Bryan Serven | Opinions To Live By

Video Games: The New Pet Rock

bryan@bryanserven.com (Bryan Serven) — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 00:08:00 +0000

I realize it has been a while since my last post and the only excuse I have is this: writing of topics other than fashion, politics, and pop music requires thought, and my intellectual stamina is at an all time low. You will see this in the next few paragraphs.

I have been on a video game kick as of late and, as you surely know, it is not the most productive form of entertainment. You can't casually listen to it through a comfortable pair of headphones as you would with music. You can't occasionally glance across the room to catch your favorite team on the sports ticker as you would with television.

Video games are a far more sinister breed of activity. They require concentration, commitment, and best of all, complete disregard for all of the trivial things in life, such as human interaction and procuring money for food and shelter. All of which I am perfectly fine with.

However, I have become aware of something even more sinister than gaming itself. An evil force of unimaginable power. A destroyer of worlds, if you will. It is none other than the notorious, nefarious game publisher.

A mere three years ago video game prices averaged $45 and typically boasted over one hundred hours of game play. Multi-disc games were the norm, and product quality was improving drastically with every release.

At some point over the past few years, it somehow became acceptable to produce games that offer a fraction of the entertainment at premium pricing. The average price for a major studio console game these days is a hefty $55, and the average advertised play time is less than thirty hours.

A great number of gamers would argue that the sacrifice of play time is necessary to produce stronger game play and better, more realistic graphics. Unfortunately, this is why modern video game companies are yielding Microsoft management-sized salaries. They prey on the ignorance of the ignorant.

Take, for example, the entire Rockstar Games line-up. While Rockstar did produce a quality video game once, every subsequent release was the exact same product with a different sub title. Each of these sold millions of copies at an especially high price.

So I am sure you are wondering: If people saw the value in a product and were willing to pay for the same game four times, why are you so upset, Bryan?

I am not entirely sure I can answer that, but hear me out.

Another example of video game tragedy is a little piece of [work] called Gun. Gun is an exceptional game with a lot of original concepts and superb game play. Its downfall was not only the initial $55 price tag, but also the unbelievably short play time. The average person with limited gaming history and ability could beat the whole game in less than ten hours. Or they could just spend that $55 on a week's worth of food, a month's worth of electricity, or enough Diet Coke and Mentos to turn an entire college full of unsuspecting women into a campus-wide wet t-shirt contest.

Just think of the typical teenager with a part-time job. Necessities like pizza, soda and condoms put a serious dent in the amount of video games that they can purchase at $55 a pop. Maybe that is an underlying cause of piracy. Yarrgh.

I am really hoping that video game publishers stop worrying about the bottom line and start allowing their studios the time and resources to create games that live up to the price tag. Square Enix should not be the only company capable of this very reasonable feat.

A Lesson For Future Developers

bryan@bryanserven.com (Bryan Serven) — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 13:15:00 +0000

Some of the latest and greatest technologies are extraordinarily simple ideas put into action by some extraordinary developers. With the nearing onslaught of web 2.0-labeled killer apps, it is important to take the time to note and appreciate professional web development, because I think it's becoming a rarity.

The amount of technological advancement coming from the minds of Google employees is staggering. Some of the companies sharing that pedestal are del.icio.us, digg.com, and flickr. But without some very creative development and near perfect user satisfaction, these services would be in the same sinking boat as Hotmail.

Joining the boat is one recently launched service that appears to have already shot itself in the foot by way of a poorly timed press release, Reuters article, and some of the worst programming in the history of the internet.

MOG.com touts itself as a blog space, where music lovers can spread the word on their favorite artists, and find people with similar musical interests. It's not a bad idea, but it is likely the worst executed idea I have ever seen.

The most noticeable flaw on the website is their forum, which is inaccessible due to a rather pitiful administrative mistake. While the forum is a relatively small part of the MOG.com experience, it is far from the only nail in the coffin.

If you decide to register an account, I recommend taking some aspirin prior, because headaches are guaranteed. The form is short and simple, but the programming on the server side is ugly. After hitting the submit button, if the script finds any errors with the form it will take you back to the same page and inform you of the problem, which is standard procedure for form submission. However, due to a bug that registers the e-mail address regardless of errors, you will not be able to use the same one the next time you hit the submit button.

A service that requires registration with a form that makes it impossible to register. That's a new one for me.

Because I was unable to make an account, I am unsure whether you can search for other users based on music-related criteria, though they have included the ability for unregistered users to search by unrelated criteria. The results include a very small picture, a city/state location, and proof of a profoundly small amount of registered users. Include the slowest database server I've ever experienced into the equation, and you have got a pretty weak service.

Programming 101:
Make sure the basic functionality of your website works before your company starts submitting press releases!

NEC's Eventual Self-Destruction

bryan@bryanserven.com (Bryan Serven) — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 00:30:00 +0000

For most hacker types, including myself, NEC is a name that has been associated with quality for quite some time. But a recent experience with NEC tech support has me questioning their integrity, and may foreshadow a drop in loyalty from computer professionals.

The ability to deliver a reputable product or service is what makes the CEO a million (or billion) dollar asset. The inability to provide respectable technical assistance, however, is what drives a majority of modern companies into the ground. This has been the case with a number of technology startups and was thrust into the spotlight by the world's largest computer maker: Dell.

Dell's negligence of customer relations nearly dethroned the company in 2005 and resulted in a number of 'I Hate Dell' websites, as well as 'To Hell With Dell' merchandise. Their market share has steadily dwindled since. Dealing with a disgustingly large amount of Dell computers over the past few years, I have experienced their incompetence first hand, and I can assure you that my heart does not bleed for their loss.

The word 'disappointment' has commonly been affiliated with customer support ever since corporate America collectively decided to outsource its communications with the public to every country but its own.

So what, then, does this have to do with NEC, a Japanese corporation that has an American support staff for its American customers? Just that. NEC is a massive, foreign company whose bottom line will remain unscathed in light of bad publicity from the West.

My incident with NEC began with a click to online support. I explained to my new friend that a recently purchased MultiSync 1940CX monitor was not functioning properly (either the backlight or diffuser was preventing light from reaching the top of the monitor, causing a brightness gradient). After completing a forty minute checklist to ensure that my refresh rate was not the culprit (huh?), my friend revealed that he was not in a position to provide any assistance in resolving technical issues or in authorizing the return of merchandise. He referred me to an 800 number.

I thought, perhaps, that this was an unpublished telephone support line that would put me in touch with somebody capable of supplying a solution, but my hopes were dashed when I heard the all too familiar "press one for..."

Three 15 minute phone calls finally produced an honest soul, who proceeded to inform me of the two options available:

I can pay to ship the monitor back, wait 7-10 days to have it repaired and then have it shipped back 3-5 days afterwards.
I can pay to ship the monitor back and then, upon receipt, also pay $50 to have a refurbished monitor of the same or similar model shipped.

Imagine if these options were applied to something less expensive than a $400 monitor like, for example, pizza. You have your choice of adding the pepperoni that they forgot to put on and have it reheated, or you can pay another $20 for a similar pie ordered several hours earlier in the day that was never picked up.

When did this become an acceptable business practice?

An hour of arguing with a fellow claiming to be in a management position produced only a headache and a mutual lack of respect for eachother.

A Main Street Observation

bryan@bryanserven.com (Bryan Serven) — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 14:38:00 +0000

Have you ever heard a car alarm go off while the vehicle is actually being stolen?

The Reuters Spin On Paid Advertising

bryan@bryanserven.com (Bryan Serven) — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 03:43:00 +0000

All the major news organizations would love to have you believe that the content they give birth to is factual, researched and void of opinion. As such, we would all like to think that the news media has a set of standards that prevents them from crossing into unethical territory.

Robert MacMillan is doing an excellent job of removing the public's veil of ignorance.

On March 10th, 2006, MacMillan published an article so completely void of morals or significant information, I feel as though society has died a little inside.

The story reads like a sales pitch from a used car dealer, naming Best Buy and its computer service child, Geek Squad, 8 times in a piece that was supposed to be about the perils of wireless networking. Unintelligent quotes from the company's employees include an appeal for potential customers to buy new computers instead of trying to network "older" ones. A careful use of words aims to convince the reader that Geek Squad is not only a capable choice for network troubleshooting, it's the only choice.

I sincerely hope that this fusion of journalism (I use that term loosely) and advertising does not become commonplace. However, the fact that this article slipped past Reuters quality control and made it onto several news sites, including CNET's News.com, I fear that corporate dollars have already won this battle.

I'd like to take this moment to notify you that, chances are, you have a high school student in your community that is probably more capable of computer and network troubleshooting than your closest Geek Squad technician. One that will likely charge little or nothing.

The Definition Of Beta

bryan@bryanserven.com (Bryan Serven) — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 00:58:00 +0000

As of late, Google has taken a lot of heat over minor glitches in its Gmail service. Some bloggers have been producing lots of harsh comments out of their frustration with the isolated service interruptions.

While I fully appreciate the affliction associated with the brief absence of a necessary service such as e-mail, I'm going to take it upon myself to introduce a word to everyone's vocabulary: Beta.

Beta is one of the most important words of the computer age. But prior to the affiliation with software development, it held a long-standing role as the second letter of the Greek alphabet and flirted with various scientific terminologies.

As if that wasn't a solid enough resume, today's Beta is a constant reminder that the public testing of a product or service does not imply guarantees of its stability.

The aforementioned bloggers should take note that Gmail is a partially-public beta. As such, it should not be used to conduct business or be relied upon for time-sensitive exchanges of information.

Google has been conducting this public test of its e-mail service for a mere 2 years. Microsoft acquired Hotmail in 1998, before Google was even a company, and it is still frequently plagued by bugs and outages.

Windows OneCare Live

bryan@bryanserven.com (Bryan Serven) — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 11:18:00 +0000

After Microsoft's launch of a surprisingly successful anti-spyware unit, I thought that they had got their act together, and that maybe, just maybe, greater things would be coming out of Redmond.

I was wrong.

My initial reaction after installing OneCare was the same reaction I had after tearing ligaments in my knee during a high school gym class. It was painful, embarrassing, and I came close to crying like a 6 year old girl.

Installation

Within the first 60 seconds of running OneCare, I had flashbacks of the days when everyone and their brother used ZoneAlarm. Upon rebooting after the install, my system screeched to a halt while the software made sure that my local area connection was, of all things, allowed to connect to my router. This was followed by several prompts to check if I wanted to allow AOL Instant Messenger, Mozilla Firefox, and Mozilla Thunderbird to connect to the internet. All safe and reliable software run on hundreds of millions of systems around the world.

Oddly enough, there was no prompt to make sure I wanted to grant Microsoft's Internet Explorer permission to do the same.

Virus Scan

The first software-recommended action was to start a virus scan, which I hesitantly agreed to. Immediately my 10,000 rpm hard drive was grinding away, and almost 25 minutes later I had a clean bill of health. The significance of posting my hard drive speed is that with both Norton AntiVirus and McAfee Virus Scan, the average in-depth scan takes about 4 minutes.

To test the OneCare virus scanning further, I placed a virus on my desktop, renamed it with a .txt extension for safety purposes, and ran the scan again. McAfee? Check. Norton? You bet! OneCare? It appears it didn't even look at the file.

For some reason it only took 19 minutes the second time, which makes me wonder what kind of caching is going on. Caching is never a good idea when it comes to scanning for viruses, by the way.

Also worth mentioning are the virus scan options, which consist of: On, and Off. You can also manually exclude files that you don't want the software to scan. "How does that help me," you might ask? It doesn't, unless you write viruses.

Tune-Up

The tune-up portion of the OneCare system seems to be implemented nicely, but not without some questionable functionality. The tasks that run include:

Hard-drive defragmenting
OneCare Virus Scan
A Windows Update check
Auto-backup (optional)
File cleanup (optional)

I would agree that 3 of these are good practice for the average user, and the backup feature would be useful for people with external or secondary drives that fear file corruption or hard- drive failure.

The file cleanup option is intended to clean out things like temporary office and internet files, as well as "unnecessary program installation files," whatever that means. However, I would highly recommend leaving the file cleanup feature turned OFF. Nothing good can come of giving any piece of software no-questions-asked control over deleting files on your hard drive.

Firewall

It looks like the firewall works. But that's the only good thing I can say about it. I can forgive Microsoft for blocking internet access for all applications that aren't their own. I even understand the idea behind this process: that you can't trust the user.

Unfortunately, having a warning window pop-up every time the average Windows idiot runs an application will make them panic and call for help. If you want proof of this, you can answer my phone for a day.

Conclusion

It appears that Microsoft Antispyware will remain a separate application, which will confuse a lot of users thinking that OneCare will take care of everything. There are better packages out there to handle what OneCare does, but it might give the average user a little piece of mind.

At least until their credit card information gets stolen.

Goodmail: A Guide To Extortion

bryan@bryanserven.com (Bryan Serven) — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 10:46:00 +0000

If you are the type of person that is constantly looking for a way to con millions of dollars from thousands of reputable and ethical businesses, consider modeling your methods after Richard Gingras, Founder & CEO of Goodmail Systems. His company's CertifiedEmail service provides a method for, what else, companies to legally spam your inbox by paying to ensure their exclusion from spam filters.

Before I rip Mr. Gingras a new one, let me explain how this abomination of technology works.

Goodmail Systems has partnered with two of the biggest internet and e-mail service providers in the world, America Online and Yahoo!. Once the system is implemented, companies wishing to receive this certification for their e-mail will have to pay a small fee (a fraction of one cent) for every e-mail they send. When a certified e-mail arrives in your inbox, it will be identified by an icon of blue ribbon next to the subject line.

It is important to mention that this is not a method of spam prevention, and is not publicly advertised as one. In fact, this system provides little benefit to the end-user other than being able to identify companies willing to spend the cash to make sure you see their message.

The recent controversy surrounding the service really highlights the purpose, and vice versa.

Goodmail stands to make, potentially, billions of dollars by convincing companies around the world that getting their e-mail certified through the service is a necessity. However, instead of protecting the end-user from spam and e-mail scams, this actually creates more spam by allowing anybody who signs up for the service to bypass spam filters with whatever content they can dream up.

This whole system essentially amounts to extortion.

But before you start writing angry letters to Mr. Gingras, the attorney general, or your closest congress-person, you should know that Goodmail Systems is not the only company profiting from this. AOL & Yahoo! will be receiving an unknown percentage of revenue for their participation in this scam.

It seems as if Goodmail is just the middle-man, but that doesn't make them any less guilty.