Rants

My apologies for not updating the site as frequently as I wanted to. Some things changed in my life but I'm fairly settled now. I've got a bunch of stuff planned in the future; mostly regarding future site updates. My host (NearlyFreeSpeech) recently added a new site runtime with no per-request memory limits. For those who aren't me, I've been having to hold back on particularly ambitious site functionality because the modules required for that functionality would put me over my request limit. That's going to change in the "24PHP5.4" runtime.

The economics of game development are completely unhinged from the way they're monetized. When you go and buy a game you're told that they're very expensive, that they're going to be $60 (or regional equivalent) a piece and that you should keep hold of them because they are most certainly valuable objects. But the cost to make those copies is actually zero - ever since the beginning of the CD era distribution costs have slowly fell to the point where, with digital distribution, the cost to actually ship a file to your machine with the game on it is on the order of pennies per copy.

Upcoming furvor over the new console hardware has boiled over into the Internet's usual escape resovoirs of arguments and hipster contrarian counter-arguments. Specifically, the idea that console hardware will now attach digital-style, non-transferrable licensing to packaged products, ostensibly to counteract actions on behalf of certain retailers to cut game publishers and developers out of their revenue stream through selling used games. More specifically: screw GameStop, we're not letting you give your games to other people.

The main governing law regarding online services and copyrighted content is the "Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act" (OCILLA), or DMCA Title II, commonly known as "DMCA takedowns". It provides a legal requirement for online services to take down infringing content and ban users who frequently accumulate takedown notices.

There are two incredibly effective marketing techniques both involving the creation of throw-away value propositions to get someone to accept another, related value proposition. The first one is the foot-in-the-door technique, where the throw-away proposition is relatively non-committal, and the related proposition is more involved. The idea is that getting someone to accept the throw-away proposition mentally prepares them to accept the later related one; since the person already has dealt with you, there's less transaction anxiety.

Today, the Kickstarter-funded project "Shadowrun Returns" announced... a modification of sorts to their original project. You see, they had originally promised DRM-free copies of their project as part of their Kickstarter rewards. The key phrase is "DRM-free": Many modern PC game stores - yes, including Steam, this is why people used to HATE Steam - have technologies that allow the owners of those game stores to remotely disable copies of games arbitrarily.

Rupert Murdoch's media empire is on the rampage again about a new tech startup called Aereo. Specifically, how Aereo is eating it's retransmission fees lunch; and how Fox (the affiliate network station, not Fox News Channel) will have to cease over-the-air broadcasts and go cable-only.

So let's talk about HTML5 - the much touted "open web" that kicks proprietary, insecure plugins like Flash, Java, or Silverlight to the curb. Specifically, it adds audio and video handling functionality to the browser specification so that you don't need to use Flash anymore. You just add a <video> tag and bam, you have a functioning video player in your browser. It almost makes handling video and audio in the browser as easy as handling images.

When I started seeing the hashtag "copyreform" trending on Twitter I was... slightly interested. Copyright laws are horribly broken and need to be cut down. Cut down to the point of terminal bleeding. I generally hold an incredibly skeptical view of modern copyright and patent laws - to the point where I think it would be fair to call myself an IP-Skeptic. I'll eludiate as to what that means in another rant.

Yesterday me and a friend (@Stranton on twitter) decided to play the Bitcoin currency arbitrage game. In it we discovered that the primary reason why there is such a wide gap between different exchanges' bid and ask prices is because they have absolutely asinine ways of transferring money between the two.