Event Horizon

It’s a week of events.

Monday 6th 5pm – Microsoft E3

Monday 6th 6pm – Apple WWDC

Monday 6th 8:30pm – EA E3

Monday 6th 10:30pm – Ubisoft E3

Tuesday 7th 1am – Sony E3

Tuesday 7th 5pm – Nintendo E3 (and 3DS eshop?)

HD consoles are bad for business

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=27163793&postcount=32

“Many companies do, yes. ActivisionBlizzard, EA’s largest competitor (EA is Dice’s parent publisher) is one of only a few profitable “major” third party in the west over recent years and lists PC/MMO as their largest segment of revenue at 23% of total:

http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ACTI/1225926632x0x440234/15fed731-0b27-46c1-9212-e2b4deb8fbeb/Q4%20CY10%20Press%20Release%20Final.pdf

Zynga is a company that did not even exist when the Playstation 3 launched, and is now worth more than Electronic Arts almost exclusively through PC games:

http://mashable.com/2011/02/18/zynga-10b-valuation/

By contrast, Electronic Arts, a company that is clearly focused on PS3/360 as their primary revenue drivers, has lost ~2.25 Billion dollars in the last 3 years, and hemorrhaged more than 3,000 jobs, which be like Nintendo firing 60% of their entire company:

http://investor.ea.com/results.cfm

I just want to make sure that everyone understands that the focus on PS3/360 has been absolutely terrible for third party publishers in general, destroyed profitability and lost thousands of jobs. It doesn’t mean the PC is a panacea — nor is the iPhone, or particularly the Wii, etc. — but it’s really difficult to argue that the PS3/360 have been very good to publishers’ profits.”

- frod out

iPad blogging app

Just found what I think might be as close to my perfect blogging app as I can reasonably expect – Blogpress. Migh actually blog a lot more now.

- frod out

Economy stuff

Saw a nice comment post on the BBC website that I thought I’d share.

 

94. At 08:59am on 7th Apr 2011, richard bunning wrote:

Those that argue for continuing on our course of deep and rapid spending cuts need to look seriously at where this took the Irish economy.

For every Euro the Irish reduced government spending by, several times that amount was sliced off their aggregate demand, which led to the economy rapidly contracting so that tax take fell sharply whilst unemployment rose, driving up government spending.

Result – THE IRISH DEFICIT WENT UP – NOT DOWN!

The UK deficit today is completely different from the very similar sized one that Ken Clarke left for the last government to deal with.

Firstly a large part of the debt was to bail out the banks, not ordinary government public spending per se at all.

Secondly the UK now has an asset approaching £100 Bn in publicly held shares/loans to the banks to set against the deficit.

So would you asssess the credit worthiness of an individual, a company or a nation by only looking at the liabilities without even considering its assets? You’d be an idiot if you did – but that’s precisely what those who only go on about the DEFICIT are doing when they ignore the bank holding ASSET.

The substance of the criticism of the level and speed of the spending cuts is that the deficit arose from the credit crisis and was not caused by domestic economic factors at all and just as you wouldn’t try and pay off a new mortgage in four years by starving your family to do it, we should recognise that over time the UK holding in the banks can be unravelled and the money used to pay off a large part of the debt – an option not available to Gordon Brown when he came into office faced with the same level of debt then as now.

For George Osborne’s policy to work the economy must perform a miracle that no other economy in the developed world has ever achieved EVEN IN PERIODS OF STRONG WORLD GROWTH.

+2m new private sector jobs
Exports must rise by a third
$400 Bn+ new investment in manufacturing capacity

If these figures are not acheived the UK will follow Eire into the spiral of cuts, rising public deficit and personal debt levels which we will not be able on our own to escape from.

What does that mean for you & me?

House prices collapse to less than half what they are now.

Interest rates hit 10%+

Petrol is over £5 a litre – so is a loaf of bread.

Unemployment passes the 5,000,000 level and goes on rising.

Sterling falls to parity with the Euro – and goes on falling.

So before you blindly support the current economic policy, pause and think about the RISK that is being taken and the LONG ODDS of it succeeding.

Even if you blame the last government for everything, are you seriously prepared to give the coalition a blank cheque to take this sort of gamble with your family’s future?

 

Not sure about his predictions but his clear view of the facts is nice to see. The bank ownership really is a huge asset to us that sets us apart from the PIIGS and should serve as a counter to the ‘blah blah deficit MUST CUT MUST CUT’ Thatcherite BULLSHIT spewing from Tory mouths.

Games I don’t like

Just thinking casually now about games I have generally tried a bit and not enjoyed.

nb. I don’t really care if you disagree, because this is just a cathartic exercise for me.

• All console FPS. I’ve tried Halo, CoD, Resistance, and Killzone. I even finished some of them. I keep trying them because they’re popular I guess.
• Pretty much all the big Playstation 2 era action games. Devil May Cry, Metal Gear Solid, God of War, Splinter Cell, the kind of ‘epic’ games that waste my time attempting to create some kind of story to wrap around the (now worn out) gameplay.
• Zelda. Loved the Gameboy and SNES games. Not got on with any other one since despite repeated attempts. Too much padding and old content, just for 5% of new stuff. Needs a total reinvention, and I don’t think Motion+ controls are the answer.
• Any RPGs that bear any resemblance to WoW (not WoW itself). I feel that no matter what they do, they cannot make me feel like I’d not be better off just playing WoW instead. Possibly because mostly the stories are completely pointless and terrible. Exemptions are given to handheld games, I can play those in certain situations where I can’t play WoW.
• 99.5% of iOS content. This includes the big headline games like Angry Birds and Flight Control. I just don’t get it, there are plenty of pick up and play games on normal handhelds that offer so much more in the short and long term.

There is plenty of other stuff I’ve missed as well. I think it’s possible that I hate videogames.

Using Cygwin and PuTTY to get a unix-like command line on Windows

I remember trying this a while ago and suffering a lot of pain, but it’s a lot slicker now. I have essentially ‘replaced’ the Windows 7 command line (and associated “terminal” application) with a much more agreeable alternative.

First you need the putty installer package, and install it:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

Then get PuTTY Tray, for clickable URLs:

http://haanstra.eu/putty/

Replace the PuTTY binary with the one from PuTTY Tray. Load it up, go to ‘Behaviour’ and change ‘Show tray icon’ to Never. Unless you really want that feature (seems pointless on Windows 7 to me, this bit was really for my benefit). Save this under default settings and make any other config changes as desired.

Get Cygwin:

http://www.cygwin.com/setup.exe

Cygwin leaves a few ‘standard’ tools out, probably because their functions are already performed by built-in Windows tools. This is worthless to me. Take all the defaults you can and add (at least) the following packages using the installer’s package selection tool:

• ncurses
• openssh
• wget
• make
• gcc
• file (in Utils)
• procps
• libncurses-devel
• vim

Once done, run Cygwin from the start menu as an Administrator. This is required for the initial ssh server setup. To do this, find it in the start menu, right click and select the appropriate option from the context menu.

From the cygwin command line, run ssh-host-config. This will ask various questions and set up the ssh service for you. Go for the privilege seperation option. Make up the names, doesn’t matter what they are (probably). I think I said yes to pretty much everything (put ‘ntsec’ for the “value of CYGWIN” question).

Once done, run ssh-user-config, this sets up keys and permissions. I didn’t use a password here, but it depends on your security requirements as to whether you think you need one. You’ll have to enter the password in pageant every time you log in if you require one. Not a real issue, probably worth it in the long run.

Now do ‘net start sshd’, fire up PuTTY and create a profile for connecting to ‘localhost’. Give it a good name, we’re going to need to refer to it as whatever you call it. Test it to check you can log in ok. Pick a nice location for a simple batch file. Create one (use notepad or whatever, don’t forget to save as .bat). Put the following in:

start “starting localhost putty” “C:\Program Files\PuTTY\putty.exe” -load “2 localhost”

Please note this is wrapped by my stylesheet, there should be no line breaks in your batch file. You may need to alter the path to the putty binary. In this example my putty profile for logging in to the local cygwin openssh server is called “2 localhost”.

We still need to stop having to enter a password every time. Load PuTTYgen, press the Load button, change the file filter from PuTTY private key files (ppk) to All Files and navigate to C:\cygwin\home\<username>\.ssh – select the id_rsa file and enter your password if necessary. Press the ‘Save Private Key’ button and navigate to C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup and save the file there. Now it will be loaded when you log in to Windows. Find it in Windows Explorer and double click it. Now try your batch file again, and it should log straight in.

Now we just need to put it in the Windows 7 dock. This is where Windows is stupid, but it is doable still. Open the Start Menu, and search for ‘cmd’. Right click the ‘cmd.exe’ result and select ‘Pin to Taskbar’. Right click the new Taskbar icon, right click ‘Command Prompt’ in the resulting menu and select Properties. In the ‘Target’ field, add the following to what is already there:

/C C:\Users\Public\Documents\localputty.bat

This is the full location and name of the batch file we created earlier, in my case ‘localputty.bat’. You can try and change the icon and description if you want, although it didn’t work for me.

One final thing. Cygwin has an annoying habit of putting nothing but the current path in the PuTTY title bar, which isn’t helpful at all, unless you spend your whole computing time navigating Cygwin file trees and need to know where you are at all times.

In the /etc/profile file, find the section ‘Shell dependent settings’ and the line below this that says:

PS1=’\[\e]0;\w\a\]\n\[\e[32m\]\u@\h \[\e[33m\]\w\[\e[0m\]\n\$ ‘

Change this to:

PS1=’\[\e[32m\]\u@\h \[\e[33m\]\w\[\e[0m\] \$ ‘

in your ~/.bash_profile, uncomment the section regarding adding the user’s private bin to the PATH variable. Run ‘mkdir ~/bin’ and create a file in there called ‘wt’ or whatever (short for window title!).

In this file put the following:

echo -n “^[]2;${1}^G”

The ^[ and ^G are actually escape characters. In vi these are created by doing ctrl-v escape and ctrl-v ctrl-g respectively. Make this script executable and you can now easily change your PuTTY window titles. I like to alias my favourite terminal commands and wrap this command around them, for example (in my .bashrc):

alias irssi=’wt irssi; pkill irssi ; irssi; wt Wind’

where ‘Wind’ is my regular terminal title.

Hopefully there aren’t too many mistakes here. I guess I’ll find them when I go through this on my desktop at home.

MSI Wind U130

Really enjoying my new netbook. Added a 1GB stick of RAM (1GB is built-in and 2GB is the maximum).

Batteries from the U100 fit just fine. Just need to decide if I’m going to put a decent SSD in it as well.

Apple Tablet News

Merkdot can exclusively reveal that the upcoming Apple tablet will come with an Apple Bluetooth keyboard.

The keyboard will form the protective shell for the tablet and also have a fold out clip that holds the screen so the form factor looks like a laptop.

The reason why the iPhone does not support Bluetooth keyboards is precisely because Apple do not want it to cannibalise sales of the new Tablet.

Blogs

Does anyone do these anymore?

Pondering

I wonder if this generation of gaming will ever stop constantly repeating stuff invented on PS2.