superficial.net

As much as I like Apple products for their aesthetics (both physical and software-based) I find myself more and more disillusioned by their attitude to their customer-base. A case in point is the iPhone - a beautiful device which without restrictions would certainly be a “smartphone killer”. Unfortunately Apple’s creativity is matched only by its arrogance - instead of the aforementioned God-phone they crippled its Bluetooth functionality and made it so it was only possible to do anything with it via iTunes. Apple’s problem then is that they treat the iPhone like it is one of their Macs - a fixed spec with authorised upgrades only.

Apple don’t want iPhone users to have the sort of freedom that regular Bluetooth support provides. Some might argue that the userbase is better off for it, and I’m sure plenty of apologists will point out that Bluetooth is “insecure”, or some other contrived excuse to explain away the unjustifiable crippling.

“Users can’t brick their phones if they don’t have filesystem access”. True, but when has filesystem access ever allowed a user to brick their phones? Files marked as “system” is nothing new, I have full access to the “C” drive on my Nokia N95 - and try as I might I can’t do anything that would irreparably damage it. The worst I could do in fact would be to wipe or otherwise corrupt the system settings and end up returning the phone to factory spec.

On the flip side of course if you stop users from being able to do things like this at all then it means less support queries. Again, is Nokia inundated with people who keep factory resetting their phones over and over? I doubt it. Therein lies the rub - Apple treats its users like children who simply cannot be given the keys to the kingdom lest they inevitably end up bricking their hardware. This is a false economy though - security through obscurity - a secure device should stand up to full access to the filesystem and implement appropriate safeguards to stop people from doing bad things inadvertently. Nokia manage it, as do Symbian, Microsoft (Windows Mobile) et al - so why can’t Apple?

The scary part about things like this is how people rationalise their freedom being taken away so easily, “Apple knows whats best” is a common attitude it seems. That notion scares me. Whilst I can appreciate companies denying access for the good of the user, or to protect trademarks, or whatever, but denying access just because it doesn’t fit in with a business model - and for no other justifiable reason - is not good. The irony of course is that often the same people who talk about DRM taking away peoples freedom to do what they choose with things they’ve legitimately bought wlil defend Apple to the death seemingly only because Apple has a “feel good” aura about it.

Apple is in my mind at least just as crafty and conniving as any of the “usual suspects” like Micro$oft (lol), Sony, RIAA, MPAA et al - the only difference is the Apple PR machine and the legion of cultists have managed to achieve what the others can only dream of: imposing draconian restrictions on their customer base and leaving them smiling.

(I own a MacBook Pro and - soon - an iPhone, before anyone chimes in about anti-Apple attitude. The difference is I see the devices (and Apple) for what they are rather than as life-changing products)

This somehow manages to be more ridiculous than the one I posted before. How anyone manages to actually play this without smashing the controller to bits within seconds amazes me.

I don’t know whether I would laugh or cry at 1:10…

I recently bought Team Fortress 2 and I honestly think it’s one of the best games I’ve played in the last 5 years. For the uninitiated there are two teams - Red and Blue - to choose from. Once you’ve chosen a side you choose one of 9 available classes, each of which brings something unique and distinct to the team effort.

Most games that have this many classes struggle to make each one effective, usually there is one or two which totally dominate everything else. Whilst there are still some kinks in the game that need attention (i.e. Pyro is less effective up close than a Soldier is, when the Pyro is supposed to be the de facto upclose and personal class) on the whole the various classes really do compliment eachother in different ways. No one class really negates another, and effective teams usually require a spread of all the classes playing to succeed.

TF2 uses quite a unique graphical style that almost resembles a cartoon. Listening to the commentary that comes with the game the developers state that the principal reason for this was to make it easy for anyone to be able to tell the classes apart at a glance. This is quite a deviation from other mainstream FPS like Counterstrike Source, Quake, etc. This cell-shaded presentation together with the fact that each character class has his own particular accent, taunts, cadence really does bring the game to life.

There are some really nice touches in the game as well which brings the whole experience up a level. For example when you are killed you see a “death cam” freeze frame of the person who killed you which you can save for posterity. If you get gibbed you see humourous dialog boxes on screen pointing out the various locations of your body parts. There really are some laugh-out-loud freeze frames to be had…

The biggest draw for me is the fact that Valve have clearly designed this game from the ground up to be the sort of game anyone can just pick up and play. Unlike a lot of other competitive games the gulf between the seasoned FPS players and “noobs” isn’t so insurmountable as to suck the life out of the game playing experience, even when you’re on the losing team you can still feel like you’ve made a contribution to the effort. Contrast this with the likes of CS:S (or particularly CS 1.6) where the learning curve is so ridiculously high, and the maps have been learnt off by heart by the die-hards, unless you yourself are a FPS god you’re not going to have any fun playing it at all. TF2 - at its very heart - is a very fun game to play.

I could wax lyrical for hours about this game but in all honesty I would only be scratching the surface. It’s the most complete and engaging multiplayer FPS I have played since the old Quake 2 days, and I’m definitely not alone in my thoughts either.

Team Fortress 2 is available as part of the Orange Box on Steam, which also includes Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1 & 2 and Portal. Bargain!

Version 0.25 of my MythTV Toaster TCL script is available.

This version includes some minor optimisations as well as incorporating the Levenshtein Distance Algorithm to order ambigious search results by relevance (distance).

You MUST install the Levenshtein MySQL UDF for this to work (get the source here). This version of the script WILL NOT WORK without this module installed. I will release 0.26 soon to have the Levenshtein algorithm as a configurable option.

0.25 also includes FULLTEXT “fuzzy” searching in MySQL, using the !tvfuzzy command. This requires that an index be added to the mythconverg table as follows:

CREATE FULLTEXT INDEX prog_ft ON program(title,subtitle,description);

(the index can be called anything you like, “prog_ft” is just an example)

The format of arguments to the !tvfuzzy command are as follows:

(e.g. !tvfuzzy +england +brazil will return all programs that contain “england” and “brazil” in ALL rows)

Download:
MythTV Toaster TCL 0.25

I recently installed Microsoft Windows Vista and all things considered I think it is pretty good. Sadly however the same cannot be said for the driver support. Despite having been out now for several months in retail channels, and in various stages of beta for a good year or more, the driver support in Vista is totally hit-and-miss.

One of the biggest failures for me so far has been one of the most unexpected - ATI. ATI have had drivers for Vista for a long time now, although only recently have they actually managed to provide full functionality in their Catalyst drivers. Well, “full functionality” is jumping the gun a bit - at least as far as I’m concerned…

To give some frame of reference here is a rundown of my experiences installing the standard ATI Catalyst 7.3 driver suite for Vista x64:

1. Install driver - installation itself was seamless thanks to the Catalyst Install Manager. Reboot, and my PC bluescreens before it gets back into Windows. Twice. Finally get back in having not changed anything (can’t beat random BSODs!) and search around for help. Didn’t take too long for me to come across this thread on DriverHeaven with many other poor souls in the exact same boat as me. Seriously, how the hell does something like this get past QA? Anyway the solutions are to either disable a service or install a hotfix, sounds simple enough right?….
2. A few reboots later (after having disabled the service which causes the BSODs) and I can no longer get into Catalyst Control Centre (CCC). Now, nothing had changed between the time I disabled the service and the reboots after it when CCC actually worked - yet for some inexplicable reason CCC would just make like it was going to start and silently terminate itself. Nice job ATI.
3. Without having changed anything CCC miraculously started working again… sortof. Whilst it actually opened now none of the clock speed or Crossfire settings worked, and trying to change any settings at all just resulted in some kind of application exception message. If I didn’t know better at this stage I would assume ATI & CCC was just toying with me, teasing me with the prospect of actually being able to control the hardware their software is supposed to work with. But wait, it gets worse.
4. Booted my PC tonight and CCC decides it’s had enough ot silently terminating or showing an interface that doesn’t actually function and brings something new to the party:

   

   Now, bear in mind once again that nothing has changed on my system at this point - no new hardware or software has been installed, no settings have been changed. It would appear that the critical error I made was assuming I could actually power off my PC when I’m finished with it and expect it to behave the same the next time I boot it up.

Bizarrely the Creative Audigy drivers for Vista, which are widely reported to be rubbish (no EAX in DirectSound games, various key functions disabled, reports of poor sound quality, etc) installed first time and have just worked from the get-go. The speaker settings work (5.1), I can mix sound from the rear speakers to the front, sound quality is as good as it was in XP, everything just works.

*sigh*

UPDATE: Driver Cleaner .NET solved all of the above.  Why can’t ATI package an Uninstaller that actually works?