New Technology

    I was just reading an article about how technology is ruining kids lives.  And I can sympathize with it.  In fact, I think technology is ruining everyone’s lives.
As a society, I believe we’re less patient now.  In the old days we would get our information from weekly or monthly magazines, or even the daily paper.  None of which is updated on the fly.  Now, with web pages, we expect all information to be up to the second.  And when we learn that there’s a new movie being made, we want to see it now, not later.  We torment ourselves reading everything we can about these things and then we bitch mercilessly when they don’t show up.
As an underage boy, back in the day, you had to work at getting a glimpse of a naked woman.  It meant scavenging through your parents room, the garage, the back shed or the workroom looking for your dad’s hidden stash of Playboy’s.  If he didn’t have any, or your parents were divorced and you were living with mom, you had to settle for not-at-all-sexy photos of women in Redbook or Reader’s Digest.  If you were lucky, there was a Vanity Fair laying around.  In a worst case scenario it meant shoplifting  a magazine at the 7-11.
Now, some really raunchy stuff is available just by typing a few letters after everyone has gone to sleep.  Granted, it can be made difficult by putting in a firewall and other parental locks.  Do not make the mistake of underestimating the lengths a pubescent boy will go through to view an image of a naked woman.
As adults we’re not much better off.  You can’t hide dirty pictures on a computer.  Not from your wife or girlfriend.  The woman you thought was incompetent with computers will, somehow, manage to become intimate with keyloggers, web browser caches, temporary files, and undeleting programs.  And she’ll still refer to the act of completely erasing a hard drive and re-installing the operating system as “rebooting.”  Just to annoy you.
Why do I never use my name on my blogs?  Because a potential employer might look it up and get offended by something I say, or a picture I post, and not hire me.  Worse, I may get fired.  It used to be that what you did in your non-work time was your own — not anymore.  Now, if you have a public web page you are open to scrutiny by anybody and everybody.  Is that really a good thing?  Just as you’re checking up on what your new girlfriend is doing on MySpace or Facebook or Zango or whatever, so too, are they doing the same to you.
Remember making all those prank calls?  With caller ID you can get yourself in trouble.  Big trouble.  Did you do something stupid at that party?  No problem, no one will remember and it will be forgotten.  Except that someone took a picture of you with their cellphone and uploaded it their web page.  You really like that girl/guy you went out with but you made some not-so-nice comments on your web page about them.  Uh oh.
Yeah, so while technology has helped us out a lot (like putting TV’s in refrigerators so you don’t have to skip Oprah while cooking) it’s also put a big crimp in a lot of lifestyles.

A Plea For Sanity — Copy Protection in the PC Gaming Arena

    A long time ago, before home computers were considered “PC’s,” games were coming out.  On tape, cartridge, or disk, they all had one thing in common: even in this primitive age, they were being pirated.  Copied.  Stolen, if you will.

Over the years many methods of preventing piracy have been tried.  Codes, printed on funny colored paper so they couldn’t be photocopied, typing in a word from a manual, code wheels, dongles, bad sectors on disks.  All of these had several things in common: things got lost, couldn’t be easily seen anyway, and they were all bypassable.  Every single one.  None of them worked.  Not even for stopping casual piracy.  They only thing they ever did was inconvenience the person who paid money for their game.

Sam, at one point, had bought a game.  She brought it home, installed it, and immediately ran into a problem: the game said that she was running an illegal copy, which she wasn’t.  After doing a search on the internet and calling the company that made the game she found out that the copy protection was not compatible with her CD-ROM.

She now had a choice: buy a new CD-ROM drive, which would bring the cost of the game up from $40 to $70 or more, or get one of the copy protection bypass cracks on the internet for free.  Not only would it be free, but if she got the crack then she wouldn’t need to hunt down the CD and keep it in the drive to play the game.

Needless to say, she installed the crack and was quite happy.  Until it dawned on her, that she could have gotten the entire game that way.  She wouldn’t have wasted time and money trying to figure out why it didn’t work and then fixing it herself.  Download and play.  In the future, when buying add ons for this particular game, she never bothered paying for it first.  Who suffered for it?  Sam, who plays the game for free without any worries about what works or doesn’t, or the company who released it and is now out quite a bit of money?

Let’s think of this another way.  You go to buy a new car.  The car has several anti-theft devices.  You need to insert your computer chipped key, scan your fingerprint, do a retina scan, and then keep your hands on the wheel at all times so the built in palm print reader verifies that you own the car.  Or, you can steal a car that had all of these features disabled except for a key and locks.  And you’ll never get caught for stealing it.  Which one would you be tempted to go for?

Copy protection has never worked in the past and it’s likely that it will never work in the future.  When copy protection gets more advanced it doesn’t deter people from trying to break the protection, it spurs them on even more because it’s a challenge to be met.  To top it off, copy protection is not free.  You pay for it because it’s included in the price of the game.

Would it be better to get rid of copy protection and lower the price of the games?  People that pirate games will always do so.  It wouldn’t matter to them if it was affordable or not.  But there are people out there that like to pay for what they have.  Would it make a difference to keep those customers instead of making it harder for them to use what they pay for and making them feel like they should be copying the software just to make life easier?

I am not saying that people should illegally copy games.  I’m not advocating piracy.  But I am saying that there comes a point where you just have to realize that making your paying customers life more difficult is not going to stop piracy.  It’s never going to stop as long as there’s a reason to do it.  This applies to video, audio and games.

Self Checkout

There used to be a commercial a few years ago that had a guy walking around a grocery store and stuffing his coat full of goodies.  You were meant to believe that he was a shoplifter but, when he walked out the door, it was shown that he was a customer taking advantage of some new technology that allowed his items to be scanned and purchased without going through a register.  I don’t remember who the commercial was for but it sounds like a neat idea.
But…  How would you buy produce that was required to be weighed?
We’re not quite there, yet, but there are many stores now that have self checkouts.  While I’ve grown up in the computer age and can adapt quite easily to new technology as it shows up, I find myself not liking these things at all.  I usually have problems of some kind as I use them.  I don’t always know where the problem is when the system demands that I call for assistance.  Most of the time it appears to come with the bagging.  These systems don’t like it when you remove the bag from the area, and they certainly don’t like it when you have something that’s too big to fit in a bag.
They also mean less jobs for cashiers.  Another problem I see is that, since they have less cashiers and many people don’t like the self-checkouts, that there are longer lines when you want to deal with a human.  Combine this with only one person to help with the check outs that go awry, and you’re looking at an increased time trying to check out.
All in all, I think they are quite a nuisance, except when you’ve only got one or two items you need to purchase.

It’s been a long, long time

It appears I have totally forgotten about this place again. But that can be good! We’ll see. I like WordPress, even if it looks like I lost the ability to change the font. Easily, anyway. I’ll look at that later.

For instance, I can re-hash the whole trip to Kwik-E-Mart, thing. That’s always a crowd pleaser, except for the people that couldn’t get to one. I suppose there’s quite a lot of things. But, now is not the time. As always.