Blackmoor Vituperative

Apple and EMI have agreed to come out with a “premium” music service that permits downloads of songs without the intrusion of the Digital Rights Mafia. As part of the deal, the cost per song will increase by 30%.

So let me get this straight. The record distributor saves a ton of cash because they are no longer chasing the DRM windmill, Apple saves money because they no longer have to regularly patch their software to keep up with people who find ways around the obnoxious DRM entanglements… and they are going to charge more for it.

I suppose in the long run, it’s a good thing. Once DRM is dead and buried, the law of the market will kick in and competition will force prices down. At least in theory. Unfortunately, the American music industry is currently dominated by the Big Four cartel, so the market pressure will have a hard time pushing prices down.

Bluetooth headsets are “bling” for boring people: tacky ornamentation that serves no purpose (if you aren’t on the phone, having the thing in your ear serves no purpose), and which only shows the people around you how little taste you have.

It’s the exact opposite of “fashion“.

Not that fashion is all that great a concept to begin with.

This is my final update on my evaluation of Star Wars Galaxies.

I have played a Jedi up to level 20, a spy up to around 10, and was working on another character when I ran into a peculiar error message. When attempting to create a character named “Siobhan”, I got an error message that said names of famous Star Wars characters and planets were not permitted.

Um… what the hell? Since when is the name “Siobhan” a Star Wars character or the name of a planet?

So I went on the Star Wars Galaxies forums and asked if this was a famous planet or character that I’d somehow never heard of. The answer was… ye gods, it’s just too ridiculous. Because the name filter won’t permit any name that has the letters H – A – N in it.

Ethan. Chani. Hannibal. Vaughan. Nathaniel. Siobhan. “…han…” is a very common series of letters in names. And none of those names are permitted? You’re kidding me, right? They weren’t kidding.

You know, there are so many, many things wrong with this game (I am not going to list them all, because it’s simply not worth the effort), but I have struggled through and persevered over the past couple of weeks because, by gosh, it’s Star Wars. I will go a long way and forgive a host of faults just to play in the Star Wars universe.

But this is the last straw. Any game with that level of obnoxious, overt stupidity built into it is simply not worth my time.

I really, really look forward Bioware’s game. Hell, at this point I am thinking about giving World Of Warcraft another try. I hadn’t played SWG yet when I evaluated WOW, and I think I may have been too harsh on it.

Another day, another security hole in Internet Explorer.

Are you listening yet? Switch to Firefox.

The phone call is about two things, first that Guild Wars, what NC Soft believes to be the second largest massively multiplayer online game around, is getting a final expansion and that the final expansion will prepare gamers for Guild Wars 2.

(from Kotaku, Guild Wars 2, GW Expansion Unveiled)

You know, from what I have seen of other MMOGs, and what I have seen of Guild Wars, I think the Guild Wars folks are doing a great job. I think it’s reasonable to expect that GW2 will be a great game.

Here’s some other news: I keep hearing rumours that Bioware might be working on a MMO for Knights Of The Old Republic (they are definitely working on a MMO, the rumour part is what that MMO might be). Now that would be a great game. Bioware combined an awesome story with a great user interface with KOTOR, and I am sure they would do a great job with a Knights Of The Old Republic MMO.

I’m not going to hold my breath, though.

An odd, six-sided, honeycomb-shaped feature circling the entire north pole of Saturn has captured the interest of scientists with NASA’s Cassini mission.

NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft imaged the feature over two decades ago. The fact that it has appeared in Cassini images indicates that it is a long-lived feature. A second hexagon, significantly darker than the brighter historical feature, is also visible in the Cassini pictures. The spacecraft’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer is the first instrument to capture the entire hexagon feature in one image.

(from NASA, NASA – Cassini Images Bizarre Hexagon on Saturn)

Proof that the masters of Saturn are gamers.

Yes, there’s another security hole in Internet Explorer. In other news, water is wet, politicians are dishonest, and teen-agers are horny.

Switch to Firefox, you knuckleheads.

Last month Circuit City announced it was closing 70 stores and separating around 400 employees.

Today they announced that they are separating another 3,400 associates. That by itself seems pretty bad, but look at what they told the people they are letting go:

The company has completed a wage management initiative that will result in the separation of approximately 3,400 store Associates. The separations, which are occurring today, focused on Associates who were paid well above the market-based salary range for their role. New Associates will be hired for these positions and compensated at the current market range for the job.

“We can get cheaper people than you, so we’re firing you and hiring some mooks off the street.”

I can believe that there might be a few people who are overpaid. It’s a pretty big company. But 3,400 people? That’s not an attempt to hire people at the “current market wage”. That’s an unabashed attempt to lower the “current market wage”.

And how does this mesh with the company firing 130 employees in the technology infrastructure division and replacing them with IBM contractors who cost the company two or three times as much? Circuit City has a lot of legacy systems (they never throw anything away, they just bolt on new pieces to what they already have), and it will take months, maybe years for an outsider to come in and get a handle on that. I think it’s crazy.

You may not know the name Kathy Sierra. She wrote one of my favorite Java books, Head First Java (I’ve bought every edition of it that’s been printed). She is also a reasonably popular blogger on technical matters such as usability and “creating passionate users”. Well, for reasons which mystify me (evil always mystifies me), she has been receiving death threats and has therefore cancelled her appearance at a major conference. She may not appear in public again, at least not any time soon.

There is a common perception that the world is more violent, more crazy than it ever has been before. Anyone who reads history knows that this is not true. What is true is that our borders are wider, our news net is cast wider, than ever before. Tragedies that used to reach only to the next county are now broadcast across the world. It also means that when we join this wider world, we are exposed to not only the worst people in our neighborhood, but the worst people in our society.

Click the link and go read her site. It just makes me sad.

A year after its original launch, a U.S. government-backed project that scans open-source code for flaws is expanding.

The effort, supported by a research contract from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, is now scanning code of 150 open-source projects, up from the original 50.

“This allows open-source developers to find and resolve defects introduced into the project,” David Maxwell, open-source strategist for Coverity, said in a statement. Coverity makes source-code analysis tools and shares the DHS contract with Stanford University and Symantec.

Since the start of the project, 6,000 bugs that were found have been fixed, according to Coverity. About 700 developers are now registered to access the bug data and 35 million lines of code are scanned every day, the company said.

(from ZDNet, Open-source bug hunt project expands)

On the one hand, I don’t think the federal government should be spending money on things like this. But that is because I don’t think the federal government should be spending money on anything other than what it is specifically given authority to spend money on by the US Constitution — and that ain’t much.

On the other hand, if it’s going to unconstitutionally rob Peter to pay Paul, at least Paul is doing something useful with it in this case. I’d much rather it fund debugging open source software than pay to put every American’s personal information on an expensive, insecure ID card where any identity thief who wants it can grab it.