Next week’s PSA: backups – do you have a system and if not, why not? Let’s move onto the news.

In copyright news, The Pirate Bay appeal is about to begin, but there has been some shuffling of the judges in the case. Judges, or just clerks, I’m not quite sure – the Swedish legal system is a bit different to that of the US or Australia. But a judge, or a clerk, has been removed due to bias, but the request for removal came from the people suing TPB, not from TPB.

This leads me to believe that this might not be done to ensure the result cannot be challenged, as the RIAA/MPAA claims, but rather that the person’s removal may in fact hurt the TPB. The bias in question was related to this person owning shares in Spotify, which has content distribution deals with the RIAA. Does this mean the person would benefit from TPB not existing? Possibly, as Spotify aims to offer what TPB offers illegally. However, it also might mean this person has the required technical knowledge to understand the major issues behind the case, and that in turn might hurt the copyright holder’s case more. I was once told that this type of case is often won or lost on the ability of the judge(s) to understand the technical implications of their decisions, and that judges that do not come from a technical background (that is, most of them) will usually rule in favour of the industry group. It’s understandable, as if the first thing you think of when someone says “torrent” is rain, then you would also be more likely side with major Hollywood studios as opposed to a bunch of kids who set up this website about pirate ships.

Pirate Party Australia: Ready to fight in the next election in Australia

Which is precisely why there should be more education and more public lobbying of the issues, which has generally been one sided in favour of the copyright holders. The Swedish Pirate Party’s fantastic results in the European Parliament elections shows that this is an issue that people care about and politicians and judges should realise that there are two sides to this issue, and is not a case good versus evil as portrayed by the copyright lobby. Which is good news then that Pirate Party Australia has managed to sign up enough members to contest the next Federal election, and I suspect they will do rather well in the polls, since there has been a lot of Internet related issues that have become major issues, such as the government’s ridiculous pursuit of a national censorship system, or the much needed national broadband network. And the piracy issue, particular with the current high profile copyright court cases, and the government’s hints at moving towards a three-strikes system, should ensure a lot of protest votes go the way of the PPA.

iiNet will defend itself in court next week over claims that it allows and promotes piracy

Speaking of high profile Australian copyright court cases, it will start next week but the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) has dropped another key part of their case against iiNet. Previously, they had dropped the “conversion” charge, as they could not prove that iiNet was the main copyright infringer. Now, they’ve dropped the part of the case which say that iiNet engaged in primary acts of infringement, based on the fact that iiNet caches content for its subscribers. Of course, all ISPs cache content, that’s how ISPs work, and if an ISP can be found guilty this way, then all of them need to be shutdown immediately as they’ve all helped to plan terrorist attacks, share child pornography, commit acts of fraud and every other bad thing that has gone through their cache. The fact that charges are being dropped this late into the preparation phase, suggest that the original charges were far too ambitious, and lacked understanding of even some basic facts like how ISPs work. Were they perhaps too ambitious deliberately to scare iiNet into submission, into a settlement, not expecting iiNet to be so determined to fight the charges out in court? Who know.

Free All Music: Free MP3s, if you watch an ad ... too good to be true?

Now, whenever there’s a clever new way to fight piracy, no matter whether it will work or not, I’ll report it here. The latest is interesting, and it’s actually good for consumers, as if the plan works, you’ll be able to download legal MP3s for free, and all it will take is a moment of your time. The new idea, well not exactly new, is ad-supported MP3s. The plans is that after the user views  a short video ad, they will then be able to download the DRM-free MP3s to keep. Sounds pretty good to me, although it’s a US only thing apparently so I can’t take advantage of it. But if it sounds too good to be true, then it might just be that. The major problem I can see immediately is, well, how will the video ads actually manage to pay for the MP3s, each of them costing at least $0.50 each – a single view of a video ad, unless the user clicks on it, is going to generate a lot less than 50 cents, probably a lot less than 5 cents. But if the ads do manage to pay for the music, then it becomes a good business model and will go a long way towards killing piracy, much more than a new DRM scheme or more lawsuits. Let’s hope my math is wrong and that the system does work, because I don’t people will mind sitting through an ad or two if it means free stuff.

Let’s move onto high definition news, the latest rumour is that Apple will finally add Blu-ray support to its iMac range, despite Steve Jobs calling Blu-ray ‘a bag of hurt’, referring to the messy and expensive licensing process and the lack of user penetration. Both problems have been greatly reduced thanks to lower and simpler licensing schemes, and with current  market share double that of when Mr Jobs spoke.

But as it is, it’s just a rumour for now, and I haven’t really heard enough from the right sources to think that this is a certainty, not like with the PS3 Slim and Xbox 360 price cut rumours. Will Apple’s support help Blu-ray? Of course it will. Will it be a major help, probably not. Why? Well, Blu-ray has been available on Windows systems from day one, and despite there being a lot more Windows systems than Macs, it has been of almost no help to the format, and penetration of Blu-ray on PCs remain quite low. Still, with Apple’s well known and respected ability for working with HD video, having Blu-ray support is almost a necessity these days, rather than a luxury, although it remains to be seen whether hardware acceleration will be enabled in software (the Nvidia GPUs that iMacs use should support at least H.264 acceleration for Blu-ray playback).

One rumour about Apple’s reluctance towards Blu-ray is that its current Apple TV devices would be hurt by Blu-ray’s success, since Apple would prefer everyone to be buying movies through iTunes, as opposed to on disc. I don’t know if I believe this, as I think Apple’s reluctance is more to do with how people use Macs, and whether Apple thinks people will use it as a Blu-ray player, when they take into account the number of people who currently use it as a DVD player.

Foxtel Download: Free downloads for subscribers

But it is true that technologies like iTunes are in some ways competing with Blu-ray for the home video market share. But even within downloads, there’s great competition from the way it is being offered. The latest thing here in Australia is that our major cable/satellite subscription TV provider, Foxtel, has just announced that they will offer 400 hours of downloadable content for free per month for all subscribers. It’s technically just allowing subscribers to download for free the content they’ve already paid for and with subscribers using the IQ set-top-box, content that they already have the ability to record and keep. But with a billing system already in place, and an user base that is already willing to fork out cash for TV shows and movies, it will be interesting to see if Foxtel extends this download service to premium content like the latest episodes available straight after their showing in the US – with the payment being handled through the monthly bill. Foxtel already does this with on-demand HD movies through their set-top-box, so it’s not a huge step to extend this to TV and movie downloads on the PC.

Everyone knows about the infamous Xbox 360 RRoD problem, but I wonder if the PS3’s “no disc reading” problem might also get some unwanted spotlight in the near future. The problem I describe is one that I have personally experienced and posted about on this blog, and it seems to be still happening with the latest firmware updates.

I have no doubt that this problem is far less widespread than the RRoD problem, but there are still a large group of people who have suffered from it, and it seems to occur after every firmware update. I would guess that less than 1% of PS3s are affected, possibly much less than this, so it’s no surprise that some people feel the problem doesn’t exist because it has never happened to them. But it has happened, I can confirm from personal experience, with the people who posted comments on the blog, from users posting about their problem on the official PS3 forum and elsewhere, and so the problem is not imaginary. The worst part is that Sony charges $150 per repair of this problem out of warranty (mine was in warranty at the time), and if it is the firmware update process that somehow causes this to occur (and the PS3 firmwares themselves are not really known for their bug free nature), then I wonder if charging users this large amount is the right thing to do. And this problem pretty much only started showing up after the 2.40 firmware update, so something must have changed then that causes this problem to appear, but it’s all just speculation as Sony has refused to release any information in regards to this issue. And with the wholesale hardware changes in the PS3 Slim, I don’t think this will be an issue for the Slim, so that’s one reason to upgrade your old PS3s to the new one, even if the styling isn’t to my taste (I still like the old one better, hmmm, glossy).

Okie dokie, that’s itie for this weekie. More next week, so until then …

Otherwise, it was a fairly quiet week, with a few stories occupying the headlines to still make it a very interesting week, although most of it was yet again about the issue of copyright.

Let’s start with the copyright news. There was only really one news item that really caught the attention of people this week. And not even Sir Elton John could push the news out of the headlines, much of it thanks to the reactions to the story on the Internet.

A screencap of the Google cache of Lily Allen's anti-piracy blog, which has now been closed

Earlier in the week, musician Lily Allen decided to take a stand on the issue of online music piracy. But unlike many others who have come out against the proposed three-strike Internet banning policy, Ms Allen has come out for it, even launching a blog called “It’s Not Alright” to voice her views on piracy. Now there is nothing wrong with someone expressing their views, in fact, that’s what the Internet is for. However, if you do come out with some opinion, especially a controversial one, then make sure you are untouchable when it comes to arguing the facts. Unfortunately, Ms Allen made the mistake of not doing enough vetting into her personal history in regards to piracy, and in netspeak, she has been truly and thoroughly pwned. It turns out that, in publishing her anti-piracy views, that she might have pirated the article of high tech news and discussion website, Techdirt. And not only that, a few days later, it was revealed that Ms Allen was a distributor of pirated music herself, with some self-made mixtape MP3s that was available for download from her website, that featured songs that she (and her record company) did not have the distribution rights to. Oops.

Some dude said nearly 2000 years ago that “let he who is without sin, cast the first stone”. And if one is to take the moral stance that anyone who has downloaded or shared an illegal MP3 (and that’s a lot of people) is a thief and should be punished harshly, than he, or she, should at the very least ensure that they have not committed the same “crime”. Because the truth is that it’s very easy to commit this crime, it may be because you think you’re not doing anything wrong by not paying for something you never had the intention to pay for in the first place, or perhaps you think sharing songs is a great way to promote the song and the artist and it may lead to you, or the people you shared the song with, to become a fan and start buying. There are legitimate arguments for and against a heavy crackdown on piracy, but as the Lily Allen incident showed us, it’s far too easy to be labeled a pirate just because, earlier in your music career, your appreciation of other artists led you to make a mixtape that somehow ended up online. And as Ms Allen posted on her blog about the mixtapes, “I made those mixtapes 5 years ago, I didn’t have a knowledge of the workings of the music industry back then”. But Ms Allen, under the very legislation that you support, you would be punished for what you claim you did out of ignorance 5 years ago, and guess how many other people might get punished for similar acts if what you support becomes law? And the article you stole from Techdirt, well, that’s copyright protected as well, even if it were just some text on some website you’ve never seen before. So I’m glad Ms Allen spoke out, because she has successfully demonstrated the worst aspect of the three-strikes system, something nobody else could do until it was actually made into law. Ms Allen has since then decided to quit the music business, which could be to her genuine loss of hope in the future of the music business due to continuing losses to piracy, a publicity stunt, a bit of sulky sulk sulk over the whole affair,  or a bit of everything.

Oh, and Sir Elton John made similar statements but nobody really cared, not when the Lily Allen Show was so interesting.

UK ISP BT says that policing Internet usage could cost more than simply ignoring the problem

In all of this, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the whole point of the anti-piracy drive, and the three-strikes system, is all just about increasing profits for the music industry (and other industries). Not that there’s anything wrong with this of course, they have the right to take actions to increase their profits. But will the three-strikes actually stop piracy, and what about the cost to implement and maintain such a system. One of UK’s leading ISPs, BT, has came up with some estimates as to the cost of spying on Internet users, and they put the cost at £24 per person, or roughly £365 million per year in the UK. The UK music industry actually only claims £200 million in lost profits due to piracy per year, and as with their estimates, the actual loss is probably less than a quarter of this amount, if that much. The extra cost, the full amount of which will no doubt be passed onto the consumer, will hurt the Internet as access plans become less affordable and some are priced out of being able to connect altogether. This will in turn hurt legal online music sales and promotional efforts. I would be surprised if the music industry actually comes out ahead at all, but for them it’s of little risk since they scream so loudly about the seriousness of online piracy, yet are unwilling to fork out a single cent for a solution that they came up with. Probably the most effective way to actually kill off the three-strikes system is to actually force the music, movie (and other) industries to come up with the cash to implement such a system.

But the movie studios (or at least movie theaters) are spending on implementing systems that try and stop camcorder pirates. The latest such system uses infrared pulsing lights situated behind the screen that the human eye cannot see, but will be recorded onto camcorder images. This is supposed to deter pirates and purchasers of said pirated content, but they’ve obviously never bothered to download and examine a cam recording of a movie, what with part of the picture being blocked by somebody’s head, and the sound of popcorn chewing louder than the explosions in the movie. I don’t think quality is what people care about when it comes to cam recordings, and so feel free to spend millions upgrading cinemas with this technology, and in the end, some guy who works at the cinema for $10 an hour will still manage to get their hands on the original reel and hand it over to the right people to make a perfect rip.

So what would drive the copyright holders to spend so much fighting against online piracy, when by reasonable estimations, the loss to online piracy isn’t anywhere near as bad as the copyright holders make out, and that the benefits of the Internet will probably eventually outweigh any effect that piracy has. Many people can see that Internet and digital distribution provides a lot of new opportunities, but why does the industry treat it as a disease that must be eradicated? Well, William Patry, the senior copyright counsel at Google might have found the reason in his new book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars. He explains that this isn’t, nor will it be the last, time that copyright holders show mass panic in the face of a new distribution medium, to identify it as the enemy and do all in their powers to stop it, and then only to find out later on that it actually benefits them the most in the long run. It happened with the introduction of radio, television, VCRs, and now, it’s the Internet that’s public enemy number one where copyright is concerned. I guess it is understandable to a degree. To have something so valuable, you will want to protect it, against new things that you don’t fully understand and sometimes that means going too far. I keep on thinking back to the Susan Boyle episode, and wonder if her performance, and the show she performed on, would have been as popular if somebody hadn’t illegally uploaded the clip of the show onto YouTube. Had the copyright holders got to the video before the general public, how much of an adverse effect would that have had on the finances of said copyright holders, I wonder. Not to mention the financial fortunes of one Susan Boyle (although the publicity has had an adverse effect on her personal life, but that’s a whole other problem).

Onto high def news now. Still not much happening, and that’s true on the release front as well, as the last few weeks (after the Watchmen bump had subsided) has been fairly quiet ones. However, one thing is for certain, and that’s the price drops for Blu-ray happening all over the place, for both hardware and software.

Blu-ray prices have come down, for example, Crash on Blu-ray is now under $10 on Amazon

I’ve noticed this trend from analyzing the NPD stats, and NPD themselves have also been monitoring the situation and found that average prices have indeed dropped and are getting closer to the pricing of the DVD versions, even compared to just a few months ago. And from looking at the price history info on our own Amazon Blu-ray Price Index section, you can see the trend quite clearly. New releases, which used to be priced at just below $28 on Amazon, are now almost always under $24, with older releases previously hardly ever discounted, sometimes now falling to under $10. And whenever there has been a discount for older titles, it will usually shoot to the top of the charts. It’s good new for consumers and good news for the Blu-ray format, but probably not great news for the backers of the format, who have envisaged a premium format to combat ever lowering DVD prices. It hasn’t totally failed in this respect, as DVD prices are falling faster and so Blu-ray has at least slow downed the bleeding, but I think it’s time studios start to think about ways to sell more copies of the movies, rather than to make more money per copy.

Not much happening in gaming as it’s still a couple of weeks away from official sales figures for September, which should tell us how well the PS3 Slim is doing, and whether the discount to the Xbox 360 Elite has worked or not. The Wii price drop has been confirmed as well, but it comes too late in September to really have an effect on the month’s sales figures. But the fact that Nintendo is doing it may suggest they’ve had a look at the September sales figures and weren’t really happy with what they saw. And there is also news of a further $50 rebate offer for the Xbox 360 Elite, which suggests that Microsoft weren’t that happy with what they saw as well.

That’s it for now, have a great week, and see you in about 168 hours time.

First of all, a little background on the issue. 32-bit computing has been with us for quite a while now, ever since Windows 3.11 and 95. But what does it all mean? Well, a 32-bit OS is one that can work with 32-bit chunks of data in a single operation. Accuracy of data, particularly decimal values, also increase as the number of bits increase – a 64-bit system can represent a decimal value up to 14 significant numbers, whereas a 32-bit system, can only go up to 7.

32-bit Windows Memory Limitation ...

The bit rating also determines how much memory the system can support, as each byte of memory will require their own address location. With 32-bit computing, up to 2 ^ 32, or 4,294,967,296 different locations can be addressed. 4,294,967,296 bytes work out to be 4 GB. But if you need to add more memory to your system, then you have reached the limit of 32-bit systems the extra memory will simply be ignored. You will actually get less than 4 GB of memory being available in Windows if you are using the 32-bit version, as other devices with memory, such as your graphics card (which can come with 1 GB+ of memory these days) will also use up the available addressing space. This is why it’s common to see only 3.2 GB or less on 32-bit Windows with 4 GB of memory. But with a 64-bit OS, you now have 2 ^ 64 address locations to work with, and this means support for up to 16 Exabytes of memory (1 Exabyte equals 1,073,741,824 GBs)! We’ll probably colonize Mars before we’ll need a computer with that much memory.

In order to use a 64-bit OS, there are a couple of requirements. First of all, your CPU must be 64-bit compatible. Luckily, most CPUs these days are. AMD’s Athlon 64 makes this clear in its naming, and practically any Intel CPU released since 2005 (including some Prescott P4’s, and everything after the Pentium D). And obviously, you need a 64-bit OS. And then in terms of software, you’ll need 64-bit drivers for your various devices. All 32-bit applications will still run perfectly fine in a 64-bit OS (that’s because even though most of you are running a 32-bit OS, you’re actually already using a 64-bit CPU, and so you’ll already taking advantage the 32-bit compatibility that 64-bit processors offer). 16-bit software won’t be supported at all though, but it’s unlikely they will run in Windows, even the 32-bit version – but you can still  use DOSBox to run these programs in 64-bit Windows.

... But 4 GB Is Fully Usable In 64-Bit Windows

Upgrading to Windows 7, particularly doing a clean install as many will be doing, is an excellent opportunity to upgrade from 32-bit to 64-bit. And you do almost always need to do a clean install in order to make such an upgrade. The rest of this article will examine the benefits, and some of the drawbacks, of upgrading from 32-bit to 64-bit so that when you do make the decision to go with Windows 7, you can make the right decision. Note that the retail DVD disc of Windows 7 will come with both 32-bit and 64-bit editions, and if you need to go from one to another, you’ll have to to a clean install. If you are buying the OEM version or if you system comes with one, then the product key is usually limited to either the 32-bit or the 64-bit version, and you normally cannot go from one to the other without buying another set of keys (although your system manufacturer might be nice enough to exchange product keys for you).

Performance:

While in theory, the CPU’s ability to process 64-bit chunks of data, as opposed to only 32-bits, should provide a performance boost. In reality, thanks to processor extensions such as SSE4, the CPU is already capable of processing data in ever larger chunks, some 128-bit wide. The ability to take advantage of 64-bit processing also depends on the type of software. Software that performs lots of calculations, especially of larger numbers, and software that deals digital video, encryption, large databases will all benefit. Of course, these software will have to have 64-bit support, but that’s becoming much more common these days (K-Lite Codec Pack, ffdshow, x264, VirtualDub and Media Player Classic are just a small selection of software on Digital Digest that already have 64-bit editions). And of course, because 64-bit systems can support more memory, any application for which 4 GB is simply not enough will definitely benefit from 64-bit systems. But for general home use, there is very little noticeable difference between 32-bit and 64-bit computing, at least for now.
32 or 64: 64-bit has performance gains, albeit mostly theoretical or fairly insignificant. You certainly won’t be worse off with a 64-bit OS, so there’s no harm in being future proof.

Compatibility:

As mentioned above, compatibility is much less of an issue than a couple of years ago, since new CPUs are 64-bit these days. Driver support is also much better, particularly with the large vendors, and a quick browse of their driver section reveals 64-bit drivers ready for Windows 7 even right now. The only problem is with smaller vendors and legacy hardware, for example, a no brand scanner from 2004. Unless the manufacturer of this device was considerable enough to continue to provide driver updates (unlikely), or that Windows has native support, then you may be out of luck. Note that 64-bit Windows requires all drivers to have electronic signatures, and it won’t allow drivers without them to be installed – this brings improved security, but it also means custom drivers are out of the question and that you have to rely further on the manufacturer to provide signed drivers.
32 or 64: 32-bit will definitely be more compatible, but unless you can’t live without a particular legacy device, it shouldn’t be an issue for most people.

Extra Memory Support:

On the surface, being able to use more than 4 GB of memory sounds like it will be quite handy, as 2 GB is quickly become even standard on budget systems. And even if you use exactly 4 GB of memory, being able to use all of it, instead of just 3.2 GB of it, is also a good idea. But in reality, at least with today’s applications, the extra memory will not bring you a huge performance increase, and in fact, the performance benefits of even going from 2 GB to 4 GB is debatable. With Core i7’s triple channel memory support, getting 3 GB of memory so that you don’t waste the extra GB in a 32-bit OS is also a possibility.
32 or 64: A 64-bit OS will allow you to use the full amount of your 4 GB of memory, and allow you to upgrade to more when needed. But whether you will actually need more than 4 GB of memory is debatable. But as with performance, you have nothing to lose by going 64-bit now, even if you don’t need it right away.

Conclusion:

So the conclusion may be that while 64-bit is the future, going to a 64-bit OS won’t give you a huge amount of benefits right now. But unlike the early days of 64-bit computing, with missing drivers and patchy software support, these are all relatively non issues and you really have nothing to lose from going 64-bit. The increased performance from a small set of specialized tasks, the improved memory support and even some security enhancements means that the benefits just about outweigh the risks. And the benefits will keep on increasing, while the risk keep on decreasing over time as well. Of course, if you get the retail version of Windows 7, you can always stick with 32-bit for now and do a clean install sometime in the future when you need 64-bit.

But one thing is for sure, 32-bit computing is nearing an end. With CPUs already having moved on, driver support mostly in place, and the memory limit becoming an issue, Windows 7 will most likely be the last ever 32-bit Windows and it’s only a matter of time before we’ll all using 64-bit operating systems.

Let’s start with copyright news for this relatively news lite week. The Pirate Bay continues to be attacked by the MPAA, via the Swedish courts. This time, the MPAA has forced the Pirate Bay’s web host’s web host to shut off traffic to TPB, which managed to shut down the torrent listing site for an entire three hours. Millions of dollars spent in legal proceedings don’t give you much, do they?

And as a preview of what could happen if the TPB would go down forever, the temporary downtime of the TPB led to server spikes for the other torrent sites. So unless the MPAA/RIAA go and take down every single torrent website, then people will just move on to the next one. Eventually, someone will open a website in a country that won’t bow down to the MPAA, maybe Antigua or somewhere, and then the MPAA would have finally forced piracy to become fully resilient. Evidence shows this to be the trend, that the more the industry fights against piracy, the harder it becomes to prevent it. Evidence also shows that through more competitive pricing and less DRM, piracy can be reduced.

IsoHunt - the MPAA needs to prove direct infringement, Judge says

Going to another big trial going on at the moment, the judge in IsoHunt’s trial actually wants the MPAA to prove direct infringement, of which they have presented zero evidence of it so far. The MPAA are of course outraged, that they would actually have to prove direct piracy, because it might be a bit hard to prove that a text file, which is basically what a .torrent file is, can do any damage at all when it comes to piracy. The text file has to be fed to a software program, which interprets the data, connects to the right trackers, and then through the tracker, connect to users to initiate downloads and uploads. Not exactly direct, and nothing other than the original text file is hosted by torrent sites like IsoHunt – everything else is hosted or produced by someone else, and even at the end of this, you still cannot prove piracy unless a complete copy of a file has been uploaded or downloaded, not just chunks of it. A chunk of a file is just digital garbage, and is neither unique nor will it contain any artistic or commercial value, and hence, no copyright abuse. It would be almost as ridiculous as someone copying a couple of word from an AP news article, and then AP going after them for copyright abuse. Oh.

Going to yet another big trial, a Dutch court has ruled that Mininova must remove all infringing torrents within three month, as the Dutch MPAA, BREIN, has won a court case. It’s funny because Mininova was only set up after Suprnova was shutdown, and Mininova, despite the name, is not much larger and much easier to use than Suprnova. I’m looking forward to see what advances Micronova will have when Mininova goes down, if it goes down. And if you can’t stop torrent sites, then you can go after the people who download them. The UK government is planning to have their own three strikes system that will ban anyone suspected of downloading pirated material. All this will do is to put further pressure on the courts, which might need to handle a couple of thousand claims every week. Happening in the UK, this reminds me of what happened over there in the 19th century, where moral outrage ensure every other poor person were sentenced for trivial crimes, and sent to penal colonies all around the world. Just don’t send them to Australia this time please, because we’ve got enough of our own pirates already.

None of this will actually stop people pirating though. As mentioned above, people will just open new torrent sites that will become super popular instantly. And the people who download pirated material will simply switch to encryption technology, which won’t really slow down downloads that much, but will mean it would be next to impossible to monitor what files you are downloading. So the industry can spend millions on lawsuits, the government can spend millions on new legislation and put further pressure on the judicial system, ISPs can be forced to spend millions on monitoring (which will kill off the smaller ISPs), and further millions can be spent on DRM, but what will all this get you? Piracy that can’t be stopped. Well worth the money spent, if you ask me. For people pirating stuff, and people downloading pirated stuff, that is. Eventually, all of this will force piracy to be even more convenient and private, and then at that time, everyone will do it because they know they can’t get caught anymore. Good one, MPAA.

Let’s get to HD news. Blu-ray may be gaining popularity in the home theater, but hardly anybody is using it on computers, and the situation is likely to continue well into the 2010’s, according to analysts.

There are a lot of reasons why Blu-ray hasn’t taken off on PCs, the main reason may be because other than movies, there’s nothing else that uses Blu-ray. Games could come on Blu-ray instead of 2 or 3 DVDs, but that will only work if most people have Blu-ray drives, and because games can be installed to people’s huge HDDs, the convenience only comes in at installation time. So instead of swapping out the disc once or twice during the install, Blu-ray can save you the trouble, but after this, you will still only ever need to insert one disc into the drive to play the game, whether it is the first DVD, or the single Blu-ray. It’s not like the transition from CD to DVD, because at that time, some CD games came on as many as 5 discs, and because people’s HDDs were smaller, you had to swap discs during play which was really annoying. And even then, the gaming industry successfully resisted using DVD-ROM for gaming for many years.

BD-RE: Too big for some things, too small for others, and just not as convenient

So without BD-ROM applications, then it comes down to Blu-ray recordables (BD-Rs and BD-REs) to offer huge amounts of storage on a single disc. But do people really need these 25 and 50 GB discs? They aren’t big enough to store a full backup of your PC’s content, usually several hundred GBs in size. They may be too big to store the odd file or two, most people use USB drives for that now. So there is probably a use for them for archival purposes, to store content that you don’t want someone to erase, but then again, 25 GB is a lot to store on an easily lost and damaged disc. The fact is between DVDs, USB thumb drives with ever increasing capacity, external HDD redundant arrays, there may be no place for Blu-ray recordables other than for storing HD movies. Imagine if DVDs were only good for making your own DVD movies, would it have become as popular as it is today?

Plasma TVs are dying, and that’s sad thing, because they are still the best quality, and in some cases, the best value screens on today’s market. LCDs, even the newer LED based ones, cannot hold a candle to the quality plasmas can give you. Candle is an appropriate term to use here because it’s the contrast ratio that usually separates the plasma TV with LCD equivalents. And there aren’t any viewing angle issues either with plasmas. But because plasma panels are hard to scale down, they can’t be used as PC monitors or on even smaller devices, and so the LCDs are much more cost effective to produce. And this is why plasma is dying. OLED will come along one day and replace LCDs and plasmas, both in terms of cost and quality, but for now, it remains a rich man’s toy ($2000+ for a 11″ screen? No thanks).

And finally in gaming, the reaction to the PS3 Slim is still the focal point of this week’s news. All eyes are on Microsoft to see how they respond, with analysts calling for a Xbox 360 Slim, which Microsoft needs much more than Sony. But Microsoft’s response, or perhaps it was pre-planned all along, is to drop the Pro bundle and reduce the Elite to Pro prices. Something that you would have already heard about back in July, if you read the WNR.

Sales wise, the PS3 Slim should give Sony’s console a much needed boost, particularly in the short term. Remember it won’t be just people who are buying their first PS3, due to the price drop, but there will be many who will buy their second PS3, as another Blu-ray player perhaps. Expect Sony’s console to outsell the Xbox 360 quite handsomely over the next few months, which is good timing on Sony’s part as the holiday season is so close. You won’t get the same effect with the Xbox 360 Elite price reduction, although Natal should see the Xbox 360 remain strong in 2010.

Xbox 360 Slim: Are Microsoft too scared to put out another piece of hardware, after the RRoD fiasco?

And I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks the PS3 Slim doesn’t look as good as one had hoped. Instead of calling it the PS3 Slim, it really should be the PS3 Flat, because it’s as if they’ve taken the old PS3 and basically flattened it, making it actually lengthier in size. And as Examiner.com article mentions, it may be because it’s far too early the product lifecyle to have a slim SKU, as least compared to what happened with the PS2. Sony couldn’t make the PS3 Slim any smaller without having to suffer cost issues again, and in the end, they didn’t make it as small as it should be. I don’t think this is a problem for the Xbox 360 Slim, as the Xbox 360 is a year older and the PS3, and the technology it uses was already a bit out of date at the time it came out, and while incremental improvements have occurred, there’s large scope for miniaturization, which could help to both decrease cost and improve reliability. But I guess Microsoft’s Xbox 360 hardware division are still suffering from PTSD due to the RRoD issue, and they won’t be too keen to put out another piece of hardware. But I won’t be surprised to if the Xbox 360 Slim makes its appearance right around the time Natal comes out.

Wordpress tells me I’ve nearly used up this week’s word limit, so I’ll have to stop now. Have a great week, and I’ll be back next week with the same mix of news, ranting, and outright lies.

I know I ranted on about the bugs in Fallout 3, but I think I may need to retract a few of my statements there, because compared to, GTA IV, Fallout 3 seems like  military grade level software, stable, bug free and won’t accidentally launch a nuke from time to time. GTA IV, to date, is probably the worst PC game I’ve played to date yet.

Now the game itself is quite excellent, and after finishing it (or nearly) on the Xbox 360, playing through it again on the PC actually somehow made the game better the second time around. The PC controls are better (well, driving aside), with better aiming and shooting. The “Independence FM” feature is excellent, and actually makes driving around tolerable, being able to listen to your own music. Plus all the reasons I’ve mentioned up top as to why I prefer PC gaming over consoles. But it’s the actual programming that’s the problem: GTA IV on the PC simply doesn’t work most of the time.

This is an actual in-game screenshot from my game, moments before a crash occurred

Now, I’ve only recently got the game so I don’t know what it was like before the latest round of patching. I’ve read on some forums that suggest the older patches were better, and that the newer patches made things worse. Which is exactly the sort of thing that I touched upon in my Fallout 3 rant. But the problem goes further. At least with Fallout 3, there are workarounds which allowed you to at least play the game for an hour or two at a time. With GTA IV, and the latest 1.0.4.0 patch, you’re lucky to be able to get more than 20 minutes. The problem I have is that it will stutter (screen turns black, sound freezes, and then after about 10 seconds, everything is back to normal – repeat this every minute or so) and then freeze completely, requiring a shutdown through Task Manager. The problem happens randomly, and it can happen when your computer has been on for a day, or when it has just been booted into Windows. And even when the game is working, and just like on the console versions, the framerate isn’t very consistent and it’s certainly not smooth in the way Fallout 3 is smooth (unsteady framerates probably). But I can forgive Rockstar Games for this, since they’ve never been really good at this sort of thing going back to GTA III, which had ultra fast framerate on modern PCs unless you tweaked around with the settings, and GTA: SA, which still doesn’t give me smooth Fallout 3 type framerates on my C2D E8500 with ATi Radeon 4850 and 4 GBs of RAM. These things I can forgive, as long as you let me play the great game for more than 20 minutes at a time. The in-game benchmark gives me 50+ FPS, but the uneven framerate problem can’t really be shown in benchmarks like this which only shows the average framerate (so if the framerate was 1 FPS for half of the time, and 100 FPS for the rest, then the average is still 50 FPS).

And it’s not even a problem that Rockstar are unaware of – they even published the full list of error codes. I think the error I get is either the DD3D10 or the DD3D30 one, sometimes the RESC10 one as well, and the only way to run the game again is to reboot the computer. Now I’m aware that GTA IV is a complex game, more so than Fallout 3, which is kind of sparse in terms of objects (fits well into the nuclear wasteland scenario, though). But a C2D E8500, Radeon 4850 and 4 GBs of DDR3 RAM (in XP), should at least let me play for more than 20 minutes at a time. And the game definitely gets worse the more you play, and you get access to more islands. So I didn’t experience crashing until about a third way through the game, unlike others whose games crashed much earlier than that. It seems there’s a memory leak somewhere, but who knows.

But after extensive tweaking, I’ve been able to play for an hour at a time, not always, but a few times already. A lot of testing and tweaking was needed, and I’ve really just been testing things randomly really, but some of it might have worked. So I thought I would share some of the things I tried here. Now not all of them has worked, and I still get crashes often, but at least it’s a step in the right direction. So test them out yourselves, and hopefully, you’ll get to play the game for more than 20 minutes at a time. I won’t go through the more obvious things like closing down all non essential programs (I found closing down MSN Messenger made things a lot more stable), installing the latest drivers (or rolling back to drivers that allowed you to have a better GTA IV experience before), unrolling any overclocking you may be doing, and ensuring your memory isn’t broken by running memtest or your CPU is stable by running Prime95. Also, turn off the clip capture setting in the in-game menus, as that just consumes more resources and causes crashes faster. For the in-game resolution, try to use one with 75 Hz output, which seems to make the game run smoother, at least on my system.

Tip #1: Using command-line switches

GTA IV on the PC supports several command line switches that can be used to affect the game’s settings, some of them not available from the options section within the game. To use command line switches, first start the notepad program in Windows, from the File menu, select “Save As” and then navigate to the folder in which GTA IV is installed (by default, it should be “C:\Program Files\Rockstar Games\Grand Theft Auto IV”). When saving, make sure the “Save as type” setting is selected as “Text Documents (.txt)”, and then name the file “commandline”. So basically, you should now have a blank text file called “commandline” in your GTA IV folder (the same folder as the files “LaunchGTAIV”, “gta4Browser” …). Now that this file has been created, we’ll add several command line switches to it to use within GTA IV.

Tip #2: Adding the command-line switches

The switches that I have added to my commandline text file are as follows:

-fullspecaudio
-memrestrict 262144000
-windowed

The first one enables full spec audio, which unsets limits to the framerate and makes the game stutter more. This is to improve the framerate experience, but I’m not sure it has any effect on stability. Some have suggested trying -minspecaudio instead.

The second one, memrestrict, is something that the Rockstar tech support have recommend (thanks for the tip, but how about actually fixing the game, as opposed to workarounds?). The exact setting (the number following the switch) depends on your game settings, so have a look at this thread for information on which setting you need to use.

The third one enables windowed gaming mode, which gives you an ugly border around the game, but at least it makes using Task Manager to shut down the GTAIV.exe process (as opposed to a reboot) much easier when the games does indeed freeze. It also, at least on my system, seems to cause less freezing and crashes.

There are a bunch of other command line switches you can try, but some I found made things worse, rather than better.

Tip #3: Underclock your GPU

One theory is that GTA IV pushes your GPU to the limit and causes it (or the device drivers) to crash. It’s a programming error if this happens, but one that Rockstar either haven’t identified or aren’t able to fix right now. And even if it isn’t a programming thing, then people with computers that have poor ventilation or underpowered fans will also experience this as GTA IV uses 100% of your GPU for an extended period. You can underclock your GPU in many ways, but I use the software RivaTuner. Start the tool, under the “Main” tab, look for the drop down list that list your GPU/monitor combo, and just under that, to the right, there is a button you can click on next to the word “Customize …” click on that and click on the first icon in the pop-up. Check the “Enable low-level hardware overclocking” checkbox, you may need to reboot your PC if you’ve been using it for a while or have been overclocking before. Then, from the default clock position, move the slider to the left (lower clock), and lower the speed by 10 or 20 MHz. Press “Apply” to apply the changes. You can save the profile and create a shortcut so you don’t have to go through this every time, but I don’t mind doing it manually. This trick seems to work better on ATi cards, especially the newer Radeons, as they have dynamic underclocking (for example, my 4850 switches between 500 and 625 MHz, depending on usage), and this constant change might be one of the many reasons why GTA IV crashes.

Tip #4: Nvidia Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames

For Nvidia card users, there is also another thing they can try to boost framerates and/or reduce crashes. I don’t have an Nvidia card, so I can’t test it, but others have had success. This is a setting you’ll find in your Nvidia drivers, under “Managed 3D settings” I think (see screenshot) – set “Maximum pre-rendered frames” to “1″ for the application “LaunchGTAIV.exe”. See this thread for more information. But other threads show that increasing this setting reduces the burden on the GPU (at the expense of the CPU), but might help with crashing. Something worth trying for Nvidia owners, I suppose.

–

I’m sure there are many other tips and tricks, some will work, some won’t, but with the above, I’ve at least been able to play the game for more than 20 minutes, and sometimes for up to an hour before the freezing starts again. And with the windowed mode, I can shutdown the GTAIV.exe process using Task Manager, and sometimes I won’t even need to restart Windows to play again. Suffice to say, the “auto-save” feature of GTA IV becomes increasingly useful, as trying to get back to a safehouse before the game crashes isn’t the type of suspense I was expecting from the game (though it is sometimes quite exciting).

So anyway, great game, bad implementation, worse patches. Just one of the many PC games that do this (Test Drive Unlimited is the other one that I’ve had a lot of problems with), and companies wonder why PC gaming is dying. But not all games are bad, some will work for hours on end without breaking a sweat. Call of Duty 4/World At War, World In Conflict,  Stardock’s Sins of a Solar Empire (at 1080p, full details, hundreds of ships in battle at the same time – no crashes!), Company of Heroes, Far Cry 2, Crysis – are just some of the games that don’t cause this type of headaches for their users, despite some of them being more CPU and GPU intensive. So it is possible, game developers, to make PC games that don’t crash. It’s not easy, given so many different configurations, but it is possible.

For now, it’s back to GTA IV, Task Manager, and reboots for me, all the time praying for a new patch that solves at least some of the problems. Well, at least I didn’t pay full price for the game (thanks to cdwow.com.au’s discount offer).

Update:

Having tried some more things, what I suggest is that at first, you only try the “windowed” command line and see how that works out. Also, make sure you close all other running programs, including any browser windows you may have open. Basically anything requiring a bit of memory or graphics memory should be closed, as it could lead to out of memory errors. And finally, if the game freezes on you (the sound may freeze or go on), don’t hit the reset button just yet – wait a bit and it will usually bounce back, at which point you can do a normal shutdown of the game, or in some cases, continue playing (I’ve often found that the game somehow becomes more stable after the first freeze, and after that, I can play for an hour without it crashing again).

Update #2:

ATI has released a new set of Catalyst drivers (9.8), which are official and stable, but not yet on their main websites (it’s posted on their blog). Some have experienced less crashes with this new driver, with sometimes better FPS as well. I’ve tried it, but only for a short while, and I haven’t noticed any positive differences. In fact, FPS seems to be a little lower, and I’ve already had the freezing problem. You may have better luck though, so try it out, and if it fails, then uninstall the driver using add/remove programs, then use Driver Sweeper to fully clean up the drivers, and finally re-install whatever drivers you were using before.

In Copyright news, the week’s major talking point has been about Amazon’s SNAFU and the implications it has regarding DRM. As you may have heard, some third party reseller on Amazon sold several Orwell e-books for Kindle, but it turned out they did not have permission to do so. So what did Amazon do? They used a not so well known DRM feature of Kindle to, without the permission of the user, erase all copies of the unauthorised books off people’s Kindle devices. Without permission. Without warning. This, my friend, is DRM at its worst.

Amazon's 1984-esque screw-up means Big Brother is not only watching, it's also erasing your books

Sure, in this particular situation, the erasure was probably justified, although ironic in the extreme considering the titles that were erased (’1984′, in particular – Big Brother must be so proud). But that’s not the point. The point is that Amazon at a moment’s notice can erase all of your purchases. Now why would they do that? They wouldn’t, not unless they want to be hit with hundreds of thousands of lawsuits all at once. But the point is that they could, and they have proved that they can this time, and there will be many similar future situation which will force Amazon or publishers to do this again. They wouldn’t be able to do the same with hard copies, and so it would be the seller or Amazon that will have to pay damages, rather than the customer who bought the item in good faith. The truth is that with these kinds of DRM, you’re not buying, you’re only renting or licensing, as you are bound by the license agreement which you agreed to when purchasing the books. Anyway, the whole thing caused quite a stir, even though this isn’t the first time Amazon has done this, but the media just loved the ‘1984′ references. Amazon’s boss had to issue a public apology. DRM again shows it’s true evilness.

DRM may still be alive on e-books and other media, but it’s pretty much dead on music. There is watermarking, which is a form of DRM, but it’s something people are willing to live with (at least those that do use the content lawfully, and not hold intentions to distribute illegally). But generally speaking, the kind of DRM that is on Kindle is dead for music, so much so that the RIAA has came out and declared DRM dead. Or did they? It made good copy so all the news agencies (and websites) ran with the story, but the actual quote was not as harsh as the headlines, but the RIAA did still admit the fact that DRM was largely gone from download services. So basically it’s dead, right?

Well, as one of our forum members pointed out, it’s not entirely dead. There are still music download services that employ DRM, but nobody really uses them, not when they can get DRM-free tracks. One new service which just launched and still uses DRM is Kazaa, the notorious file sharing service now gone legit. You can all you can eat music, but the DRM restricts playback to PCs (and a limited number of them as well), so it’s virtually useless before it is even launched. All you can eat music is good, but not if it’s limited to PCs, and as this requires DRM, it also means you’re effectively subscribing or renting the music, not purchasing. An all you can eat purchase account for DRM-free music is what the industry needs to really grow the download business. Prevent illegal sharing with watermarking and other methods, sure, but don’t make people jump through hoops just to buy something that’s less entertaining and value than many other forms of entertainment (this is why video gaming is growing at the expense of music, for example).

Pirating MP3s may not lead to communism, but DRM certainly takes a page out of the little red book

I guess you can see the theme of the week so far has been the difference between buying something and owning it, with all the rights associated with it, like the ability to actually not get it taken away from you without your permission, and the ability to re-sell it. That’s owning property. What DRM introduces is licensing, which is nothing new, but DRM allows licenses to be enforced strictly, such as remote erasure of the content. So the question is, is copyright anti-property? I think it is, and I think that’s been the core of the issues which people are against. Starting with DRM on DVDs, which prevented people from making backups of their DVDs, something they could do with CDs and all other media before that. And bit by bit, people’s rights are being taken away from them, and as Kindle-gate shows, companies now have the right to come into your home (in a way) and take away your purchases without your permission. People bleat on all the time about the evils of Communism in regards to the lack of personal ownership, but is this any better (or any different)?

Back to the lawsuits. The co-founders and the (ex) spokesman of The Pirate Bay have filed a lawsuit against Dutch anti-piracy agency BREIN, in response to a lawsuit filed by BREIN in which the only communication was through a Twitter tweet. BREIN apparently also accused the former TPB guys of launching denial of services attacks against their websites, which the TPB guys are counter-suing on the basis that this isn’t true and may constitute slander. They also claim that the original BREIN lawsuit continued numerous errors and should never have been filed in the first place. An agency having a better time is the Italian FPM group (where have all these groups come from, all of a sudden), which claims they have forced Mininova to remove 20,000 torrent links and many other sites to do the same. Mininova is fighting a legal battle themselves of course, and they have been hinting at trials of a system to allow torrent removals by content owners, I guess trying to prove that there is a system in place to handle piracy, and it should be up to content owners to police their own content (as otherwise, how would anyone know what belongs to whom)?

Moving on to HD news, the big rumour of the week (and as of right now, still unconfirmed), is that Toshiba is joining the Blu-ray bandwagon, which in many fanboy’s eyes will signal final and irrefutable victory over HD DVD.

64GB USB drives are already here, bigger than the biggest Blu-ray disc, and is rewritable without special hardware - could it be used for movie distribution?

I must make clear that Toshiba have not confirmed any of this, issuing a no comment which may be suggestive of some smoke, if not the fire. The question is, does this story make sense? In my opinion, yes it does. Toshiba was always unlikely to skip Blu-ray entirely, unless Blu-ray died a quick death. They make TVs and DVD players, and so Blu-ray is the natural next step for them. However, this does not mean that their focus on the post-Blu-ray technologies, such as downloads, streaming or flash memory distribution, have been abandoned. I for one feel that Toshiba getting back into the game at this time may in fact be due to the fact that these new technologies are finally mature enough for the marketplace, as seen with LG and Samsung’s Netflix integration. USB drive capacity has already exceeded that of Blu-ray, and offer better value than Blu-ray recordables even at this nacent stage. And with more and more companies launching USB thumb drive movie distribution services, this may be the right time for Toshiba to embrace Blu-ray, but also sneakily introduce these post-Blu-ray technologies through the back door and use Blu-ray to launch their own ideas about what the future of movie distribution will look like. Is it also a coincidence that the companies mentioned so far, LG, Samsung and Toshiba, as well as Microsoft with its Netflix Xbox 360 strategy, are all HD DVD proponents? And with Netflix in 9% of US homes already, thanks largely to the expansion of their online streaming service through game consoles and Blu-ray players, it shows people may be ready to start embracing online video streaming. Sure, Blu-ray quality HD streaming and downloads will have to wait another generation, waiting for the Internet infrastructure to catch up, but Blu-ray quality (and even better than Blu-ray quality) movie distribution via flash memory is already possible now.

For the short term though, 3D TV and movies are also seen as the next big thing. James Cameron’s new movie ‘Avatar’ aims to bring new 3D filming techniques and the concept of a 3D movie to mainstream audiences, to make 3D less of an optional experience, and make it *the* experience at the cinema. ‘Avatar’ is definitely the most expensive 3D movie produced thus far, there is no doubt about that. Along with the Blu-ray group trying to establish a standard for 3D Blu-ray movies, and with Nvidia joining the “game” with its GeForce 3D Vision kit, to bring 3D to the home computer, there is certainly a movement towards making 3D mainstream. But my view is that while 3D can be popular, it cannot be mainstream until one invents a technology that doesn’t require glasses. It’s just too much trouble, regardless of  the payoff.

And finally in gaming, Microsoft has announced the next Dashboard update will be on August 11th, bringing a bunch of new features including better movie streaming, more avatar related content (achievements which give clothing and props sounds very interesting to me), and even games on demand. It’s not just movies that are moving to a media-less distribution method, it seems.

Sony’s PS3 Slim is rumoured to be unveiled soon as well, if the rumours are true that is. Sony will be making announcements in August, which should see either the rumours confirmed or denied. Again, there is a bit too much smoke without even a small fire at this stage. The big question will be how much cheaper will this new PS3 be? Because if it’s just the same price, then I don’t see the point.

I think that’s all the news for this week. More DRM bashing, digital distribution championing and PS3 price cut pining next week. See you then.

A busy week this week, since I actually bothered to do some work. I started a new series called “The History of Digital Digest” to celebrate the 10th birthday of this website. Part 1 was posted this week, and it talks about how Digital Digest was launched, and some tidbits that have never been made public before. The June 2009 NPD figures came out and as usual, I have posted the full analysis. It marks another month in which the only happy party is Microsoft, as it was the only company yet again to have any sort of year-on-year growth. The Wii is still the best selling console (portables not included), but the PS3 is struggling, in hardware and software numbers. All could be fixed by the magical elixir known simply as “a price cut”, but it’s going to take a while for Sony to figure it out I suppose. Yes, they lose more money if they cut prices without cutting manufacturing cost, but how much money are they losing by being 3rd in the console race at the moment? And game sales, the stable of console manufacturer income, is very much dependant on hardware numbers – this is why most game console are sold at a loss. Just bite the damn bullet, Sony. Anyway, onto the WNR proper …

Starting with Copyright news, continuing with The Pirate Bay coverage, or perhaps better expressed as “The Death of The Pirate Bay” coverage, the company that has bought TPB has hired a new man to helm the (in)famous website – step up Wayne Rosso, who is now courting the RIAA and MPAA and trying to make nice.

Wayne Rosso aims to destroy, I mean fix, The Pirate Bay by making it legal

In a stomach churning interview, Rosso calls his best buddies at the RIAA and MPAA “unbelievably supportive” and vows to “turn over a legitimate new leaf” to make TPB completely legal. Rosso plans to do this by introducing some kind of fee, which will be used to pay the content owners – the fee can be reduced if users contribute P2P resources. I don’t see how this can work, because you cannot still offer pirated material even if you charge a fee and pass that on to the content owners, so the content would have to be legal and so will become limited by the content that content owners are willing to provide (so expect lots of DRM), which defeats the whole purpose of the website because there are already tons of sites offering the purchase of legal (and DRM infested) downloads. So if it wasn’t clear as to what will become of the TPB, it’s now pretty clear that TPB, as we know it, will end. At least if the intentions of the new owners are met – the only glimmer of hope is that often intentions give way to financial reality, and keeping TPB as it is might be more profitable.

The original founders of TPB have moved on it seems, and they’ve mentioned some political ambitions. The Swedish Pirate Party’s recent successes will no doubt fuel the political movement, with the Swiss Pirate Party being launched this week. There is already an Australia Pirate Party, although what Australia needs is an Internet Party. An Australian Internet Party is very much needed at the moment to help guide and oversee the government’s efforts to complete the National Broadband Network, as well as to keep them in line in terms of issues such as the Internet Filter Scheme. And such a party is needed even more so now that the government here has suggested that they might want to implement a three-strike anti-piracy system. A political voice is very much needed in Australia to fight the government on this issue, and a sizable number of votes in the next election could force the government into acting sensibly when it comes to these issues. And yes, I’m pointing my accusing fingers at you, Senator Conroy, recent winner of the Internet Villain of the Year award.

Continuing with the theme of posting people's pictures for this WNR, here's Stephen Fry

From politics to celebrities, noted Internet addict and actor Stephen Fry has launched an attack on the anti-piracy industry, specifically in relation to them going after TPB. The usual thing to do when celebrities speak is to wince, but Mr. Fry makes a lot of sense in his interview with the BBC and he’s Internet and real life celebrit-ism would be a good way to promote the injustices that are occurring all around us. One of the things that can quickly solve the piracy problem, as well as make users happy, would be an all-you-can-eat type music (and eventually, movies or games) download service. Charge $20 per month, sign up a couple of hundred million users worldwide, and let them download all the music they want. Would anybody still bother to pirate stuff? And if they can sign up hundreds of millions of users, which I think is not totally impossible, then that’s billions worth of revenue per month. With these kind of services, the users that download absolutely everything will be subsidized by the users that don’t download much, and because it’s all digital anyway, there’s no limit as to how many copies you sell, as opposed to selling CDs and physical content.

The alternative is to continue this fight against users, websites, and ISPs. While none of the actions actually solve the problem of piracy. All these legal and technological (DRM) measures have done is to force the implementation of new technologies that makes pirating easier, more private and harder to stop. With the imminent demise of TPB, public torrent trackers are the next big thing and the more public trackers there are, the harder it will be to shut down piracy. Meanwhile, the MPAA has vowed to attack and keep on attacking torrent websites, and for example, has vowed to chase isoHunt founder Gary Fung for the rest of his life, to try and claim the damages rewarded to the MPAA. So if Mr. Fung starts a new business, then the MPAA won’t be too far behind. If Mr. Fung gets a new job, then the MPAA will want a share. And so on, and so on.

In HD news, there’s no much on Blu-ray that I found interesting, although there’s a bit about it that’s more to do with gaming and so it covered later on. All I know is that Blu-ray sales figures, as covered in this thread, shows that Blu-ray sales are fluctuating wildly between being excellent, and like last week, not being much better than the same time last year.

You will of course read more stories on how Blu-ray has grown a million percent in 2009 or something and compares that to drop in DVD sales and the come up with the conclusion that Blu-ray has won. But the fact is that Blu-ray has nowhere to go but up, and 2008 was a poor year for Blu-ray until the very end. DVD sales have nowhere to go but down, thanks largely not to Blu-ray but to increased spending on video games. And the increases in Blu-ray sales, as I’ve mentioned numerous times before, are nowhere near sufficient to make up for the loss in DVD income. Blu-ray wins when it reaches 51% market share compared to DVDs, and not a day sooner, in my books.

In slightly related news, Microsoft’s new version of the Silverlight platform now supports H.264 (and AAC), bringing it in line with the rest of the industry. There is no doubt now that H.264 is now the industry standard codec for video compression. Or is it? HTML 5 was supposed to anoint an official video codec, but due to pressure from various sides, it has backed down from naming such a format. Wikipedia wants to use Ogg Theora, Apple wants H.264, some of the browser makes prefer Ogg as well, but Google likes H.264 too and supports both in Chrome. Ogg Theora is open source and so it should be supported, but H.264 has so much industry support and it can’t be ignored. And I know what you’re going to say and “who cares” is not an acceptable solution to this puzzle.

And finally in gaming, and yes we have some notable gaming news this week finally, of course it’s time and an appropriate place to plug my June 2009 NPD analysis again. Really, it’s good reading especially if you like graphs and stuff.

Microsoft guy Aaron Greenberg says Sony distracted by Blu-ray

Responding to the positive news from the June 2009 NPD figures, Microsoft is claiming all sorts of victories, while saying that the reason the PS3 is behind at the moment is largely due to Blu-ray. Can’t really argue with that, because Sony turned one of the most successful gaming platforms (PS2), that also came with a DVD player, into one of the most successful Blu-ray players, that also came with gaming capabilities. The change in focus is what did them. Now this isn’t to say that there’s no way back for Sony, far from it. A temporary, and largely avoidable setback aside, the solution to the problem is very simple. And they could do it through the PS3 slim, if it is real. This video seem to suggest that it is. A PS3 Slim that costs less might be just what the doctor ordered for Sony.

In any case, Microsoft will try to ride on this wave of success for as long as possible, and with the much more welcomed Windows 7 coming soon, this could prove a strong period for Microsoft. And perhaps to tie together the two potential successes, Project Natal may make an appearance on the PC as well. Games for Windows Live has tried to tie together the Xbox 360 with the PC, and  something like Natal would definitely help. And not all applications for Natal will be for gaming, as even on the Xbox 360, Natal is being used for everything from video chatting to media navigation.

Okay, that’s all for this week. More “History of Digital Digest” next week, some kind of mid-week rant I suppose, and another issue of the WNR same time next week. See you then.

The very first version of Digital Digest, note the Asus V3400 reference

It is worth noting again that Digital Digest is really a collection of many different websites that I have developed over the last 10 years. The very first of these websites was a Geocities (and Tripod) hosted website called DVDigest. It was still relatively early days for the Internet, and the boom was underway. Free web hosting was all the rage, and Geocities and Tripod were amongst the leaders. You get something like 15 MB of space and some unspecified bandwidth limit, for hosting static HTML pages and images, which was plentiful back then. And when you do go over the bandwidth limit, you can always open another free account – to solve the problem of ever changing URLs, you used redirect services like cjb.net (so you would have something like dvdigest.cjb.net, which would direct to whichever free account that was still active back then). Now, this was a time of venture capitalists going crazy and IPOs popping up all over the place, so in comparison, DVDigest was pretty amateur. Even for the amateurs.

But it was noob time for most people back then, before the word “noob” was even invented. My interests back then, being the nerd that I am, was to go to newsgroups and help people with their DVD playback problems. I was one of the few that jumped on to the doomed VCD bandwagon (having purchased a hardware MPEG-1 decoder card at great cost), and my interests naturally flowed onto this new format called DVD. Playing DVDs on your PC back then is  like trying to play games at 2560×1600 resolution today. With 8xAA and 16x AF. In other words, stutter city was the name of the game. That is unless you had some sort of graphics card that could accelerate DVD playback (or a dedicated hardware MPEG-2 decoder card). The graphics card I had back then was the  Asus V3400, part of Nvidia’s Riva TNT family. Despite the marketing, it did not have DVD acceleration and playback was, well, awful. Software based DVD decoders were still in their early days back then, and it took a great deal of tweaking before you could get acceptable framerates on an Intel Celeron 333a. The experience I gained from helping people play DVDs is what led me to write up a few webpages and open a site called DVDigest, which quickly became DVD Digest because people were a bit confused at the name (and they still are – “Digest” reads as in Reader’s Digest, and not as in “digest food”, BTW).

This went on, and more content was added. There were a few new things coming out back then that were quite exciting (for a nerd like me). Talks of doing the impossible and somehow copying the copy protected DVD to your hard-drive, that is if you had a hard-drive big enough. The very first “ripper”, if I can remember, was all about using PowerDVD’s screen capture facility and capturing everything frame by frame. People might as well have pointed a video camera at their TV for all the good that it did (no sound until further processing!) , but at least the process path was all digital. There as also this thing called DivX ; -) – which allowed you to make high quality videos (even better than VCD!) at maybe only a tenth of the space. It was an exciting time.

DeCSS: Who knew such a small program could cause so much trouble ...

It was still late 1999 when I was approached by a company, which shall remain nameless (and actually I can’t remember their name anyway), that offered to help me host my fledgling website, which had already grown too p0pular to be hosted on a 15 MB free webspace deal (shocking, I know). I was to get a part of the advertising money, and they would do all the hosting. They even kindly purchased the domain name dvd-digest.com (don’t bother hurrying over to whois the name, it’s owned by different people now, I think), which was perhaps not as kind as I had believed, naive as I was. All went pretty smoothly until the said company received legal documents which suggested that the rippers I was hosting was not entirely legal. The infamous DVD CCA vs DeCSS case had started. It doesn’t really matter now that the court eventually ruled in favour of the defendants, but I’m sure it was scary for the company that hosted DVD Digest (and owned the domain name to boot). And they took what was in their eyes not only the right action, but the only action, which was to “Shut It Down!”. I was on vacation and away from the Internet at that time (hard to believe that being away from the Internet is actually possible these days, I know) and I did not find out until a week or two after the fact. It wasn’t good news for DVD Digest.

So I had to start from scratch again in the fake new millennium (2000), this time with the domain name digital-digest.com, even though the site was still called DVD Digest back then. And start again I did. The year 2000 was a great one for DVD Digest, despite the soon bursting of the Internet bubble. It was then that I turned what was really a hobby into a business of sorts, and of course, the DVD industry made huge strides in those few years which was helpful for a website that relied on more and more people wondering why they’re only getting 15 FPS from the DVDs on their PCs.

The DVD Digest name continued to be used for many years, with Digital Digest eventually taking over as the official name of the website, but by then there were other sites part of the Digital Digest network called DivX Digest and DVD±R Digest, but that’s a story for part 2 and 3 of The History of Digital Digest.

To be continued in part 2 …

Patching. It’s now as integral a part of computing as say the mouse or keyboard. As a software engineer, I understand the complexity behind a software project, and how the final version is never really good enough for public consumption, no matter how thorough your testing procedures are. And that’s especially true with games, because these are complex bits of code, and they rely on a variety of different hardware (Nvidia or ATI, and which GPU series, which sound chip …) and software (which driver version, which DirectX version, which Windows version …). So games do need patches, and it could be several patches before all the major bugs are fixed.

Fixing bugs is one thing though. Introducing new and more annoying bugs with every patch is another. And this is why I’m going to rant about Fallout 3 in this blog entry.

Fallout 3: Actual screenshot from my save game - great game, crap patches

As I mentioned before, Fallout 3 is my 2008 game of the year, and with the DLCs, I think it might even be my 2009 game of the year. But all of this is despite, not because of, the patches that Bethesda Game Studios (the makers of Fallout 3) have released. Nearly all of them have introduced new and more annoying bugs, without fixing long standing ones. And you can’t even skip the patches because Fallout 3 on the PC is tied into Games for Windows Live, and so without the latest patch, you cannot get into your save games (well you can, but you’ll have move a few things around so you can play offline). The latest most annoying bug for me is the closing bug, introduced in the 1.5 patch with the Broken Steel DLC (the latest patch version is 1.6, and it doesn’t fix this issue) where if you quit the game, your computer hangs and you’ll have to restart. Your computer actually doesn’t hang, it’s just that Fallout 3 hangs and you can’t get out of it to shut it down. So I now play in windowed mode, or use Alt-F4 to close the game after getting to the main menu. This kind of workaround shouldn’t be necessary on a game that I’ve already paid nearly $100 for (including 3 DLCs). There are also video/audio codec related issues (nicely related to this website), which can be fixed, although it really should have been handled from a developer’s point of view by ensuring external codecs do not interfere with internal ones used by your game. And don’t even get me started on the Feral Reaver Ghouls that spasm and become invincible. For this, and many other bugs, and to read the rants of many other users, just check out Bethesda’s own Fallout 3 PC issues forum – 68,000 posts and still going strong, unfortunately (and to compare, the PS3 and Xbox 360 issues forum when added together only have 15,000 posts).

The PS3/Xbox 360 versions  aren’t much better, and they are even less lucky because they can’t play in windowed mode as a workaround (although to be fair, they don’t get the shutdown bug), and they can’t use console commands to resurrect NPCs that die for no apparent reason. But they do get random crashes, get stuck in place, and various other little glitches that are easy to fix on the PC (through the aforementioned console commands, for example to teleport yourself to another location if you get stuck in the rock crevasse or something), but impossible to fix on video game consoles.

Anyway, the point of this rant is that while I fully understand the difficulty in developing games these days, but could you at least ensure that patches do not introduce new bugs? For a game like Fallout 3, many people will forgive the developers and use the workarounds because even with the bugs, it’s still a great game. But for any other game, well let’s just say that no wonder so many people pirate games – it really is the only way to ensure that the game actually works on your PC before you pay for it (demos, while great, aren’t the full game and so there are things that won’t show up in it).

My rant is over so to thank you all for reading this crap, I will present some troubleshooting tips for my fellow Fallout 3 PC sufferers, I mean gamers:

1. Don’t run the game at the highest possible resolution/quality setting. Tone it down a notch (or two) and the game will crash less.
2. Run the game in offline mode so you won’t have to be stuck with Games for Windows Live and being forced to apply patches. This is not a rant against Games for Windows Live though, because I like the service (although I think it should be optional), particularly the Achivements, which adds to the longevity of games like Fallout 3.
3. Refer to the Troubleshooting Tips thread on the official forum to get started with the workarounds.
4. Save often – I now have over 1,500 saves occupying 2.53 GB of space, and I still wish I had saved more often to avoid having to replay areas due to crashes (to save space, you can compress old saves and then delete them – you can get a 70% saving on disk space by compressing the save games, which makes me wonder why the developers didn’t add compression to the save files in the first place).
5. Your audio chip/card may come with software that gives you all sorts of audio effects, like Dolby Virtual Speakers or whatever – turn all of these off, because audio problems are one of the major sources of crashes for Fallout 3.
6. While using the console commands may be considered cheating, it isn’t cheating if you fail a mission due to some glitch. Correct the glitch with the console commands, and if ethics aren’t that important to you (I guess that would depend on your Karma rating), then gives yourself a couple of hundred or thousand caps as reward for your patience while you’re in the console.
7. As mentioned earlier with the exit-crash bug, instead of exiting the game like a normal person, go to the main menu and press Alt-F4 to shut down Fallout 3. And then go into Task Manager to shut down the Fallout3.exe process (otherwise it keeps on running, consuming resources like the full game does). If you’re like me and tend to forget to do this, then play the game in windowed mode (see tip below) and shut down through Task Manager.
8. Play the game in windowed mode sucks, but it seems to avoid some of the crashes (possibly thanks for the lower forced resolution).
9. Get a PS3 or Xbox 360.
10. Get the word out about Bethesda’s Fallout 3 patches and complain – maybe if enough people complain, then at least the serious problems will be fixed. Not that this strategy worked for Oblivion or anything.

HTPC in a tiny tiny box, made possible by Nvidia Ion and the 9400M GPU

You will soon be hearing a lot about Nvidia’s new Ion platform. There will be a whole bunch of hype, superlatives and marketing jargon to go along with it, but if you boil it all down, Nvidia Ion’s main purpose will be to give HD where HD wasn’t possible before.

Intel’s Atom processor has been a huge success in the netbook market. Netbooks are a needed stepping stone between the ever more powerful smartphone, and the laptop. Netbooks are perfect for basic office work, Internet and will give you some multimedia potentials. They usually employ an Intel GMA 950 GPU, which will allow you to do all the basic stuff, but try to do anything more taxing like playing back a 720p H.264 video, and you’ll find it struggling, along with the Atom processor, in trying to deal with it. So while netbooks and other similar mini computers are great for most tasks, today’s multimedia demands mean that they won’t have a place in your home theater as a media player.

Nvidia’s Ion platform seeks to change this notion.

By including a Nvidia GeForce 9400M into the package, as opposed to using the Intel GMA GPU. Apart from being an tiny GPU that fits well into devices normally powered bt the Atom, the 9400M also features Nvidia’s 3rd generation PureVideo HD (or VP3) acceleration engine designed specifically for enhanced HD playback, including full hardware decoding for all the Blu-ray video codecs. The 3rd gen VP3 is only seen on some of the more recent GeForce GPUs, and not even the GTX 2xx range have them (they are still using the 2nd gen., which cannot do full VC-1 hardware decoding, only full H.264 decoding). What this means is that the GPU will handle most of the load for playing back HD movies and this now allows Atom based systems to play back 1080p HD movies.

Good things come in small packages - Ion can make netbooks play Blu-ray

This then allows Atom based systems to have a genuine place inside your home theater. The small form factor and lack of heat (and therefore, noise) will be perfect in the home theater, and with 1080p HD H.264 or VC-1 playback, it will handle all of your multimedia needs without having a dedicated PC hooked up to your system. Increase the form factor a bit and add in a Blu-ray drive, and you’ve got yourself a full HTPC system for maybe only half the cost, half the space, and half the noise. And unplug all the cables, and it’s portable too. The 9400M will support Nvidia’s CUDA platform, which means GPU will be able to assist the CPU in many other tasks.

What Ion, and the 9400M, won’t offer you is gaming potential, because in order to reduce the heat output and power requirements to fit into Atom systems, a few corners had to be cut – the 9400M only features 16 stream processors, compared to the 480 you get with Nvidia’s top of the range GPU. 2D graphics won’t be much better than Intel GMA based systems either. But video, and HD video at that, has always been the main draw here.

Intel will fight the Ion platform by introducing new CPUs that can handle 720p video using less power and at less cost than Ion, but 1080p video is where things are heading at the moment and there appears to be a bright future for Ion as long as system builders, like Asus, take full advantage.