Mon, 12 May 2008 22:34:56 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/ Glide Underground Backend en-us http://www.glideunderground.com/images/logo.gif http://www.glideunderground.com/ http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3418 Geek.com looks at how DriveSavers work their magic - these guys are good at what they do. Warning: do NOT attempt a platter swap if you don't have a clean-room (as in, the insane hygenic facility stuff with mandatory suits and all) to operate in. You'll just damage your drive. They've got a "hall of fame" on their site of some pretty insane recovery requests too. Mon, 12 May 2008 22:34:56 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3417 Saw Speed Racer yesterday, on the IMAX. It's scoring an average 35% on the tomatometer currently, but I've learned that mass-market-ish movies generally get lower scores. The reviewers love to hate on them even while normal people (those who didn't waste far too much money going through film school only to be rejected from directing jobs and becoming hateful as a result) love them. Speed Racer's... interesting. On the whole, I liked it. There were lots of subtle nods to the original series, great casting, an absolutely wonderful and fun color pallette, and an amazing set of special effects. But I saw it on the IMAX - if you're seeing it on a normal movie screen, or on a home screen, there's a TON of detail that will go missing from the movie. At the same time, I can tell you exactly why the critics are panning it. #1, it takes a while to get going. #2, it commits a "sin" in their eyes of doing the "element wipe" (a moving screen element serves as the border for a wipe between scenes). In the movie, it works, but the critics hate it when you use the same wipe style over and over. If you've got the chance to catch it on an IMAX, go for it. It really just won't be the same on a smaller screen. Mon, 12 May 2008 08:36:03 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3416 Want to know why the PC games market's dying? This might have something to do with it. If you buy Spore or Mass Effect, they will "die" if they can't phone home every 10 days. That's right: you BOUGHT a copy of a game, you play it single-player, yet it expects to phone home to the company. After the first activation, SecuROM requires that it re-check with the server within ten days (in case the CD Key has become public/warez'd and gets banned). Just so that the 10 day thing doesn't become abrupt, SecuROM tries its first re-check with 5 days remaining in the 10 day window. If it can't contact the server before the 10 days are up, nothing bad happens and the game still runs. After 10 days a re-check is required before the game can run.I have some words for Bioware and EA, but unfortunately they all involve four letters. [UPDATE]: EA have partially come to their senses - but only partially. It still has SecuROM crudware, it just won't phone home much. Wed, 07 May 2008 11:14:09 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3415 Ted Key has passed on. Bust out your DVDs of Rocky & Bullwinkle and look back on some improbable history in his honor. Tue, 06 May 2008 09:33:35 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3414 A lot of mail servers are hit hard - in part because spammers are trying to use them to "backscatter" spam by sending to known nonexistent addresses. We saw a major attack like this the past couple weeks, and it may get worse; the line of trying to watch for this, versus not sending NDR (nondelivery reports) back for a bad address, is tricky. After all, you don't want spam, but you also want to know if you mistyped an address or someone's moved. Mon, 05 May 2008 12:00:00 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3413 Movie coming soon - VR Mag has a great article set on how the movie's effects were made. The more I see of the upcoming Speed Racer movie, the more hopeful I am for it. Mon, 05 May 2008 09:05:03 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3412 Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core. There's a game in here - I just know it. It's in there somewhere. Review will come later this week. Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:46:46 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3411 Yep, it works up there too. Now, a moonbuggy in Alabama can go just fine without a fender, but in Taurus-Littrow a missing fender was a potential disaster. The reason is moondust. When a rover rolls across the lunar surface, it kicks up a plume of moondust in its wake. (Astronauts called them "rooster tails.") Without a fender, the rover would be showered by a spray of dark, abrasive grit. White spacesuits blackened by dust could turn into dangerous absorbers of the fierce lunar sun with astronauts overheating inside. Sharp-edged dust wiped off visors would scratch the glass, making helmets difficult to see out of. Moondust also had an uncanny way of working itself into hinges, latches and joints, rendering them useless.They taped the fender back on, and later replaced it with a set of laminated maps duct-taped together. Small wonder every single manned space mission includes a spare roll of the stuff. Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:35:55 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3410 This is probably the best rebuttal to this type of sensationalist garbage I've seen yet. Perhaps he's envisioning a scenario where a user spends five minutes googling, comes up with nothing, calls that a "good faith" search and forges ahead with an infringing use. That's not going to fly before the court; the user will have to detail how he conducted the search, and if the copyright owner can demonstrate that no, actually, it is quite easy to find the work's original owner, the "good faith" provision doesn't apply. And even if the "good faith" provision does apply, the Copyright Office recommends that the user should still have to compensate the owner for a reasonable amount. It's all there in writing, folks. This isn't that hard.In addition, the "orphan works" provision is important for another reason - how many pieces of software, how many other works are currently unattended and in danger of vanishing entirely? Tue, 15 Apr 2008 18:19:00 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3409 The NY Times has an article on a new theory for the Titantic disaster - it wasn't bad steel plates, but bad rivets. Ship's been sunk for quite a while, guys. Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:52:02 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3408 I thought the industry had learned how foolhardy this was back when 3dfx folded, but no, the silliness of multi-chip boards is making more of a comeback. If the X3 were destined to be a retail product then Asus would doubtless work on a more elegant solution, but this conspicuous cooling system is a worthy reminder of the huge amount of power that's being wasted as heat for the sake of a few extra frames a second. And that's to say nothing of the power expended in dissipating that heat. Green computing it's not. The X3 is an interesting demonstration of engineering potential, but its real value is as a demonstration of how fundamentally inefficient multi-GPU gaming is. Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:06:41 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3407 Hardware Secrets actually have a pretty nice all-encompassing TV tutorial if you're in the market for a new TV and need to decide on what tech to look for. Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:01:55 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3406 Having now "won" the next-gen format war through bribes and intimidation, the logical next step: Sony wants to try to eliminate the DVD. First goal: make Blu-ray "50% of the market" by year's end. If Ryoji means that Blu-Ray will account for 50% of the movies sold, then this plan seems delusional, unless prices for players and movies plummet -- which seems even less likely now that there's no competition. For example, the bestselling Blu-Ray movie at BestBuy.com is 300, which sells for $30. The DVD version sells for $14.Hey, nobody ever accused Sony of being sane. Tue, 08 Apr 2008 12:00:00 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3405 Ars covers a "whisper campaign" by the MafiAA companies to attack the fair use rights of consumers: The various campaigns to increase copyright power have also ended up in the US Congress, where the PRO-IP Act currently looks set to come to a vote this year. The bill, which has the backing of copyright owners (and which Patry once called "gluttonous"), would increase statutory damages that the groups could seek without needing to show any actual harm. According to Patry, today "it is not enough to have vast rights: corporate content owners see a need to eliminate any limitations on those rights too." Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:14:52 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3404 So over the weekend, I started playing Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core. Lots of hype surrounding this one... first "big" FF7 storyline title (rather than the side story Dirge of Cerberus), finally meet this "Zack" guy who Sephiroth kills in flashbacks during FF7, etc... Right now, the game's sitting at 86% aggregate on Gamerankings. To my impression, this is just "Square Effect" - all the big print mags love Squaresoft, high-rank the game just because Final Fantasy is in the title... and let's face it, they're more than a little blind to the downsides. My problems? You can do "missions" from within missions. Seriously, you can plop down in the middle of a storyline mission, touch a save point, and do "missions" all over the globe. "Missions" consist of tiny sections of other maps; bring up the mission map and you can see that while there's a huge map available, you're only allowed to travel a tiny portion (marked with "do not pass" lines) for your "mission." Time-wasting is encouraged. You're supposed to do your storyline missions "right away", but true to Square's form, you're also supposed to run around town, talk to everyone, do the "side missions" from the save point till you're blue in the face... the last time I saw storyline avoidance this blatant was Final Fantasy X-2, which was horrid beyond horrid. Cutscenes, cutscenes, cutscenes... when you're not doing little 4-5 minute "side missions", you're sitting through 5-minute cutscenes broken up by maybe 2-3 minutes of gameplay each. Worse yet, half the cutscenes have audio, and the other half are just you push-buttoning through dialogue with no audio attached. Ok... the battle mode is at once interesting and pointless. Yes, I know they're trying to hide the PSP's limitations,but confining the player to a "free moving" roped-off circle while enemies beat on you isn't the way to do it. The combat system hurts this way, really; it's basically button mashing, with the occasional tap to engage healing materia. Overall, I just can't (so far) get into this one. They're doing a nice job of trying to explain where Sephiroth went nuts in the storyline, but they're not doing a great job of pulling me into the story. Instead, at every turn I'm being encouraged to avoid the storyline missions to do repetitive fight sequences in tiny little roped-off areas. Mon, 07 Apr 2008 08:58:01 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3403 The MafiAA are trying to have it both ways in the Tanya Andersen case; first they complained her filings were too short and light on details, now they're upset she's put every bit of their illegal tactics up for the judge to see. Part of the massiveness the RIAA objects to comes from Lybeck's attempts to adhere to the judge's instructions to explicitly lay out both the allegations and claims for release. The vast majority of Andersen's 18 claims for relief go into a fair amount of supporting detail. (The 18th claim seeks an injunction barring the RIAA from "continuing to engage in criminal investigation of private American citizens.")In case you were wondering about that last bit - the MafiAA agency MediaSentry's been caught doing "investigations" in multiple states where they not only lack proper licensing, but where such activity is a crime. Tue, 01 Apr 2008 08:38:48 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3402 A project for figuring out what's funny. The ultimate goal; computer-generated April Fool's pranks. Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:15:09 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3401 The MafiAA hates downloads - because it destroys their business model; worse, it stops the artists (especially the ones who don't hit it "big") being basically indentured servants. With the launch of TuneCore (full disclosure here, I am the CEO and founder), for the cost of a six pack and a pizza (around $30), anyone can now literally be their own record label and have the same distribution as any "signed" artist. However, unlike a "signed" artist, this new model allows artists to keep all their rights and receive all the money from the sale of their music via a non-exclusive agreement that can be cancelled at any time, all while having infinite inventory with no up front cost or risk.As opposed to the RIAA, who want your soul, firstborn child, and refuse to pay what the contract says they should. Mon, 31 Mar 2008 09:34:28 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3400 Over at CNet, Crave spotlights 10 very obsolete PC ports. For some reason, despite the incredibly shaky start USB had -- we can surely all remember the near certainty that plugging in anything in the early days of USB 1.1 would result in either a blue screen of death or some other virtual plume of smoke -- it still managed to beat FireWire to be the most popular data-transfer system. Sure, you could argue popularity isn't everything, but try telling that to all the dorky kids at schools across the world. For the time being, FireWire lives on as a way of transferring video from camcorders to PCs, but as time goes on and USB gets ever better, and wireless, we'll see the eventual demise of FireWire. At the very least, it's on the verge of obsolescence. I still use some of these - and I'm sure you do too. Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:07:59 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3399 IT News looks at the death of the silicon chip as newer materials are needed to improve performance: One team of researchers at the Leeds University in the UK have proposed to replace silicon chips with carbon nanotubes, which are electrically-conducive tubes of pure carbon that are tens of times thinner than a human hair. Already, some elements of computer circuits such as transistors have been constructed from individual carbon nanotubes. However, scientists have been as yet unable to precisely arrange nanotubes into circuit patterns, which is necessary to determine how each tube conducts electricity.It'll be interesting to see what eventually happens with this. Don't expect silicon to die for everything, though - just the technologies that are pushing the envelope in transistor sizing and speed. Fri, 28 Mar 2008 08:54:20 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3398 No word on if any crappy DRM or other substandardized forms might be involved, but South Park is going to be available free in an online format: Currently in its beta format, the site and its episodes are ad-supported, but require no additional fees to view as many episodes as a fan's heart desires. In an appropriately glib statement, Parker and Stone said they were inspired to start the site when they got "really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time. So we gave ourselves a legal alternative."If only more shows would adopt this model. Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:21:45 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3397 The NY Times looks at why certain technologies live in spite of their predicted doom: The mainframe stands as a telling case in the larger story of survivor technologies and markets. The demise of the old technology is confidently predicted, and indeed it may lose ground to the insurgent, as mainframes did to the personal computer. But the old technology or business often finds a sustainable, profitable life. Television, for example, was supposed to kill radio, and movies, for that matter. Cars, trucks and planes spelled the death of railways. A current death-knell forecast is that the Web will kill print media. What are the common traits of survivor technologies? First, it seems, there is a core technology requirement: there must be some enduring advantage in the old technology that is not entirely supplanted by the new. But beyond that, it is the business decisions that matter most: investing to retool the traditional technology, adopting a new business model and nurturing a support network of loyal customers, industry partners and skilled workers. Wed, 26 Mar 2008 13:31:19 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3396 SLI - in both dual-board and quad-board arrangements - was supposed to be the new "killer app" for PC gaming. Buy an expensive board now, "upgrade" when the price comes down by getting one to match it, etc... or slap a bunch of cheapies together hoping to make four $100 boards equal a $400 board. Never really made sense to me that way. And according to [H]ard, it doesn't really work in practice either.. We feel that the use of 512MB of RAM and its more narrow bus per GPU on the GeForce 9800 GX2 is a bottleneck, especially when running Quad SLI. Four of these GPUs are very powerful, with an incredible amount of shader power. The shader performance exists here to push pixels at extremely high resolutions and in-game settings and AA settings. However, the storage space isn’t there to support the high resolutions and AA settings that four GPUs are capable of pushing. That combined with the narrow 256-bit memory bus means the GPU shader performance is way out of balance with the storage and memory bandwidth supporting each GPU. This was proven with GeForce 8800 GTX SLI (2 GPUs, but backed by 768MB of RAM and 384-bit memory bus) allowing higher settings than Quad SLI, and smoother more consistent performance. Quite simply GeForce 9800 GX2 Quad SLI is bottlenecked, and the result is very underwhelming performance scaling when playing games with it like we think you would be doing with a $1200 video card setup. Point of reference: if my video setup costs me over $300, no thanks. How many games can I buy (plus an Xbox360 and a Wii) for that $1200? Tue, 25 Mar 2008 11:01:40 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3395 Seagate is telegraphing lawsuits if solid state hard drives catch on: apparently they think there's some patent violation in other makers' designs. But in case flash prices continue to plummet and the flash drives really do catch on, Watkins has something else up his sleeve. He’s convinced, he confides, that SSD makers like Samsung and Intel (INTC) are violating Seagate’s patents. (An Intel spokeswoman says the company doesn’t comment on speculation.) Seagate and Western Digital (WDC), two of the major hard drive makers, have patents that deal with many of the ways a storage device communicates with a computer, Watkins says. It stands to reason that sooner or later, Seagate will sue – particularly if it looks like SSDs could become a real threat. Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:00:00 -0500 http://www.glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3394 The Feds are now looking into allegations that the auction of the old TV spectrum was rigged with some false data: In a press release, PISC referred to a letter they sent to the FCC on March 19, 2008. "[W]hile not accusing any party of wrongdoing, the letter asks the FCC to investigate whether discussions between Morgan O'Brien of Cyren Call and possible D Block bidder Frontline Wireless caused Frontline to lose financial backing and scared off other bidders." Cyren Call, the advisor to The Public Safety Spectrum Trust Corporation, manages the public use of the spectrum in the FCC's public-private partnership. Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:00:00 -0500