Recently the games companies have got into a fit about second hand games. They see it as unfair that they take no cut from the sale of such items, whether it be in the local branch of Game or eBay. They have developed a way round this – the online pass. Basically, a new copy of the game ships with a code that allows the player to play online. It might also entitle the user to reduced price or complimentary downloadable content (DLC). All fine and dandy if you bought it new, but if you’re a second hand buyer and you want the same items, you have to purchase a pass for around £6.99.

However, just as the companies have found a way round not getting money from second hand games, the user has found a way round the new charge – they don’t play online. Most of my gaming friends have given up playing online unless it’s against people they know. For many games this is the only rational choice. Why pay £7 or so to play against people that play the game all day and will be way better than you? Personally I’ve found that’s not much fun. In addition to the issues raised in my previous post, the games I do (or have) played online when not being beaten by were spent being shot by members of my own team, or being pushed into a gravel trap by players intent on doing their own thing in a race. So why would I want to pay for that “experience”.

However because there is further cost to the consumer following buying a second hand game, the prices of many of the affected titles has fallen. This means for those that are happy to play games on their own, or with friends that are sat in their living room, gaming is a lot cheaper now. If you get through games quite quickly, then it’s possible to sell a game for the same price you bought it for. So effectively it’s free.

The games companies think that most games are worth upwards of £40. This is probably true in the sense that to pay off all the associated costs and to provide the vendor with a margin, they need to sell for that amount, but that is not the same as the value perceived for the consumer. If you buy new and sell the game to fund the next purchase, your outlay is probably no more than £20 but usually £10. That is the value to the customer. The situation is being further stretched by iPad/iPod games that cost 59p. It all comes down to how much fun you have with a game. Graphics are of a standard now, where mobile phone games are adequate. Console games have hours of cut-scenes that cost a fortune to make , but how many gamers sit through them? How many just hit the start button. From my experience, if a title doesn’t let you skip the story bits, it feel very annoying. I just want to play.

If everything becomes download only, the online pass is moot but then a whole new economic idea will become the norm. The new OnLive system provides unlimited access to hundreds of games for £6.99 a month. You can buy a game for £35, but why would you? It seems to me that is the future. A flat fee for all games, not just individual titles.

It has to be said though, how come the software companies think they should be entitled to a cut of the second hand price? After all, you don’t have to pay Ford when you sell your old Fiesta. They’re doing it, because the technology is now available to allow them to do it. The same happened with music companies that having previously tolerated home-taping, were presented with the idea that by adding DRM to MP3′s they could control the market. And look what’s happened to them…

Basically it’s the same cake as the Daim version but with Toblerone topping. I like Toberlone, so it seemed a good idea. But I found the end result was not as tasty as I’d hoped. It was still very tasty, but the Toblerone didn’t come through as much as I expected. This being the case, I’ll be sticking to the Daim product. But if that’s not available, then I wouldn’t turn this cake down. Overall 7/10.

Soon after Infinity installation, my PS3 enjoyed about 10mb of connection. Faster than it had over BT’s ADSL service or the Sky service I had before that. Gradually though this slowed, to a new low of 256kbs and I was unable to access online gaming. I called Sony and they did all their checks, said they’d give it to 2nd line support who would call back (they never did). I was also tweeting with @BTCare and they directed me to their ‘how to connect to broadband’ help pages. Evidently it was up to me. The signal to the Laptop and the iphone was fine (25mb and 13mb respectively) after much playing around, trying one thing, then another, I’ve discovered the problem is with the ‘Smart Wireless’ system on the BT HomeHub3.

This system analyses the airwaves and selects the best channel number for the WiFi. Trouble is, mine selected 11, which seems to be the one everyone uses. So I’ve reset and fixed it to another channel. The speed on the PS3 has gone up to 11mb. However the speed of the laptop has gone down to 16mb.

Not being satisfied with that, I’ve ordered a 20m ethernet cable from Amazon for the princely sum of £2.84. I’ll hard-wire the PS3, taking it up to the 36mb and put the router back to the Smart setting, so the laptop can increase speed too. Hopefully that will sort everything out.

Being the nature of threads, anyone who is a friend of his can join in. On this occasion, someone I knew from college popped up made a comment which I replied to, saying his view wasn’t the case, he then says I shouldn’t address him because I make his flesh crawl. Naturally I pointed out the feeling was mutual but if he doesn’t want me to address him, then maybe he shouldn’t comment on the thread. So he blocked me. On the basis we never got on, I wasn’t about to send this individual a friend request anyway, so it doesn’t concern me at all that he feels that way, but I am fascinated by such behaviour.

The event struck me as odd and it would only happen online. After all, if it were in a pub, who would go up to a group of people join in the conversation and then when someone replies, tell the other person not to speak directly to them before walking off. That’s just weird. However, such conduct is a product of the internet. We can sit safely at home, knowing that if we want, we can be as rude as we like and no one is about to come round and punch us. Consequence is limited by the ‘threat’ of someone blocking you.

The first fully connected generation is growing up now, what will that do to the social skills of the world? Will rudeness become more acceptable in the physical world? Will the people “brought up properly” be left behind? I think it’ll be fascinating to watch society evolve and with the speed of the net, it will evolve quicker than ever before.

It was coming to the end of my 12 month contract and I was going to re-evaluate the situation, when BT called and offered a free upgrade to Infinity, their new fibre offering. It meant a new 18 month contract, but I don’t see that as too bad a thing. Without being too techy, the broadband speed is increased by using fibre optics to the cabinet in the street instead of using the resistance-heavy copper cable. This doubles the potential maximum speed from 20Mb to 40Mb. However that is still affected by such things as how far away you live from the cabinet and the quality of the interconnects along the way.  Other issues occur when connecting to devices, but I’ll come to that later….

The appointment to fit the new system was only a week after the call, which I thought was quite good considering a friend of mine is having to wait 7 weeks for Sky to move his broadband from his old house to the new. The engineer arrived in the alloted time-slot, fitted a new master socket that has an integral filter and set up the equipment. Previously the HomeHub2 that I had, was a router and phone all in one, but now on my hallway table, there is a DSL modem, a separate HomeHub3 and I have to use my old home phone. So I’ve gone from one plug to three and a table covered in gadgets. I knew this when I signed up, so for me it’s not a problem, but in some ways it’s a disappointment that it’s not an all-in-one unit. However, it may be a problem to you if you’re already strapped for plug sockets near the master socket.

So after the engineer cleared a line fault, packed his things and left, I was able to start testing the speed. According to Speedtest.net (and others) my connection speed on the old system was 14 Mb using a wired connection. I’m about 200m -300m away from the street cabinet and now it’s 31.96 Mb. So that’s not bad and as the line settles down over the next few days that may change slightly. However, I mentioned other issues, didn’t I? Well thanks to the joys of WiFi, which need to encode and decode the signal back and forth, the speeds I get on my devices are as follows: Laptop 16Mb, iPhone varies between 11Mb & 13Mb and my PS3 is reading 10Mb. Interestingly the upload is about the same on each at 8 Mb, which the same again when measured at the router.

This issue is not particular to BT, it affects all WiFi. Things like microwave ovens have an impact on the quality of the signal and it’s worth bearing in mind that if you live in a flat or semi-detached house, it doesn’t have to be your microwave. Indeed anything in the range of the router can affect the signal. It’s this point that is clouding the overall issue of download speeds. It’s often in the news that people don’t get speeds that the ISP promise, whilst this is certainly the case in part, I wonder if people are measuring it over WiFi and not on a wired connection, therfore getting a lower reading than they should. Afterall, the ISP is only responsible for speed until the point it gets to your router, after that demarcation point, anything that goes on is your problem.

So overall, would I recommend BT Infinity? Given that customer service is a big issue for me, I’m happy to pay the extra for a BT service (it should be pointed out the monthly fee for Infinity is the same as I was paying before). The speed is much better than I got before, but realistically as I was getting 20Mb from Sky, the resultant speeds are only a few Mbps faster than I’ve got in the past. That said, for everyday browsing it’s not an issue and only comes into play really when you’re downloading large files. The weekly round of PS3 demos I downloaded this morning were much faster than before. It only took 2 hours to download just over 2.5Gb of data. Last week, that would have taken about 5 hours. So it’s been worth it – especially as it was free to upgrade !

The speeds are a starting point though and like Virgin has with their fibre network (which also only goes as far as a street cabinet – despite the adverts claims), I’m sure it will get faster as technology develops.

In the pilot episode we discover how a son who had moved out of the family home years before has gone back to living with his dad. The mother is not dead, but divorced and so will doubtlessly turn up at some point.

That last sentence might seem a bit cynical but that’s how the programme comes across. The rawness of the original twitter feed has been tempered. The bad language that in the context of quotes was hilarious has been dismissed with and only the remnants are left in the title. The script seems very generic and could be applied to any number of shows. Aside from Shatner’s, the characters (or at least the performances) seem bland and uninteresting. It’s a by-the-numbers show, the laughter seems canned aside from a few glimmers provided by Shatner, there doesn’t seem to be the dark original humour suggested by the original Tweets. It’s obviously written by committee, which isn’t always a bad thing, The Simpsons is written by one person then a group adds stuff in for the final script, but this show seems like they used “Sitcom writing for Dummies” and refuse to deviate from it because “that’s what the book says right here –  stubborn man must always refuse to admit he’s wrong but make up with his son because it’s what he really wants to do”.

Admittedly I’ve only seen the pilot episode, so we’ll see how it goes, but from this evidence the show would have worked much better as a late night programme, leaving in the swearing and humour of the source material. The supporting cast should be made up of distinctive characters in their own right and not just there to make Shatner stand head and shoulders above the rest. In Boston Legal the cast were brilliant and Shatner still shone, so it can be done.

Overall I found the programme, or at least that episode, very disappointing. The reviews on Metacritic gave it a very low 28% rating and I guess that’s why it’s hidden most of the way down the Sky EPG on Five Star. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg_s6aOp23M )

Taken on 26.2.11 by Rob Bullen http://bit.ly/fcZOeE

Last night, along with a lot of the Twitter-propelled population of the UK it seems, I watched the Space Shuttle Discovery and the ISS zoom across the night sky at about 18,000 mph. It’s Discovery’s last flight and it had not long left the ISS for the for final time. Lit up by the sun, two dots in perfect formation moved silently across the cloudless sky.

In a way, the speed they were travelling surprised me. Although it’s obvious that they’re going to zip along if they’re going to orbit the earth every 90 minutes or so, normally the only pictures you see, are from the space station looking down and everything seems so slow and ponderous up there. All you could see with the naked eye was a couple of dots but I couldn’t help wondering if the astronauts were looking at the earth; are they still amazed by it or is it just another part of their daily lives, just as a commuter gets used to the view from the train window and reads the paper instead. I’d like to think they are still blown away by the view.

They’re passing over again tonight. If there’s no clouds, I’ll be staring back at them.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a software update pushed to the device by Amazon. Unlike an iPod, the unit doesn’t need to be attached to a PC, I just turned it on one morning and a notice appeared that a software update was about to happen. A few minutes later it was all done but I did have to re-enter the router password, which wasn’t a big deal but it was an inconvenience.

The unit has only crashed on one occasion. I had downloaded a sample of a book, then deleted it, however whenever I went to one of my purchased books or tried to go to the store, the text from the sample appeared, not the item I was looking for. The old cliché of turning the unit on and off again worked, but it took two or three times to do it.

One word of warning. The Kindle uses the Amazon ’1-click’ payment system instead of the ‘basket’. It’s possible that if you buy 2 or 3 books in quick succession, each individual purchase will go to your bank and may set off their anti-theft system, so that the payments may be blocked. It seems that online thieves often take small amounts as they aren’t usually noticed by the customer. I bought 3 books and payment for the 2nd one failed because it was too soon after the first. News of this was conveyed to me via an email sent to the Kindle itself. I called Amazon to sort it out and the customer service man said “yes, that happens a fair bit”. Happily though it was sorted out quickly.

I think my biggest problem with Kindle is no fault of the unit or Amazon, it’s the price of eBooks. As mentioned in my previous post, in the UK, ebooks are subject to VAT at the current rate of 20%, unlike their physical counterparts. However that doesn’t account for the sometimes 50% extra cost. Next to the price, Amazon write “Prices set by the publisher”, so you’re in no doubt who is to blame. I’ve been a bit cheeky and tweeted a couple of authors asking them to have a word with their publishers – naturally I’ve received no reply ! The good thing is though is that this discrepancy between the formats hasn’t gone unnoticed.

Both the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and the European Commission are investigating the publishers and how the price of ebooks are set. (source: PCPro , Money Saving Expert , Daily Telegraph) Hopefully this means that something will be done about it.

Amazon have a different business model to Apple and their iBooks store. Amazon tries to behave as a normal bookshop does and set the lowest prices they can for the titles. Apple on the other hand, allows the publisher to set whatever price they want, so long as the publisher gives them 30% of the purchase price. It seems to me that the Apple approach can only lead to prices being driven upward. There needs to be competition between the various stores.

One of the attractions for me buying a kindle was the inter-connectedness of my devices. I have Kindle on my PC, my iPhone and of course my Kindle device. In time, I expect I’ll buy an iPad or other tablet and then I can sync up to that device too. However Apple has recently changed it’s terms and conditions for publishers of apps. Previously you would get an app from Apple’s app store (free or paid) and then then the app would either allow you to buy further items from the app store or link to an outside website to allow purchases there. Kindle used the latter. Now Apple has said all content must be purchased through the app store and they want 30% of the purchase price for doing so. Also any content offered must be the same price or lower than elsewhere.

Unsurprisingly, this has upset not just Amazon, but many publishers because it affects magazine and newspaper apps too. The effect is to drive up the price to the publisher and in turn, the consumer. In some cases this means the digital version of the product is now more expensive than than printing it, trucking it to a shop and letting it sit on a shelf until sale. Some publishers have welcomed the move though but these seem to be the ones who can only benefit from being “in the gang” because their sales are so low or they have wider deals going on with Apple.

Anyhoo, after a month and a bit, can I still recommend a Kindle? Yes I can. It’s doing it’s job as described and aside from pricing issues of individual titles, I feel it’s more beneficial to me than buying physical books because it suits the way I am. I like gadgety things and I find it inconvenient to wrestle with physical book or sit in a certain way, so that I can turn the pages. In that way the Kindle is perfect for me. It’s lighter than an iPad and the way it’s used allows you to not be distracted by the chore of having to keep the pages open.  I can’t say I’ve read masses of titles, but the point of buying it was that at least I’d read more and that goal is being achieved. Marvellous.