September 4, 2001

 
3:19 PM
It must completely suck when a console has a huge user base, even as it dies away. Witness the Sony PlayStation. While I don't know how many are in a given geographic region, I do know that there are 85 million of them out there, not counting PS2 units, making it the most popular console ever, hands down. As a result, there's still a ton of games coming out for it including, get this Black & White. Yep, the beautiful PC game that's a work of art is headed to the PSX, where it looks like shit warmed over. I can't even pretend that this game doesn't look like ass on the PSX. It had been in development for the Sega Dreamcast, but when Sega dropped publishing the port (right before dropping the Dreamcast) that port died, since the game's PC publisher, EA, is on the take from Sony not to make that happen. Therefore, it's headed to the PSX. It's coming to the PS2 and XBox as well, but on the PSX even completely lackluster sales will outdo sales on the PS2. Black & White is also headed to the Game Boy Color, of all things, but that's more of a joke than a port.

This all leads back to what may be the big problem with the PS2 - backwards compatibility. Back when the Commodore 128 came out, Commodore figured people didn't want to chuck their old Commodore 64 software, so they made the computer compatible with the C64 through an emulation mode. However, developers didn't initially want to write for the C128 since it would hurt sales, and then consumers wouldn't buy the C128 because it didn't have any software and was more expensive than the C64, which was cheaper anyway. This is the problem the PS2 is experiencing right now. Now granted, Sony does have more control than Commodore did - the PSX is a closed platform, so they could state tommorow that December 31, 2001 would be the last day of PSX games, since Sony has final say. The question/problem is, whenever they finally do do that (if they do that), will it be enough?

September 3, 2001

 
11:28 AM
One of my all-time favorite shows is NYPD Blue. I've been taping them off ABC in recent years, but what I really want is to get them all on tape. A daunting task, given that the show has been on for years now. If nothing else, having them on TV on a regular basis would be nice. FX, the Fox cable cash-in channel, has been airing them for some time but my cable provider doesn't carry that channel. A short while back I heard that TNT would start carrying the show, so I got all excited. I just checked the TNT Page, however, and they say that the episodes they're airing tommorow feature Bobby Simone, so they're not beginning the series from episode one. However, this FAQ entry tells me that what happened is that FX's rights expired in August and so TNT and CourtTV (?) started bidding on the rights, and they both won. Both channels will show two episodes per day, one in the morning and one in the evening. Court TV's morning episode will begin the rotation at season one, the evening rotation with season two. TNT's morning episode starts at season five, the evening starts with season six. Apaprently once they get to the end of the syndicated seasons they're going to start over, so once season 12 or so ends on TNT they'll start with season one again. I'd rather start watching/taping them from season one, but of course I don't get Court TV.

Am I crazy enough to attempt to tape them all? Will I remember to set the VCR every day? Will my wife ever let me purchase enough videotapes? Stay tuned...

 
10:25 AM
Moe has a new quip up wherein she complains about the confusion over the word "download". I.e., customer calls in and says "I downloaded the Internet off your site" or "It won't download" when they can't send email. While I try to make this site something other than a retort site to other people's ramblings, I'm going to make an exception in this case. Here are some more postulations on the word "download"

For starters, while the phrase "I downloaded the Internet" is daunting beyond imagination, I can't really tell you what the word "download" really means, because it has such a broad definition that technically its usage isn't wrong per se, but its overuse has run into misuse. For example, the game developer Volition has released a game demo for the upcoming title Red Faction. The demo is over 100MB in size. I go to a webpage that allows me to download it and I click on it. Since it's not a web page (.html) I've clicked on, and is instead an executable file (.exe) it does not "open" the file automatically, it asks me if I want to open it from the current location or save it to a disk. Of course I save it to my hard drive - it's 100MB and I may want to install it later, or install it a second time. In fact, because I know this already, I don't even bother to let the web browser ask me the question - I right-click on the file and tell the web browser to save it to begin with. That is downloading.

Right now I'm listening to KTSR, a local College Station radio station. I open up Windows Media Player and tell it to open a particular URL. However, I am not saving the audio of the radio station to my hard drive - it's streaming off of the Internet. It's buffered to a memory and then played through the player, then it's purged from memory. This is not downloading.

However, these definitions of downloading are my own personal ones. I guess the real difference is that you keep the first kind of activity, whereas the second one you don't. However, past web browsers and email and e-commerce and whatever, there really are only two things you can do on the Internet - send and recieve. Some call these upload and download, but all it is is sending and recieving. When you type in www.bluesnews.com, your web browser sends a request to the Internet, and then it recieves the information that constitutes Blue's News - the text, the links, the annoying "shock the monkey" ad, everything. So, you recieve Blue's News, but by the "upload/download" definition, you're downloading Blue's News.

Now here's the fun part - Blue's News doesn't know whether you are in fact viewing their web page or saving it to your hard drive. Why you would want to save it is anyone's guess, but the Blue's News server doesn't know the difference one way or another. This becomes important in a minute.

There is a woman named Cindy Margolis. She is a very attractive blonde with breast implants who currently holds the Guinness World Record for "most downloaded woman" on the Internet. Of course, Guinness draws the line right there and never defines what "downloading" is. According to my definition, this would mean that she's the woman whose picture is saved to people's hard drives most often, which I seriously doubt is the case (since like I mentioned earlier the web server can't tell the difference). No, the definition of downloading that they're using is the one where any downstream traffic (anything you've recieved) is a "download". By that logic, if you go to her site and hit "refresh" five times, you've "downloaded" her five times.

But it gets better. There's another woman named Danni Ashe (three guesses on what her site is called) who has taken issue with Cindy Margolis' claim and counter-claims that she is the most downloaded woman on the web. She even started her own site to extoll the virtues of her own numbers and placing Cindy Margolis much further down the list. So why did Guinness not give her the title instead? Well, Danni Ashe's site which has given her all the popularity in the first place is a porn site. (that's not a porn link, BTW).

Not to get on a tangent here but the hell of it is, while many (including Guinness) will shun Ashe for being a porn queen, the difference between her and Margolis is that Ashe actually did something to achieve her fame, granted that something was pornography. Margolis is pretty and that's about it. She has had professional photography done of her and she places said pics on her website and that's it. She has her own web-based talk show and it's expanding to a televised one in syndication soon, and she's had guest spots on Ally McBeal and other shows. Her past jobs include a stint as a fembot and brief appearance on The Price is Right. However, while she calls herself a model, she doesn't do anything. She's not on the cover of Cosmopolitan, she doesn't pimp makeup, she isn't in music videos or walking down runways, she just looks pretty. The sad part is, that appears to be enough.

The problem with both of these notions, however, is not that they're fighting over who has downloaded more, but rather two other things. First, the aforementioned problems of the term "download", and the fact that the numbers are frivolous at best. For starters, these two women attempt to lay claim to the title of "most downloaded woman on the Internet", but that's assuming that every time someone "downloads" them from the web it's from their site. I'd be willing to bet that Britney Spears is probably not only viewed over the Internet more often, but saved to hard drives more often - in various states of Photoshop-induced undress.

Blue's News used to have a web hit counter on their site. They still have it - if you go to the bottom of the page and highlight it you can see it. A short while back it hit 100,000,000 hits, and they decided to mention it. However, the counter has been broken several times through server moves and CGI difficulties, so 100,000,000 hits were probably hit some time before that, but it was still significant, mainly because it was the next base ten round number. Web statistics do not have a central agency - they are not like a fishing competition where there's a judge who weighs them at the end and disqualifies those who use little BB pellets - so these numbers are probably not accurate and could very well have been made up. Danni Ashe is not the only woman getting nekkid at her site, but she's probably counting every photo on her page as a "download". For that matter, web pages are not merely text and photographs - web pages have hundreds of graphics on them. Perhaps each individual picture is getting counted.

If I look at your webpage, I have downloaded nothing. Period. If I save you picture to a hard drive I have downloaded it. Period. Don't go telling me I downloaded your picture when in 20 days it won't even be in my cache anymore.

Next week, I'll tackle the concept of "logging on" to a website with no actual content to "log on" to (i.e., "Log on to mcdonalds.com!").

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