Ars Technica talks about how the fast pace of firmware releases for the Playstation 3 adds to the frustration of casual gamers. Being forced to update your system once per week or so makes people pissed off, and it’s worse for those who only play once in a while because it’s more likely that they will need to go through that every single time. I had a PS3 and I sold it for different reasons — I only used it as a Blu-ray player, as I prefer playing on the Xbox 360 — but I can talk about another, even worse, frustrating thing about Sony’s console: forced installation.
Category: Technology
Like many others, my iPhone 3G is suffering a bit since I upgraded it to iOS 4. While version 4.0.1 apparently helped a little, even though it only officially delivered the reception bar tweak, it seems to have made my phone slightly snappier. It’s still far from how it felt with iPhone OS 3.2, though.
On this blog post (in Italian), Giovanni Fontana wonders why cars still have a cigarette lighter instead of standard power sockets. Most people, he argues, need to connect portable devices to charge than to light up cigarettes, and sockets should at least be an optional replacement for the standard cigarette lighter. Moreover, he continues, the current situation is as weird as having a house full of cigarette lighters requiring an adapter to connect electric devices: wouldn’t it be more logical, he postulates, to have standard sockets requiring an adapter to have a cigarette lighter?
I have recently gone back to IRC — specifically Freenode — and among the delicious problems of the old days, such as the inability to easily establish DCC transfers (more on that later), I have been presented with the inevitable ident check delay during the connection to server. Ident is essentially a protocol that lets the server know what user is effectively connecting from the client machine. It can be very handy, but most people are behind NAT and/or do not run any ident daemon. This translates to a delay while the server patiently waits for an ident reply before giving up and adding a tilde to the username in the hostmask, which effectively means “this user claims to be called foobar, but I could not verify it.” In practice, this doesn’t change anything at all.
Unlike Steve Jobs, who claims that Blu-ray is a bag of hurt, I think that Blu-ray is great. I’ll take instant 1080p24 at 40-45 MBps over 720p at 10 MBps without hesitation. In fact, I had originally bought a Playstation 3 mostly as a Blu-ray player rather than as a gaming rig, and I recently sold that in order to get a simpler yet stand-alone player. It supports BD profile 2.0, so it can do all the fancy things such as downloading material off the internet, provide real-time updates about the characters of the movie you’re watching (if the disc supports that, of course) and so on. Everything is great on paper, but falls short in practice. The reason? It’s slow. Really, really slow. And this is not just about my Samsung player, because the PS3 did the very same thing. Something is inherently wrong with BD-J. Certainly processing power…
Here is what I was thinking: you can get a digital 3D scan of your skull through a CAT/CT scan, which is essentially a series of 2D scans stacked one on top of the other. You can also print things in 3D these days, using one of various technologies available industrially. Considering you can pay a company to sequence your own DNA for less than $500, why hasn’t anybody come up with a business plan to make a model of your own skull? After all, most dentists will let you keep the “model” of your teeth after they are done with the impression.
I just came across an insane code snippet to validate e-mail addresses, apparently derived from RFC 822. It is in the form of a Perl module that can be downloaded at http://www.ex-parrot.com/pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html. The Perl code is intertwined with just a little bit of regexp hell, and looks as follows: (?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:(?:(?:[^()<>@,;:\\”.\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t] )+|\Z|(?=[\[“()<>@,;:\\”.\[\]]))|”(?:[^\”\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*”(?:(?: \r\n)?[ \t])*)(?:\.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\”.\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:( ?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\[“()<>@,;:\\”.\[\]]))|”(?:[^\”\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*”(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*))*@(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\”.\[\] \000-\0 31]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\[“()<>@,;:\\”.\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\ ](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)(?:\.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\”.\[\] \000-\031]+ (?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\[“()<>@,;:\\”.\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?: (?:\r\n)?[ \t])*))*|(?:[^()<>@,;:\\”.\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z |(?=[\[“()<>@,;:\\”.\[\]]))|”(?:[^\”\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*”(?:(?:\r\n) ?[ \t])*)*\<(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:@(?:[^()<>@,;:\\”.\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\ r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\[“()<>@,;:\\”.\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)(?:\.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\”.\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n) ?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\[“()<>@,;:\\”.\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t] )*))*(?:,@(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\”.\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\[“()<>@,;:\\”.\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])* )(?:\.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\”.\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t] )+|\Z|(?=[\[“()<>@,;:\\”.\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*))*) *:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)?(?:[^()<>@,;:\\”.\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+ |\Z|(?=[\[“()<>@,;:\\”.\[\]]))|”(?:[^\”\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*”(?:(?:\r \n)?[ \t])*)(?:\.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\”.\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?: \r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\[“()<>@,;:\\”.\[\]]))|”(?:[^\”\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t ]))*”(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*))*@(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\”.\[\] \000-\031 ]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\[“()<>@,;:\\”.\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\]( ?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)(?:\.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\”.\[\] \000-\031]+(? : (?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\[“()<>@,;:\\”.\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(? :\r\n)?[ \t])*))*\>(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)|(?:[^()<>@,;:\\”.\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(? : (?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\[“()<>@,;:\\”.\[\]]))|”(?:[^\”\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)? [ \t]))*”(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)*:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:(?:(?:[^()<>@,;:\\”.\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\[“()<>@,;:\\”.\[\]]))|”(?:[^\”\r\\]| \\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*”(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)(?:\.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<> @,;:\\”.\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\[“()<>@,;:\\”.\[\]]))|” (?:[^\”\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*”(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*))*@(?:(?:\r\n)?[…
Every now and then, we hear news that someone around the globe has ruined his or her life by playing video games. It appears to be a big problem, to the point that the American Medical Association had considered adding it to the next edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The idea was then put on hold because more research was needed.
But are video games addictive? Are some people more likely to be unable to stop playing? And when should playing video games be considered an addiction? Let’s try to answer those questions.
The research company Ipsos ran a poll in the UK, and found out that “64 per cent of the users polled would rather have games on physical discs, while only 25 per cent would prefer digital copies”. The survey involved “over 1,000 Internet users aged between 15 and 50.” A detailed article about the findings is available at THINQ.
Such results do not surprise me in the slightest. I am a casual gamer, in that I usually buy a game every couple of months or so, and I usually purchase them from the UK, where they are much cheaper than in Italy. The reason I do that is that, since I never get games that have been just released, having to wait a week for the delivery is not a big deal. Savings versus instant gratification. (Disclaimer: that may not be the fact when GTA V comes out. Can’t help it.)