On January 9th, I set up my blog to only accept authenticated comments, as described in this blog post.
Unfortunately, the net effect is that the number of comments on my blog has gone down greatly, even though the number of readers has gone up. I’m not happy with that, so I’ve gone back to moderating comments by hand and manually filtering out the comment spam Movable Type isn’t catching.
Via Todd Bishop of the Seattle Post Intelligencer, I read a very interesting article by Alex St. John on Gamasutra.com. In this article, entitled Vista Casts A Pall On PC Gaming, Alex writes that the combination of Vista’s security changes and the parental controls in the Gaming Center will have a chilling effect on the adoption of casual PC games:
One of the pieces of information a game has to supply to register with Game Explorer is a ESRB rating. Games that do not supply a rating will be subject to the “Not Rated” parental control setting. Since games are “trusted” to supply accurate ratings information, one might expect that they are also trusted to handle parental messaging themselves. Not so, any game that registers with Game Explorer becomes “subject” to Vista parental controls which will proceed to block the game from running and offer to delete the link to the game if you try to run it from anywhere on the system other than within the Game Explorer.
The heavy handed implementation of parental controls presents several problems for PC game developers. First, most free family and casual games are “unrated” because the ESRB rating service, designed for multimillion dollar boxed titles, is too expensive for most small casual game developers. Any parent concerned enough about the games their kids are downloading online to use Vista’s parental control system are likely to block “unrated” content and break most family appropriate content that can be found online. Note that Vista’s parental control system does not apply to web games and is not accessible from the browser so parents who expect them to protect their kids from “all” online game content may be in for a shock.
The bottom line of all this is that the idea of just trying out a casual Windows game on Vista is gone. Alex says he can’t speculate on what Microsoft was thinking, and I won’t try. I will point out that the obvious solution to the problem is to make your games web-based using Flash – the problems Alex complains about only effect games written to the Windows APIs that need to be installed locally. Longer term, Apollo will let you bring those games to the desktop as well.
[Update 1-17-2006] GigaGamez has a good followup article on the story, where an anonymous Microsoft executive says:
“It’s unfortunately a mercenary way of doing things,” a Microsoft executive tells GameDaily, explaining why indy/casual developers are receiving less support. “Certainly we want Blizzard’s ‘World Of Warcraft’ to work flawlessly on day one of Vista because 8 million tech support calls would be a very bad thing. The casual developers don’t sell quite as many.”
That’s pretty sad, and shortsighted to boot.
The iPhone is everywhere in the news these days. Like everyone, I enjoyed watching the announcements and think Steve Jobs did his usual brilliant job of pitching it. There are some curious omissions, though:
But enough about the iPhone’s limitations. I still want one!
But there’s a deeper, more disturbing undercurrent I noticed in yesterday’s announcements that I wanted to talk about. Here’s my “evidence,” such as it is, but keep in mind that this is based on early and incomplete information.
The first item is the lack of openness in the iPhone platform. Lots of people have written about this. Apple says it supports widgets, but it isn’t clear whether there is any support for third party widgets. Similarly, Apple says that there will be no ability to write applications for the iPhone without making some sort of deal with Apple first. To me, this means that it will be basically impossible for small developers to write for the platform, and difficult even for big players. Could Adobe do a free Acrobat Reader for the iPhone? Could Microsoft provide viewers for Office documents (assuming they’d want to, of course). Could Yahoo! build a widget that lets you view your flickr feed? Thats a lot of questions, with no answers. As a software engineer, though, I have to ask: if the iPhone is a closed system, how does the customer gain from it being based on Mac OS X?
The second item is Apple TV. Apparently it:
The third and final item is the new Airport Extreme with support for 802.11n. According to Apple:
Most new Mac computers ship with built-in 802.11n wireless support that can be easily enabled with the installation of enabler software included with new AirPort Extreme wireless base station (see sidebar).
Get that? Apple’s been shipping computers for a while that supported 802.11n, but they crippled the feature until their own wireless router was ready for the market. But that wasn’t bad enough: now that they do have competitive products, they still won’t enable 802.11n on the Mac you already paid for unless you first buy one of their routers. I have no doubt the software will leak to the net, but that is besides the point: if I’m a legitimate Apple customer who has valid reasons to install someone else’s 802.11n routers in my home or business, Apple is going to make that customer do something illegal in order to take full advantage of their Mac hardware.
[UPDATE 01-15-2007] According to this article at iLounge, the reason why Apple isn’t providing 802.11 support on existing Macs is Sarbanes-Oxley. I don’t know that I believe this reasoning, but if true its pretty mind-blowingly weak. Rumor also has it that Apple will soon be selling the update for $4.95 to get around this issue. Here’s the key quotes from iLounge:
I’m not going to claim to understand this next part, which really just makes no sense to me at all, but the claim Apple’s making is that it _can’t_ give you the 802.11n-unlocking software for free. The reason: the Core 2 Duo Macs weren’t advertised as 802.11n-ready, and a little law called the Sarbanes-Oxley Act supposedly prohibits Apple from giving away an unadvertised new feature for one of its products. Hence, said the Apple rep, the company’s not distributing new _features_ in Software Update any more, just _bug fixes._ Because of Sarbanes-Oxley. If this is an accurate statement of Apple’s position, which as an attorney (but not one with any Sarbanes background) I find at least plausible, this is really crazy.
Any one of these things on its own would raise questions in my mind. Taken together, though, they imply that Apple may now be putting their own plans for world media domination ahead of the needs of their customers. It also implies that Apple believes they no longer need a software ecosystem to make their products succeed. As a long time Apple fan and former Apple employee, these are both things I’m loath to see. Hopefully they’ll change their tune.
Updated 1-11-2007 to fix a typo and change the title to have a plain old single-quote instead of a curvy one…
There’s been a lot of back and forth between the XMLers and the JSON proponents of late. I thought this post by James Bennett to be particularly insightful.
Shebanator 