Author: Nicholas Deleon

The first Hurt Locker lawsuits are a-flyin’. Were you one of the lucky winners?

As you know, the movie’s producers hooked up with the U.S. Copyright Group, which, aside from the official-sounding name, is just another one of the many copyright infringement collection agencies out there. It’s about as federal as Federal Express, in other words.

Their gimmick is to send you a letter saying, “Hi. We have information from your ISP that says you downloaded The Hurt Locker using BitTorrent. You have two options: cut us a cheque right now for $1,500, or face the wrath of the U.S. court system.”

Five thousand such lawsuits have been sent so far.

I didn’t download the movie from BitTorrent, so I’m not expecting a letter.

Can we all agree that Red Dead Redemption is one of Rockstar’s finest games? It’s probably one of the best games of this generation, too. A 30-minute short film based on the game, directed by the guy (John Hillcoat) who directed The Road (good) and The Proposition (great), debuts tomorrow night on the Fox network at midnight. Set your DVR. Here we have a short trailer (that I should have posted yesterday).

“We need our development teams focused on content and cool features, not anti-piracy technology.” Thank you, finally! See, Blizzard gets it. The company’s co-founder, Frank Pearce, recently told the good folks at Video Gamer that he thinks the fight against DRM is misguided. Not that he supports end-users going around torrenting his games till the end of time, but that the way to “beat” piracy is to embrace gamers and treat them like complete jerks.

Part of the process is the new Battle.net, which launches with StarCraft II. Its DRM is rather simple: a one-time online activation. After that, you can play online or off without having to worry about Blizzard’s mommy-state servers keeping tabs on your authentication status. No, Blizzard isn’t the only company whose DRM works like that, but it does highlight the idea that, “Oh, well, all the top publishers see piracy as a huge, catastrophic issue, so clearly we need to implement ridiculous DRM policies.”

Pearce also called DRM a “losing battle.” By that he means what we’ve been saying forever: no matter how robust your DRM is, it will be cracked. It is a complete waste of resources (time, money, sandwiches, etc.) developing trying to outfox crackers. (These crackers, most of the time, aren’t even interested in pirating the game, but merely seeing if they’re “hacking” skills are as sharp as possible. That people can then pirate these games is but a nasty side effect.) There’s too many of them out there to develop a truly hack-proof system. So, spend those resources making sure your game isn’t a pile of dross! Maybe then it’ll sell?

Sigh, if only other PC publishers would follow Blizzard’s lead here…

via Tom’s Hardware

Our clichés need updating. “Axe to grind”? How many people still regularly use axes, axes that need grinding? Why not something like “hard drive to defrag”? “Best thing since sliced bread”? Why not “best thing since the iPad“? We are surrounded by technology, but our language still reflects life on the farm. Let’s do this!

First off, yes, this topic is completely ripped off from Fez Ron and Fez. If you going to rip off, you might as well rip off from the best.

It’s an interesting idea. So many idioms and clichés and whatnot are based in language that has no relevance to us here in the year 2010. Some examples:

• “Straw that broke the camel’s back.” Means nothing to the average person. Why not “baseclock frequency that causes the processor to overheat and continually crash”?

• “When pigs fly.” What? Try “when Spotify comes to America.”

• “Free as a bird.” Lame. I much prefer “free as Firefox.”

• “Money makes the world go ’round.” Sorry but as we all know “SEO makes the world go ’round.”

And so on.

If we’re not going to ban clichés outight, then we might as well update ‘em. I don’t know how to grind an axe, but I do know how to defrag a hard drive.

A UK therapist claims that two hours of playing video games gives the same high as doing a line of cocaine. Of course that raises the question of, well, what would you rather your kid do, bump lines off a dirty mirror or play Mario Kart before going to bed? What, too flip?

The deal is that, apparently, video game (and Internet) addiction is the new addiction that’s sweeping the UK. Young people are playing games to the detriment of their social lives, their studies, and their psychological well-being. Stealing money from their parents to buy the latest game, staying up at all hours of the night trying to unlock Achievements, etc. It’s pure chaos.

Spending two hours on a game station is equivalent to taking a line of cocaine in the high it produces. It is the fastest growing addiction in the country and this is affecting young people mentally, as well as leading to physical problems such as obesity…. Computer game addiction can also spiral into violence as after playing violent games, they may turn their fantasy games into reality.

That’s weird because I’ve been playing video games, violent and otherwise, since I was a youngster, and the most violent I get is when I shout “son of a gun diddily-un” after I stub my toe. I don’t recall robbing any banks, or beating up little kids to take their lunch money to buy Alpha Protocol or whatever…

I guess I’m not addicted to video games then. I mean, yeah, I’ll sit there and play something for hours at a time, but I’m not doing it to the detriment of any other aspect of my life. I still exercise, I still read, I still get very excited for Rashad Evans vs. Quinton “Rampage” Jackson this Saturday, and so on.

We do now have Internet addiction centers for this type of thing. Maybe rehab is necessary? Who knows?

I sure hope for Microsoft’s sake this isn’t true. Word on the street is that Project Natal (which won’t be the final name) will cost $150 and will launch in October. Considering Microsoft is aiming Natal at so-called casual gamers, what are the odds these people are going to shell out $150 to be able to play that paint-slinging game we’ve seen demoed over and over again?

Microsoft will also bundle Natal with a new edition of the Xbox 360 Arcade SKU, with a price of $299.

How on God’s green Earth does the Xbox 360, five years after its debut, still cost three hundred dollars? Is that not crazy to anyone else?

These prices come from one of Edge’s “trusted sources.” Edge doesn’t mess around, so I’d take these numbers pretty seriously.

All these motion controllers, Natal and PlayStation Move, are direct responses to the Wii’s success. That success happened several years ago. You have to figure that most of the “grandmas,” for lack of a better term, who bought a Wii to play Wii Sports with their grandchildren have already gotten their rocks off, so to speak? They have a Wii, it does what it does, and everyone’s happy. How many of these people will now shell out an extra $300 to play more casual games, particularly when the entire world economy is on its tippy toes? Who has an extra $300 lying around to play Silly Game? How many casual games are free on Facebook or whatever? It just seems sorta crazy to me.

I don’t know, but these prices don’t look good at all.

There’s a new gaming mouse in town, amigos. It’s the Mionix NAOS 3200, and it’s made of “carefully selected high-end components.” What kind of components? I’m guessing dark matter.

It’s a gaming mouse, so you pretty much know what you’re getting. High DPI (up to 3,200), built-in memory to save various setting and bring them from computer to computer, flashy LEDs for no real reason other than aesthetic grandeur, adjustable polling rate up to 1000MHz, and enough buttons (seven) to effectively play First-Person Shooter till sunrise.

Mionix wants €55, which currently translates to $67. I say currently because the eurozone isn’t in the best of shape these days. Next week that price may work out to $65!

It looks damn svelte, that’s for sure.

Good job, everyone. Research firm Rescuetime says y’all spent (wasted?) 4.8 million hours playing Pac-Man on the Google homepage since its launch last week. If we convert those lost man-hours to dollars and cents, then you can say the U.S. economy has lost slightly more than $120 million because of Pac-Man.

Thanks to the game, the average visitor to the Google homepage spent 36 extra seconds on the site than usual. That sounds about right: I did a quick game and spent no more than one minute chasing ghosts.

CNET mentions that many people had trouble turning off the game, so that may account for some of the time accounted for in the survey. That prompts me to ask how many people actually type www.google.com into their address bar, or even click a bookmark icon on their bookmark bar? Like, I though the normal thing now was to simply search from your browser’s built-in search bar?

In any event, the game will forever be available on google.com/pacman.

“Not a fan of 3D movies? Wait till you play 3D games, that’s when the technology will really shine.” Not an exact quote, but that’s the spirit of what Sony Computer Entertainment Europe President Andrew House said in a recent interview. The idea is that, OK, 3D movies may be just sorta there, but it’s sitting there and playing something like WipeOut HD in 3D where you’ll really gain an appreciation for the medium.

Having played several games in 3D at various events over the past few months, allow me to say this: meh. At no point did I play a game in 3D where I reacted like Homer’s mother seeing Joe Namath’s sideburns. That is, at no point did I go, “HOLY SMOKES THIS IS LIFE-CHANGING.” Neat? Sure, it’s neat, but if I never play another 3D game it won’t be so big a deal.

Then again, we’re still pretty early in the transition 3D. Perhaps in a few years developers will have figured out how to make the most of the technology. First-gen graphics are always a little wonky.

Specific to the PS3, well, we still have to wait for 3D TVs to be affordable enough to start showing up in your local Wal-Mart. We’re a little while away from that yet.

I keep seeing the stat that HDTVs are still only in something like 50 percent of homes in the U.S. Considering that unemployment is still quite high, I don’t know if now is the time to depend on people to shell out $2,000 for a TV when they just bought a TV a few years ago…

via Bit-Tech

Greenpeace’s relentless march toward reminding us that we’re killing the planet continues. The organization released its annual “Who’s Green?” list yesterday, and Nokia and Sony Ericsson get A+ marks, while Lenovo and Nintendo are, apparently, the dregs of society. Also on the wrong side of Greenpeace: Dell. The Texas-based company found itself on the wrong end of a rather impressive Greenpeace action yesterday. Oh, dear…

Greenpeace’s main issue with Dell is that the company promised, some time ago, to eliminate certain toxic chemicals from its manufacturing processes. Dell hasn’t honored its promise, said Greenpeace, so out comes the giant yellow scroll on the Dell building in Round Rock, TX.

It should be noted that no company is 100 percent green yet in the eyes of Greenpeace. Nokia is the closest with a score of 7.5/10.

The very worst? Nintendo with a score of 1.8/10.

Microsoft gets a 3.3/10 and Apple gets a 4.9/10.

The entire report is available for you to read here [PDF alert!]. Better make some tea beforehand: it’s a long one.

Flickr’d

Is the new Prince of Persia movie racist? Almost certainly not, but that’s the accusation being levied by independent film maker Jehanzeb Dar, saying that the part of The Prince “really needed to go to someone who’s Persian.” So, rather than try to find someone of Persian (or at the very least, Middle Eastern) descent, the film’s producers instead went with a well-known Hollywood actor. Is there anything wrong with that, really?

Let’s think this out a bit. Prince of Persia tells the story of Prince, a fine young man who hails from Persia. My guess is that the average American doesn’t know that Persia = Iran. If they did, we’d be hearing the likes of Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck railing on and on about how the movie glorifies Iranian civilization, and Real Americans obviously hate everything Iranian. (I’ve never met someone from Iran, but I’m sure they’re nice people.) Anyhow, Dar also said:

It’s not only insulting to Persians, it’s also insulting to white people. It’s saying white people can’t enjoy movies unless the protagonist is white.

Dar’s way over-thinking this. I’m sure the film’s producers were merely thinking, “We need to find a male actor who’s reasonably well-known to the American movie-goer. Quick, intern, go through this list of actors and see who’s available for two months sometime in the next six months. We’ll go with whoever the hell answers our phone calls.” I guess Jake Gyllenhaal, the actor who plays Prince, wasn’t busy.

That’s all that happened, people.

And another thing, and it’s the reverse of what Dar is saying: why can’t a white person portray an Iranian? Can the audience, which is watching a FAKE SHOW, not handle an actor who doesn’t look like what they think he or she should look like? And why does skin color even matter? Why can’t an actor act? Didn’t men play woman in the time of Shakespeare? What if I, a nerd of Puerto Rican descent (even though I know absolutely nothing about Puerto Rico—I know more about the cultures of World of Warcraft than I do anything about Puerto Rico), wanted to play George Washington in a community theater production of “George Washington Does Some Stuff”? Would the audience not be able to handle that? I’m a great actor, I’ll have you know!

We’re all people, folks. Jake Gyllenhaal has as much right to play Prince as does some guy from Tehran. It’s not like the show’s producers called up a giant lizard to play Prince, then I can see an issue.

There was a bit of controversy a few weeks ago when Samsung published a note warning people about the dangers of 3D movies. Pregnant women, the elderly, and a whole host of other people were told, in no uncertain terms, to limit their exposure to 3D movies, lest they become sick. What was never explained was why these people, or anyone else for that matter, could become sick when watching 3D movies. Thank God for Bill Nye (and his patrons at VSP, the eye care group). The famous scientist/greatest American ever, in this video, explains why certain people become unwell while watching 3D movies.

It turns out that up to 30 percent of the population suffers from something called “marginal binocular vision,” which basically means that your eyes don’t always work together as well as they normally ought to. If the eyes aren’t in complete coordination, then you’re not going to get the proper stereoscopic 3D effect when watching movies.

Fixes include taking the 3D glasses off for a moment, closing one eye and then the other briefly, or merely changing the angle at which you’re looking at the screen.

And now for “Smells Like Air Pressure.” I daresay I prefer the Bill Nye version to the original Nirvana version.

Is there anything like this on TV anymore? Kids today are missing out.

It’s takes a special type of nerd to read a video game’s novelization, and I’m none too proud to say that I recently started reading the Mass Effect novel. But there’s a certain quiet dignity in reading a novelization that simply isn’t present when sitting at the multiplex (or downloading the Blu-ray rip, as it were) watching a movie. Get ready: EA has sold the movie rights to Mass Effect, and it’s gone to Legendary Pictures, the same people behind The Dark Knight, Watchmen, and The Hangover. So there’s hope the movie won’t be total dross.

Several of the BioWare folks, including Ray Muzyka and Mass Effect project manager Casey Hudson, will be a part of the production, so there’s even more evidence that the movie has the potential to be OK.

It’s being written by the man who wrote I Am Legend, Mark Protosevich. I never understood how you can be credited with writing a movie when all you’re doing is remaking it…

The thing is, Mass Effect is already so cinematic that making a movie seems like overkill. Just play the game; I’m almost certain the movie won’t be as good as the game was.

Stating the obvious: Commander Shepard needs to be played by Matthew Fox, the guy who played Jack in “Lost.” They look identical.

Your phone is now your hotel key. Well, could be your hotel key. Holiday Inn will trial new software for the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android that will let you use your phone to open your hotel door. Even better: you can use the software to check out without having to futz around at the check-in desk. Convenient.

The trail begins later next month in two hotels, the Holiday Inn Chicago O’Hare Rosemont and the Holiday Inn Express Houston Downtown Convention Center. The trial will last for 60 days, and if all goes well, the program could be expanded across the country.

Incidentally, using your smartphone as your key would help eliminate the problem of room keys becoming de-magnitized. That happened to me once after I left my phone and my hotel key in the same pocket. “Well this is peculiar, the key doesn’t work anymore. I sure hope the front desk will be able to help.” And they did, and I was thankful.

A quick story, yes.

Flickr’d

Football (soccer) writers are typically terribly serious about what they do. Relax, buddy, it’s just a game. A fun game, yeah, but just a game. The Guardian’s Barry Glendenning does things a little bit differently: he’s actually good! In a column today, Glendenning prepares us all for the inevitable complaints that will surround the Jabulani’s performance at the World Cup. It’s a time-honored tradition, complaining about the new ball: the ball is too heavy, the ball is too light, the ball swerves too much, the ball swerves too little, etc. Most accurate ball ever created? Obviously you haven’t seen a Michael Carrick pass.

There’s a lot of well-deserved rambling in the column, but the one thing that should resonate to the non-soccer fan is this: the “main” stadium, Soccer City in Johannesburg, is 1,694m above sea level. Playing the game at such great heights tends to do wacky things to both player performance and ball behavior. There’s less air way up there, so we may be looking at a case of Xavi Hernandez being able to pass just at sea level in Durban, but finding the ball going every which way in the final at Soccer City.

And just to be clear: we’re talking extraordinarily small differences here. It’s not like Xavi will mean to pass to David Villa and the ball instead swerves back to Casillas. But a pass that was meant to go right at Fernando Torres’ feet and instead is a fraction of a step “off,” well, that could be something.

WOO~!

The mania surrounding “Lost” continues. It has emerged that the series finale now holds the record of being the most downloaded TV show in the history of TV. The final two episodes, within 20 hours of appearing online, were downloaded some 900,000 times. Quite a bit, yes.

Many of the downloads came from overseas, and that makes sense: episodes of the show typically don’t air in local markets for some time. Why wait until the local TV network gets around to showing the episodes when you can hop on BitTorrent and watch it just a few hours after ABC in the U.S.?

The show’s producers did anticipate this, and tried to have the finale air quickly after its U.S. debut. That would explain this little stat: a full 15 percent of downloads come from Australia, where the finale doesn’t air until tonight. Or maybe it already has; I don’t understand time zones. The point is: Australians would rather download the show than wait around till the local TV network decides to air it.

A staggered release may have worked in the past, but in this day and age, when 720p rips of every TV show are available online within minutes of their U.S. debut, there’s no way you can convince people to wait around.

Done and done!

Looks like Netflix has decided to go with Microsoft’s PlayReady DRM for all upcoming Netflix-ready devices. If all goes according to plan you shouldn’t even notice the DRM being there, but we all know how well DRM has worked in the past.

Netflix already uses PlayReady for its Mac and Windows PC instant streaming services, so both companies already have a convivial working relationship. More importantly to end-users, I don’t recall any big DRM dust-ups vis-à-vis Netflix streams.

This announcement also confirms a host of new Netflix-ready devices. The press release mentions “Internet TVs, Blu-ray disc players, home theater systems, video game consoles and other devices.” What could “other devices” mean? Something like Google TV, or maybe the Boxee Box? A Netflix-equipped Google TV could do well for itself.

Netlfix says the move to PlayReady DRM will make it easier to get content providers (movie studios and the like) to supply a steady stream of, well, content. If there’s one complaint against the Netflix streaming service is that there’s not as wide a selection of content as there is with disc-based Netflix. That should begin to change with this move.

The first devices making use of this new DRM should hit stores early this summer.

Needless to say, your ability to stream Netflix on your Xbox 360 (or PS3 or Wii) won’t be negatively affected by this transition.

Bad news, Yankees fans. Apparently the winningest team in the history of sport doesn’t want you sitting inside the stadium with an iPad on your lap. That’s right: the iPad is banned at Yankee Stadium! So says a poster on one of the IGN messageboards. The Bronx is burning.

The deal is that the poster attempted to walk into the stadium a few days ago, only to find the security guy saying, “Sorry, you can’t take that in here.” The poster was completely refused entry.

No worry: the poster went over to another entrance, slipping the iPad inside her jacket. She was then able to enjoy the game just fine.

The iPad ban is part of the stadium’s “no laptop” policy. I don’t know if you can argue with the security guard at the gate the nuance, the difference, if you will, between an iPad and a laptop.

This, of course, leaves the question: why do you need to bring the iPad to a baseball game? Shouldn’t you be watching the game? Oh: maybe you want to check out the MLB App while there. That I can understand.

But still, you’re asking for trouble. Just leave your magical and revolutionary device at home for the day. Problem solved!