Oh how things change when you do a little research.

(Let’s see if the buyer actually pays up, though.)

Ever wonder why the end credits in a movie always seem to scroll at the same rate as it does in other movies? No? Well, here’s the answer anyways. Beware: if the terms PAL, NTSC and scanlines mean nothing to you, here be dragons. Found via an AskMetafilter question that provides some interesting reading material for those of us not blessed with a working understanding of video resolutions and interlacing.

(The title of this post is apparently taken from the end credits of the UK short film Blowout, though obviously it applies to a great many other films.)

Update: Consensus is still forming, but a lot of people are now dismissing the initial rootkit diagnosis. It now appears to just be a particularly onerous copy-protection scheme, which is kind of what we’ve come to expect from Sony and SecuROM these days. The protection-stripping patch promised by Levine and company can’t come soon enough.

Having just finished playing Bioshock the first time through and loving it to bits, I’m now tempted to uninstall the whole game and shelve it for a couple of months. Why? Because the SecuROM copy protection Bioshock uses exhibits rootkit-like behavior. Sound familiar? It’s exactly the same sort of thing we saw about two years ago, when Sony and Universal were caught red-handed trying to put rootkits onto their music CD releases.

There’s still a question of whether SecuROM puts a rootkit on your system. At the very least, it exhibits some odd behavior, like protesting when you run Process Explorer—a powerful utility that, oh, by the way, was created by Sysinternals, now owned by Microsoft. In other words, you can’t run Bioshock and a legitimate Microsoft utility at the same time. And of course there’s the general copy-protection issue, namely that copy protection hurts legitimate consumers more than it hurts people who steal the game. In this case, it’s the problem of only ever being able to install the game twice. 2K Games says you should be able to install/uninstall as many times as you like, but if you should ever forget to uninstall twice, no more Bioshock for you. (2K recently said they would up the activation limit, which helps but does not eliminate the issue.)

To be honest, my Steam install of Bioshock was relatively trouble-free, at least once I got past the 400MB zero-day download and the intermittent failures of the activation servers. But now 2K Games may have accomplished what thousands of virus writers, malware spammers and worms have failed to do: infiltrate my computer with malware. Even if SecuROM turns out not to be a rootkit, there’s still the general problem of copy protection DRM becoming more aggressive with every passing year—as well as the incentive to steal a game instead of buying it.

Do I feel like a sucker for buying Bioshock? Not yet. It was a great game and the developer team have a lot to be proud of. But I don’t want to have to come back in two weeks and say I was wrong to support such a good game because the publisher went and fucked it all up with rootkits.

When Steam released the most recent Civilization IV expansion, things went fairly smoothly, and I got the game before any of the stores around town had a boxed copy in. So I figured, why wait? Just download Bioshock via Steam, save a trip to the store, great.

The release was set for 4:00pm, whereupon the game would be unlocked and you would be able to play immediately. I had all the files pre-loaded last night. This is what Steam said at 4:35pm today:

An extra hour isn’t much to pay, I guess, but I know people who took off work today to play this game. And having a release at 4pm when boxed copies have been sitting in stores since the morning is just stupid. Plus, what was the point of pre-loading the game when you still have to download 400MB upon the game’s release?

If you believe accessibility design expert Joe Clark, there’s a better than even chance that the next iteration of the TTC website will be shit. Maybe not quite as shit as the current website, which has looked like cat puke for the better part of a decade now, but the glitzy, open-standards website you’re imagining in your head? Could be the stuff of dreams, if you follow the TTC’s Request for Proposals to the letter.

Clark’s ruffled many a feather in his time; he makes no bones when he thinks you’ve done something stupid, and in his eyes a lot of designers do some colossally stupid things. But the man knows his stuff and even when he goes overboard with the criticisms (like perhaps he does a bit here) there’s always a kernel of truth to his words—oftentimes a very large one. So there’s no reason not to believe what Clark’s saying about the request tenders (though you’d have to buy the tenders yourself to read the document and form your own opinions—and you probably wouldn’t do that unless you were really interested in winning the contract).

Are we in trouble then? Maybe, perhaps, possibly not: many of Clark’s criticisms stem from the same problem, namely that the TTC doesn’t appear to have much of a clue when it comes to web technologies. I suppose one glance at the current site could tell you that much, but some details of the two RFPs are genuinely scary. For example, the fact the TTC uses Windows/IE6 on all their systems? Well, okay, I can understand that—IE6, for better or for worse, is still a large chunk of the browser market, even if everyone detests it more than they detested Netscape 4. But requesting your site be viewable in Internet Explorer 5? Asking the contract winner to host the public beta site? (11.4 million people visited the TTC site in 2006. Enjoy your bandwidth bill!) Requiring the trip planner output to be compatible with Ventura Publisher? Including a 3.5-inch floppy disk with the RFP documents? Come on, guys, where did you even find a floppy drive to make those disks?

There are two possibilities here: either the TTC is woefully behind the times, or else we’ve dug up the original RFP for the TTC’s current site. If it’s the former, the developers who win the contract will have a tough road ahead. Hopefully it’s the latter.

(Oh, and hey, obligatory mention of how the TTC’s operating budget has been slashed for the rest of the year and possibly for all of next year. Note to City of Toronto: no one will visit your shiny new TTC site if people can’t use the TTC no more.)

Thankfully not my vacation, but if you had the fortune of being at Tokyo Summerland this week (or the misfortune of being in the pool at Tokyo Summerland this week) you might’ve witnessed this amazing feat of… well, see for yourself:

In Jacob Diamond’s Collapse, the anthropologist/author discusses the folly of the Easter Islanders cutting down all their trees, causing a massive ecological disaster because they could no longer make fishing boats from the wood. “What was the person cutting down the last tree thinking,” he wondered.

I’d like to ask the last person to get into that wave pool what they were thinking.

At least 46 people have hit two home runs in the same inning. But even more amazing: one person managed to hit two grand slams in the same inning.

From the jQuery mailing list:

In IE the innerHTML property for a select element is readonly, so we
have to stick to createElement or the Option constructor here…

Oh, so THAT’S why I threw away three hours of my life this weekend.

Not that the internet needs any more help in identifying dumbasses trolling on forums, but I just thought of the phrase “Annals of Internet Douchebaggery” and thought it was too good to not use at least once. (Also, as you can see below, “User Generated Discontent” is already taken.) So here’s two instances of supreme idiocy.

(more…)

I do believe I’ll have to get me one of these. (Also, I heart Heather Powazek Champ from way back when she was harrumph.com.)