel processors as well as a docking station that allows the device to link to screens with HDMI input. The docking station also has additional memo0ry capability so that users can stream content to either the tablet PC or the docking station or directly to a media centre if one is being used.

During the past year Apple has lodged several touch screen patents. They have also lodged patents for wireless devices. However three patents according to sources have been lodged by third part Companies who are licensing technology to Apple.

During the last two weeks, Apple’s stock price has soared to record highs, as investors bet on the success of the new iPhone which will be launched early in 2007.

On November 16, the US Patent & Trademark Office published Apple’s patent application titled ‘mechanical overlay’ which was originally filed in May 2005. Apple’s patent relates generally to overlays for touch sensing devices. More particularly, the present invention relates to mechanical overlays that include one or more mechanical actuators that provide touch inputs to the touch sensing devices. This powerful patent provides several great examples of mechanical touch screen overlays which could be used with a future iPod, cell phone, PDA, remote control or gaming device. Furthermore, the patent provides us with a unique glimpse into how touch screens will eventually replace traditional MacBook keyboards in addition to providing users with the ability to transform the new keyboard-GUI into being a piano keyboard amongst other applications.

Quanta and Hon Hai Precision Industry are Taiwanese Companies that make notebooks and other devices for Apple. Both have signed confidentiality agreements with Apple for the Tablet Mac.

1. Uh-oh…..
2. Shit!!
3. What the hell!?
4. Go get your backup tape. (You do have a backup tape?)
5. That’s SOOOOO bizarre.
6. Wow!! Look at this…..
7. Hey!! The suns don’t do this.
8. Terminated??!
9. What software license?
10. Well, it’s doing something…..
11. Wow….that seemed fast…..
12. I got a better job at Lockheed…
13. Management says…
14. Sorry, the new equipment didn’t get budgetted.
15. What do you mean that wasn’t a copy?
16. It didn’t do that a minute ago…
17. Where’s the GUI on this thing?
18. Damn, and I just bought that pop…
19. Where’s the DIR command?
20. The drive ate the tape but that’s OK, I brought my screwdriver.
21. I cleaned up the root partition and now there’s lots of free space.
22. What’s this “any” key I’m supposed to press?
23. Do you smell something?
24. What’s that grinding sound?
25. I have never seen it do *that* before…
26. I think it should not be doing that…
27. I remember the last time I saw it do that…
28. You might as well all go home early today …
29. My leave starts tomorrow.
30. Ooops.
31. Hmm, maybe if I do this…
32. “Why is my “rm *.o” taking so long?”
33. Hmmm, curious…
34. Well, my files were backed up.
35. What do you mean you needed that directory?
36. What do you mean /home was on that disk? I umounted it!
37. Do you really need your home directory to do any work?
38. Oracle will be down until 8pm, but you can come back in and finish your work when it comes up tonight.
39. I didn’t think anybody would be doing any work at 2am, so I killed your job.
40. Yes, I chowned all the files to belong to pvcs. Is that a problem to you?
41. We’re standardizing on AIX.
42. Wonder what this command does?
43. What did you say your (l)user name was…?
44. You did what to the floppy???
45. Sorry, we deleted that package last week…
46. NO! Not that button!
47. Uh huh……”nu -k $USER”.. no problem….sure thing…
48. Sorry, we deleted that package last week…
49. [looks at workstation] “Say, what version of DOS is this running?”
50. Oops! (said in a quiet, almost surprised voice)
51. YEEEHA!!! What a CRASH!!!
52. What do you mean that could take down the whole network?
53. What’s this switch for anyways…?
54. Tell me again what that ‘-r’ option to rm does
55. Say, What does “Superblock Error” mean, anyhow?
56. If I knew it wasn’t going to work, I would have tested it sooner.
57. Was that your directory?
58. System coming down in 0 min….
59. The backup procedure works fine, but the restore is tricky!
60. Hey Fred, did you save that posting about restoring filesystems with vi and a toothpick? More importantly, did you print it out?
61. OH, SH*T! (as they scrabble at the keyboard for ^c).
62. The sprinkler system isn’t supposed to leak is it?
63. It is only a minor upgrade, the system should be back up in a few hours. (This is said on a monday afternoon.)
64. I think we can plug just one more thing in to this outlet strip with out triping the breaker.
65. What is all this I here about static charges destroying computers?
66. I found this rabbit program that is supposed to test system performance and I have it running now.
67. Ummm… Didn’t you say you turned it off?
68. The network’s down, but we’re working on it. Come back after diner. (Usually said at 2200 the night before thesis deadline…)
69. Ooops. Save your work, everyone. FAST!
70. Boy, it’s a lot easier when you know what you’re doing.
71. I hate it when that happens.
72. And what does it mean ‘rm: .o: No such file or directory’?
73. Why did it say ‘/bin/rm: not found’?
74. Nobody was using that file /vmunix, were they?
75. You can do this patch with the system up…
76. What happens to a Hard Disk when you drop it?
77. The only copy of Norton Utilities was on THAT disk???
78. Well, I’ve got a backup, but the only copy of the restore program was on THAT disk….
79. What do mean by “fired”?
80. hey, what does mkfs do?
81. where did you say those backup tapes were kept?
82. …and if we just swap these two disc controllers like this…
83. don’t do that, it’ll crash the sys…….. SHIT
84. what’s this hash prompt on my terminal mean?
85. dd if=/dev/null of=/vmunix
86. find /usr2 -name nethack -exec rm -f {};
87. now it’s funny you should ask that, because I don’t know either
88. Any more trouble from you and your account gets moved to the 750
89. Ooohh, lovely, it runs SVR4
90. SMIT makes it all so much easier……
91. Can you get VMS for this Sparc thingy?
92. I don’t care what he says, I’m not having it on my network
93. We don’t support that. We won’t support that.
94. …and after I patched the microcode…
95. You’ve got TECO. What more do you want?
96. We prefer not to change the root password, it’s an nice easy one
97. Just add yourself to the password file and make a directory…

Nowadays Atari is just a brand name, sold on to various companies over the years and now in the possession of French game publisher Infogrames. But the power of the brand stems from the days when Atari WAS the console industry, the entry point for many people into the world of videogames, part of gaming DNA.

Despite its years of success, one event has come to symbolise the demise of the Atari empire, a seemingly mythical tale of corporate failure that started with the acquisition of a license to make a game based on the ET movie and ended in a landfill in New Mexico.

It’s a story that is usually told as ‘ET was like the worst game ever, so bad Atari dumped truckloads of cartridges in the middle of the desert’. Like all good myths its veracity has been doubted, however one enterprising computer programmer has started a personal quest to discover the specifics behind the desert tale.

His website chronicles the events leading up to the dumping, and highlights the downward spiral Atari took when rampant commercialism forever changed its corporate culture. What’s more, he has tracked down and talked to some people involved in the dumping, and even provides evidence for the location of the site via Google Earth and old photographs. It is a work in progress, and I keenly await the outcomes of his search, like many gamers do.

It’s a fascinating read for those who grew up with the Atari 2600 - it’s made me want to don my ‘Kaboom!’ t-shirt and reinduce my childhood bouts of game-derived tendonitis. It also highlights some mistakes that modern games companies still have to avoid making. One constant source of amusement to me is that despite the tales of an ET driven corporate collapse, movie licenses are still more often than not treated as guaranteed cash, with gameplay given a secondary concern.