Diablo 3 came out today, as one of the single most-anticipated sequels since Starcraft 2. Wait, wasn’t that the…yeah. Same company. Blizzard made great games. Then they made World of Warcraft, and the cash cow that it is. Obviously they want to build on that, and fans have been clamoring for new updates to the games they liked more than Warcraft. However, the model has changed. What started out (when WoW first got popular) as disc-based games has moved to online distribution. Now, I’m totally not opposed to online distribution, it’s much greener and just better altogether (I say get rid of all optical media period, but that’s another story). However, with all good systems, there are problems. Pre-loading games before they’re released is a thing now, with online activation the minute it goes live. That’s really kinda neat. When the servers aren’t overloaded. Also, in order to play either Starcraft 2 or Diablo 3 ‘offline’ you have to go online once to activate. Oh, and to get in, even offline, requires a Battle.Net username/password. Um. No. I don’t want to have to sign in to use a game.

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m not a big fan of online multiplayer. Never have been. Yes, back in ‘the day’, I used to do modem-to-modem calls to play original Starcraft and Warcraft with people, but those were people I met in real-life first. In college, I did partake in a LAN party or two. Those were fun too, because they were in the same room or at least in the same dorm as me. I tried WoW. I did. Tried Anarchy Online. Tried EVE Online. Not a one of them I stuck with. Couldn’t do the MMO. Starcraft 2 is inundated with players who have way more time than I have to play, so that’s not fun, and I have now zero skills in that game. I love playing multiplayer on my PS3 and Xbox360…when there are others in the room I’m playing with. That’s much more fun to me. Honestly, one of the highlights of my bachelor party was a big ‘ol Halo 2 deathmatch and 4 person Halo Reach Co-Op. That was fun.

I digress. Diablo started out as a single player game, and grew online, where you could go out hunting with friends, and still keeps that. It’s actually pretty neat, as other people’s characters can join yours in your quest at random. However, I like it as an option, and not a requirement. Yes, I can play offline, but according to Blizzard “Why would you want to do that?” Um. Because I don’t want to be distracted by chat or other things, and maybe I want to care about the story? Online gaming in Diablo 3 is all but a requirement, and while I get that that is where the gaming industry is going, I don’t necessarily agree. What if people want to preload a game, but don’t have the greatest Internet connection (read: satellite or long-haul DSL)? If that was me, I’d leave my pc on for the 4-5 days it would take to load the software, then take it offline to play.

I hear the argument now ‘PIRACY WILL ABOUND!’ Actually, no. License keys do work, and if you said “Hey, we’re giving you your license key now, but we need to do a small check-in with the server to make sure you can use that key and it’s valid when you use it”, I’d be cool with that. Want to try it out before you buy? Do the same thing, and say you have X amount of time until it goes lockdown, either in play-time or number of days of use. People are becoming amazingly honest when it comes to these things, and pirate media/software when there are issues with this. Music piracy has largely dissipated with services like Spotify and Rdio. Why pirate when you can get everything for a small fee? I find new music 2 ways, through some random Spotify playlists I subscribe to and via Pandora, which always gives me something new that I tend to like. Adobe, with the idea of a monthly subscription for access to its premier photo/video editing tools is actually pioneering the idea of pay-per-use software. It’s brilliant because I can’t think of how many times I’ve wanted a specific Photoshop thing, but don’t want to plunk down the kidney it costs (yes, I like the Gimp for what I get with it, but I was proficient in Photoshop first, and I find it easier to use). Why is movie/tv piracy at an all-time high? Because of people like the HBO Exec who thinks it’s a ‘fad’. If it’s a fad, then why are more and more people subscribing to lesser and lesser Cable/Satellite packages (subscriptions are not down, but they’re not paying for the entire package anymore)? I saw the Avengers in theaters not because I didn’t want to pay for it, but because I’m more than willing to see a few bucks go Joss Whedon’s way for more of his work. Last movie I saw in theaters? Pretty sure it was Inception. If I even watch 1 movie or 2-3 episodes of a TV show, Netflix has paid for itself that month. People are willing to pay for content, provided it’s available, good, and fast. Is it for everyone? No. Unfortunately, until they have high-speed broadband in the middle of a Nebraska corn field, it can’t be for everyone. I think if I didn’t have access to high-speed broadband, and had to buy a disc for the game, I’d be very unhappy with having any online requirements to use something I bought in a store. 

I’ve had the fortune(?) of having both an Android and an iPhone for the past 6 months. It’s about that time that I tend to review the state of the mobile world, because things get updated or at least released to the masses right about then. I’ve started to notice a growing disparity between the two platforms. One, continuing to rise and utterly shatter expectations, the other trying to play catch-up constantly, never really getting a foothold. If you picked iOS as the former, and Android as the latter, you’re right on target. Let’s take a deeper look though.

Operating System

There are 3 major versions of Android currently in production: Gingerbread, Honeycomb, and Ice Cream Sandwich (2.3, 3.x, and 4.x respectively). For iOS, there are 2, 4.x and 5.x.* I’d wager that 75% of all devices are running the lowest production version of Android, and the latest version of iOS. In fact, most devices running 2.3 can’t get ICS. This is a bit of a problem, from a developer standpoint. You can’t develop for the current generation of devices, you always have to develop an app for the lowest common denominator, and a lot of times that means not being able to use functionality you have in newer versions. Can you have different builds of the product with 3 branches for each code revision? Absolutely. But try telling a one-person software company that. There’s a huge amount of overhead for each revision, and you can introduce bugs in one version, but not others. It’s simply not practical. This is why iOS has such a high update rate. When they update the software, everyone gets it, but not all functions are activated. Now yes, you can do the same thing as with Android and multiple versions, but realistically there’s no need. If you want to support a set of hardware, you use that generation’s major revision. Does this play into the fact that Apple has 1 hardware vendor in themselves and Google has lots of them with hundreds of different devices? Absolutely. I’ve said from day 1 that the reason iOS and Mac OS X work great is because Apple develops both. This is why the Xbox is better than the PS3. Sony is a hardware company. Microsoft is building both, and it works. It’s taken a long time for Microsoft to realize this, and they really are in the hardware business now on PC’s, defining the specs for what you need. Yes, you can pick your own parts, but they set a reference to what the optimal is and go from there. Everyone else falls into place. 

Apps, the Backbone of a Mobile OS

This is where iOS goes in for the kill, as I sort of foreshadowed to in the end of the last paragraph. Why are there so many damn apps in the App Store? Because they’re easy to churn out for any iDevice. Period. I’m not saying developing an app is difficult; I’m doing it myself and it’s damn hard. Or at least the idea is. I digress, though. You have to develop once, and it’s on every single iDevice there is. iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch. It scales, and you can even put in your code how the iPad version looks different. On Android, you can develop for all 3 major platforms, but there is a big shift between 2.3 and 3.x. Mostly that the latter is tablet only, and requires a certain screen size. ICS looks to unify the OS, similar to iOS, but realistically, that will never happen. There’s too many players in the game for that to work. Also, people have developed their apps in such a way that the Google Play Store (yes, it’s really called that now) has 3 versions of the same thing but you only see the one you can get. Programatically, it’s much easier to develop on Android because it’s Java, and lots of people know Java. And the memory leak the size of a Mack Truck in it. iOS is much harder, using Objective-C, a derivitave of C++, Java, and C# to make a very strange looking, but actually practical language. Also, when looking for Apps in the stores, there’s vastly different functionality. Example: Agilebits 1Password Mobile. I love 1Password on my Mac. Awesome password manager that integrates into my browsers.** Windows version works exceedingly well at reading my info from my shared 1Password library. Yes, I keep it on Dropbox, but realistically, it’s encrypted. I’m not worried about them breaking in. Android is a read-only app. iOS? Read-Write capable. This is huge. When you’re dealing with passwords, and trying to generate new ones to keep in an archive, the ability to read/write is key. If you can’t write, you can’t make changes when you find out something’s gone wrong. Or what if you need to generate a password and you’re not at your computer? Can’t do that in read-only mode. This shows the parity of the 2 markets. You can get 1 flavor in one market, and a different experience in the other.

Windows Phone

Why don’t I talk about the resurgence of Windows Phone in this? Really, it’s a niche player. It’s great for getting into smartphones, but once you touch an Android or iPhone, you realize the power it has. Hands down.

Overall

I could go on. Really I could, but I’d be wasting your time. I won’t tell you what to get. If you want a keyboard, congratulations, you’re getting a Droid. Want something pretty? One word: Resolutionary. (If you didn’t get iPhone from that, you need to crawl out from that rock, take it to Apple, and tell them that that’s a very bad word, and should never be used again. Really.) Am I biased to one versus the other, absolutely. Not because I love Apple or hate Google, but because it’s functionally better. It’s not an “It just works” thing, it functionally works better than Android, with less frills and things. I find myself groaning when I have to use my Android because it doesn’t work well. I’ve rooted it, put on custom roms, the whole 9 just to get it working better for me. It really isn’t worth the pain. I haven’t jailbroken my iPhone because it doesn’t need it. I’m all for the maker ethic: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. I like to add: If it already works well, there’s no need to open it. You already own it.

*Note that I’m not counting minor versions, because they generally don’t involve major OS changes. Gingerbread is an exception because of the way Android was version numbered and named. Google has since changed to doing names for major versions with the release of Honeycomb and ICS.

**Seriously, I love this program. I used to use LastPass, and trusted it to the cloud, but there’s something I couldn’t place as to why I didn’t like it as much. 1Password does so much more, and just works that much better. https://agilebits.com/onepassword Get it.

“The new iPad”. Screw version numbers, who cares. Know what version Microsoft Office is at? 14. Anyone care? No. OS X? 10.8, right? Thought it was Mountain Lion or some other big cat.

I said 2 years ago that the iPad was going to take over our lives, and lo and behold, I was right. For once. Apple and other mobile device companies are putting more and more into these mobile devices and it’s outright ridiculous. Tegra 3 has 12 (12!) GPU’s on it. That’s crazy. All of these tablets are almost as powerful as laptops; we’re slowly seeing the death of the laptop as we know it. People more and more are moving to tablets as their mobile computing, and rightfully so. With apps like iWork and Google Docs becoming more and more functional on a tablet, we’re seeing a migration to more mobile devices. I don’t think they’ll replace cell phones just yet, because we still have the handset concept of a phone ingrained in our mentality as compared to a headset or headphones. Desktops will always still exist, simply because nothing beats a large display for working on things like large spreadsheets, graphics, and other very interactively visual media. Same with video games, just substitute desktop with console and vise versa. Can you do all of the above on a tablet? Yes. Should you? No. Do you really want to? Try it out. Honestly. Think about what you want out of the experience. If it makes sense to you, then go for it. If not, don’t.

Every day, we start to see glimpses of the mythical “tomorrow”. As science-fiction becomes science-reality, we begin to understand what those before us thought, and make our own science-fiction. Smartphones are slowly becoming the “tricorder” of Star Trek lore, a device that can process huge amounts of information about an object/environment and give us answers as to what is going on. It’s no surprise that early cell-phones were based on the visual design of Star Trek communicators. (please excuse all the Star Trek references, it’s one of the best analogies for this)

However, there’s one small thing. I still want my flying car dammit. Getting closer, but still: No. Flying. Cars.

Backup. They say once you lose data, you never forget to backup your computer. Having been there, that’s so true. I’m not religious about it, though I probably should be. Thankfully, Time Machine on my Mac makes it easy. Plug a drive in, tell it to use it for backup, and go. Not difficult at all. It’s best when the drive is plugged in 24/7 so that it can do hourly snapshots of the changes, but on a laptop, it’s not practical. Also, it’s great to have a “cold” backup, one that’s not touched in forever. Corporate IT folks have known this for years, have a copy locally and remotely in case of disaster. However, most people can’t afford to have a hard-drive in, let’s say, a safety deposit box gathering dust only to be taken out quarterly or yearly for a backup. So what about CrashPlan or Carbonite? They’re two of the most popular online backup places, but can you really trust your life offsite? Mind you, you’re paying for the privilege to have them back up your entire computer. Cost-wise, it’s way cheaper than a safety deposit box with a hard drive, but you’re trusting your data to someone else. Yes, I know, there’s encryption and procedures in place to prevent them accessing your data without infringing on privacy and all, but in my experience, you have to have total and unrestricted access to the data in order to restore something. If you need to get a file, the system gets it for you, but if you need the company’s support, you have to give them access to your private data. Me? I don’t want that. I like my offsite copy, but with a laptop, that’s called home. With a desktop, the drive and the safety deposit box makes more sense.

Here’s the other thing: most backup software gets 3 things: Your Files, Your Programs, Your Operating System. In this day and age, your files are on usually a USB stick/Dropbox/what-have-you to be easily accessible from any computer. Your applications are becoming more and more resilient to backup with the advent of the “app store” for computers from Apple, Linux (apt-get and yum package managers)*, and soon Microsoft with Windows 8. It’s really easy to restore an app, and settings are kept with your files for the most part. As for the Operating system, that’s also getting easier. Apple’s Lion is distributed over the Internet for the most part via download, and Microsoft is preparing to distribute Windows 8 the same way. Restore will work the same way, and Microsoft in Windows 8 is going to allow you to basically do a quick OS restore back to factory. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge advocate of backing up files, but you don’t need to do a lot to keep a second copy of your data. Use what you have, and remember: Backup what you need, not what you’d like to have. Having a copy of your 100 gigs of music is nice, but not necessary if you subscribe to Spotify, Rdio, Pandora, etc. You can’t re-create your own pictures, you can re-create things others have made.

* Yes, I know apt-get and yum predate any app store, and isn’t really an store you can browse for software, but the concept of pre-built software packages that are being distributed is the same. Also, Ubuntu re-packages apt-get as the Ubuntu Software Center, which is their idea of an app store, so I’m still right, even if I’m only picking the single most popular distribution of Linux.

No, this isn’t about the movie that I still, for some reason or another, haven’t seen yet. It’s about Facespace, Tweeter and the other fun things we call social networks. I went through and pared down my “likes” in Facebook, and realized one key thing: I use it to message people, and look at pictures of my niece. That’s it. If I care about hearing it, I hear it on Twitter. Simple text, with a few photos. Yes, my blog is at Tumblr, but I see that differently, since I use it (and many others do) as either extended-form Twitter or a straight-up blog. Now yes, I do use Instagram for photos and things as well, but everything feeds back into my Twitter. The people I want to follow, including the things I like to follow are there, and everything else that’s nice is. Google+ is going nowhere, and I just can’t stand Facebook. Part of the problem is that you need special apps to tell people “I’m listening to this” or “I’m playing that”. Makes life difficult, but in the end everything can talk to each other.

I think a lot of what makes TwitterFaceSpace popular is the fact that it’s like college. You and your friends spend an ungodly amount of time in a shared space (in my case it was our suite), and you basically know when and what everyone has done. Now that we’ve all graduated and moved to the 4 corners, it’s our way of making what we had possible again. Don’t get me wrong, I like it. It’s just that it’s gotten a tad unmanageable, and when you sit and look at it, you just go “damn, do I really need to look at all of this information?” Yes, the social networks are good for talking to friends, and making sense of what is going on in the world, but now that people are actually using it to advertise, communicate, and promote their art (of all varieties, music, theater, visual, food, etc) it has gotten to the point where we can start to have information overload. 

I’m not cynical about this, I swear. In fact, I think I’ve found the sweet spot. Path. Look it up on your iPhone and Android. It’s a great little app, and designed for your best friends, your inner circle. It lets the people you want to know what’s going on and where you are, and everything else TwitterFaceSpace can do. Except it can also post there for your more public things. That and it’s pretty. Yes, my runs from RunKeeper won’t be there and such, but that’s fine. It’s about where I am and what I’m doing, clean and clear.

Final note: Thanks Internet for helping kill SOPA/PIPA. Job’s not done, but at least we can relax for a bit. Blog restored to normal.

For those unaware, or just plain slow, the US Government is working on legislation to effectively censor the Internet. Basically being “big brother” and only allowing what the government wants you to see. This blog? Gone. YouTube? Effectively shut down.

Starting today, Jan 14, and continuing thru Jan 24, visitors will be presented with the SOPA/PIPA Approved version of Technology Op-Ed. Want to keep reading my usually biased and pretty out-there opinions? Go to EFF.org or AmericanCensorship.org and write/call/just-short-of-harass your Representative and Senators to shut this down.

Special thanks to Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, whom I’ve written to more times in the past. I got a personal message explaining her opinion on the matter. Whether it was written by her or a staffer is regardless, I got a personal message and a willingness to understand the issue from a constituent. I may not agree with everything, but a willingness to listen is a good start.

And also, here’s an obscene gesture for Rep. Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland District 6. I received an e-mail back basically saying, “My opinions are on the website. Thanks”. Rep. Bartlett, you suck. You have never ever worked hard for anyone in Western Maryland and Frederick. You do what you want, whether or not it’s good for the people you represent. I can’t wait to vote you out of office in November, because guess what? You suck.

Ok. Doing public resolutions this year. Maybe I’ll actually keep to them. Here we go:

1. Keep the blog rolling. Try to write once a week. Review things that matter.
2. Play more video games. I wrote a blog post on Giant Bomb and it got 40 comments from the vibrant community there. I might have to do more with that.
3. Lose some weight. Seriously, I want to get back to where I was my freshman year of college, and that was 10 years ago. I can do this.
4. Have fun with things. Prime of life, right now both in age, and the world we live in. Just go for it.

Good luck in 2012 all!

As I have done in years past, I’m doing a personal/public year in review. I realize that not everyone wants to read this every year, so it’s under a “read more” link. Want to read more, follow down the hole…

2011 started out pretty strongly. My niece arrived just after the start, and flows to being you’re told “Hi, we’re selling the house you’re renting, wanna buy?” and then told “We’re not selling, you good for another year?” Being a first-time homebuyer is scary, but through the insane odds (finding a place and closing by April 10 when you start Feb 1), we (my wife and I) managed to do it. Me 1 - IRS 0. As if that wasn’t crazy enough, I finished my Masters, and had the 2nd half of what I’m considering my quarter-life crisis. Do I stay at the current job, or use the degree to upgrade. Student Loans 60 - Me 0. Turns out doing the latter would be harder, but the payoff has been stellar. I have more time to do the things I want to do, and relax. Time 0 - Me 60. Then it was the run-up to the wedding, and just knocking life out of the park. Me 2 - IRS 0 (sorry, no trifecta). For many it has been a bad year, others a good year. I’m not gonna lie, I had a great year. So many good things happened, and I’ll even admit, it’s going to be hard to top. But I think with the work I’ve put into the world, I kinda deserved some payoff. With that, I leave with a quote from the late Steve Jobs.

If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better as the years roll on.

Thanks for reading, and here’s to a good 2012, provided the world doesn’t “end”. 

So way back in June, I sold the AppleTV (gen 1) and picked up a Logitech Revue. In concept, it’s great. In practice, well, it got better. The 1.0 version had some issues, and within 2 months, I had installed the leaked beta of 3.1 (Honeycomb). This is where things got better. The UI got out of the way, and Chrome actually worked. Logitech finally just got around to releasing the production version, and it’s much improved on the beta and rc versions I’ve played with. Youtube works much better, and a lot of the known bugs in the pre-releases were fixed. In addition, the addition of the Android Market has made it much easier for me to install good apps. Just last night, I threw on a “yule log” app that played soft jazz in the background with soothing rain (both if I wanted it on, I ended up turning off the rain). Sports scores pop up, and tell me when there’s a good game on and what channel it’s on.

However, there are issues. The primary controller is a keyboard, and it really should be a remote. Also, and I realize it’s in its infancy, the app store doesn’t have a lot of content-provider apps. Here’s my biggest issue. Logitech is no longer supporting/selling the Revue. I don’t know where Sony stands, but this is a big blow to the system. It does have promise, but without hardware it will die. It’s an addition to live tv, not a replacement. I know that there’s a lot of TV that we watch that isn’t online or available to stream/download. And let’s not talk about the days we’ll just leave Food Network or some other channel that’s doing a marathon on and just let it go. You can’t do that with a streaming box. Literally.

Maybe one day we’ll be able to cut the cord, but for the foreseeable future, the answer is no. The GTV is working great now, but I don’t have many downloads to use it with, and there’s still a few places that I’m waiting on an app for (see HBO GO). When the GTV gets old in the tooth (or just fails), maybe someone will find a way to use the full computer inside for something else. Either that, or a Boxee Box or WDTV Live is in my future…

I’ve been using OpenDNS since it came on the scene back in 2006. Seriously, I’ve been using it forever. Their idea was a alternative DNS provider that cached major name servers (the thing that translate www.google.com to an IP address) would be faster than the traditional server infrastructure for it (you go to a server, and if it doesn’t have an entry, it goes up the chain to the root servers, and then down to the name server its hosted on). Since then, they’ve never been quite willing to sit still, and have continued to change the internet landscape since. First was DNS-o-Matic, a way to update dynamic DNS providers with your home IP address for “call home” products. Then, with the major DNS vulnerability found in 2009, they found that their service was already invulnerable to the attack because of how they cached the records and things I can’t even explain. What this also did is show us a big problem with our internet infrastructure. We can secure websites and transactions, but not the actual getting of the IP, and you can be redirected to places where you can have your identity stolen, et al. Well, that’s not good, is it now? So the fine folks at OpenDNS created DNSCrypt. The idea is a secure DNS client that encrypts the traffic between you and their servers. Today, it was released as public beta for Mac users, and the code has been open-sourced for intrepid developers. The code compiles and runs on *nix, and there is a Windows client in development. I had the pleasure of using the private beta, and helping them shape the product to come. It worked great, and if you have a Mac, it makes it more secure (as if you weren’t already!). In addition, I felt more secure when I was in a hotel recently for my wedding. I didn’t have to worry about the hotel changing where I wanted to go at all. The product will only get better, and I hope it becomes a standard that all OS vendors implement in their core.

[1] http://www.opendns.com/about/announcements/273