Global Geek News Blog

Greetings Readers!

Over the last half dozen years or so, I have been known to be quite vocal when it comes to my extreme dislike of Electronic Arts and what it is doing to the gaming industry.  From the fact that it rushes buggy, unfinished games to store shelves, to the lack of support for many of its games compared to companies like Blizzard, to the insane DRM, there is very little about EA that doesn’t piss me and most gamers off.  While those issues will continue to piss me off till either I die or EA does, tonight’s news takes the cake.  Now, if you get banned on any EA forums or in any EA game, you are banned from all EA games and forums.

I will admit that EA has been doing better at making quality games that aren’t part of a series that has a new version every year, they still have not changed their greedy attitude.  From the DRM meant to prevent piracy (which actually does nothing other than screw the honest consumer), to milking the various sports games for every dollar they can get, it is now apparent that they still aren’t rich enough.  Apparently, they have now decided they can make more money if they sell you a bunch of games and then can ban you from all of your EA games based on a single incident.  In this post from Apoc, the Command & Conquer community manager, since gamers profiles are managed under a master EA account, if they are banned in any of the message boards or on any of the games, they are banned on everything tied to the master account.

Essentially, if you break the rules and get on the bad side of anybody at EA, all of your EA games will basically turn into a poor excuse for a paperweight.  You might still be able to play the single player in some games, but you will no longer have multiplayer abilities in your games.  This is complete BS.  While I should have expected this from the greedy bastards at EA, I honestly never thought they would go this far.  Not only is this a cost saving measure for them, but it makes it easier for them to kill off support for older games.

If you have many EA games, you better guard your account with your life as if it gets stolen and somebody uses it to get banned, you will be screwed out of the hundreds of dollars your paid for their games.  It is stuff like this that is why I don’t let anybody have access to any of my accounts, I dont care who they are or why they need access.

EA really needs to rethink this policy.  How are people going to learn from their mistakes if the punishment can lead to their banning from all games?  If I got banned from one game, I would quickly get the hint and not act as such in other games.  There is no reason to make all games useless because of a single incident.

Until EA decides to pull its head out of its butt, where it likely stores all its mountains of cash, gamers have very few options here.  My only recommendation at this time would be to keep all your games under different master accounts so that if you get banned on one game, you dont lose your gaming ability on everything.  I would also recommend taking the fight to EA.  Post your thoughts about this on thier forums, email them, call them, sue them and everything else in between.  I recommend the last option as it seems lawsuits are the best way to get a companies attention when the only thing they care about is counting the mountians of cash they have from creating bad products, much like those infomercials you see on tv at 3am.

Forward this to every gamer you know as the more informed people are, the better!  We must unite and fight EA!

Don’t forget to check out the new Global Geek News Podcast!

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-Jeremy “pcnerd37″ Bray

Greetings Readers!

If you are like me and are a huge fan of Gmail, there is another great new feature for the popular email service from Google.  In the past couple of weeks, there have been several new features added to Gmail including canned responses and an e-mail sobriety test.  There is yet another new feature today that will likely excite any instant messenger fan, emoticons.

Yesterday afternoon, the Official Gmail Blog announced that you can now have emoticons in your email.  There are a ton of these little animated things, so you might want to check these out, especially if you are into writing causal emails.

The new emoticons in Gmail.

While some of these are cool, I don’t expect this to become the norm for business emails.  Personally, I almost never write email unless its for more of a professional purpose.  The last time I sent a casual, “Hi! How are you?” email was when my best friend was deployed to Iraq.  Even then, I never used any key combinations to indicate winks, smiles or anything else.  Emoticons certainly have their place in email, but I personally think they should be left to forums, chat and IM applications.

Anyway, if you have Gmail, check out the new emoticons and leave a comment telling me what you think about them.

Follow me on Twitter!

-Jeremy “pcnerd37″ Bray

P.S. Don’t forget to check out the return of the Global Geek News podcast!

Greetings Readers!

I’ve spent most of the day catching up on podcasts, when I heard about the new auction site Swoopo from Ken Rutkowski of one of my favorite podcasts, KenRadio.  If you haven’t heard of Swoopo, I wouldn’t be too surprised as it is a new auction site that is unlike any auction I have seen before.

Swoopo is like an auction site for gamblers.  Unlike Ebay, you can’t sell anything on this auction site.  Swoopo is the one selling all of the items.  They sell items ranging from game consoles to bids (more on this later).  Also unlike Ebay, there is no defined end time to an auction.  The more bids an item receives, the longer the auction will continue until people stop bidding.  If you thought that’s where the differences end, you would be wrong.  All bids take place in $.15 increments and there is no reserve price.  Auctions also start at $.15.

If you were wondering what I was talking about when I called it a gambling auction site, this is what I mean.  You have to pay for bids.  Every time you bid, it costs you $1.  It can cost you less than that if you buy your bids in bulk.  Whether or not you win the auction, if you are bidding, they are making money off of you.  Much like the gambling you would do at any casino, you can spend a lot of money in the hopes of winning something, only to end up with nothing more than a dent in your bank account.  This is where the genius part of the site lies.

While many auctions often go for less than their retail value (I saw a 8GB USB drive go for less than $6 last night), because you are paying for the bids you place on an item with a set bid increment, they are still making money hand over fist.  Let me give you an example.  Last night, I was watching an auction for a PS3, just to see what it would go for.  It was an 80GB PS3 with the retail value of $400.00.  The last time I looked, the auction was approaching $430 (why people will pay above retail when they don’t have to is always something that will confuse me).  Not only did the company make back the retail value on the game console, but when they charge at most $1 per bid (it could be less if you buy bids in bulk) which is $.15 above the last bid, they have likely made over $3000 profit from a single auction.  This is not something other auction sites such as Ebay can boast.

Another ingenious part of this new auction system is that the auction end time is only dependent on when auctions stop receiving bids.  With the real-time AJAX interface, there is no need to refresh the page to see if somebody has outbid you.  If somebody bids in the final seconds of an auction, the clock is immediately increased back to 15 seconds, allowing people to bid again if they choose.  By upping the time left on the clock when people bid, the auction will continue to go on until people stop bidding.  This allows the company to make the most amount of money from bids while making sure that people don’t have their auction sniped without being able to do anything in the last second of an auction.

While I will admit that I love this concept and think it has profit margins that no other auction site can come close to, there are some problems with this system.  Since Swoopo is the seller of all products instead of the consumer, there is a fairly limited selection of items on the site.  Don’t expect to find any antiques or stamps that my be missing from you collection here.  This site can’t compete in the number and diversity of items with companies like Ebay.  While I would call this a possible flaw, it does keep the profit margins on the products they do have much higher.  Another major drawback of this system is its gambling like nature.  Because of this, there are several states that you are not allowed to participate from what I presume are gambling laws.  While I would call this a major drawback to the system, I don’t think it is having a major impact on the system at this time.  I do see it as likely that they will run into legal issues as more state attorney generals find out about the site.

All things considered, if you are looking to try to get some great gadgets for cheap, this might be a place to check out although you should be prepared to lose money if many other people want the same item, not something many people can do in this down economy.  I recommend checking out Swoopo, but I will warn you, even watching other people bid can be addicting.

Follow me on Twitter!

-Jeremy “pcnerd37″ Bray

P.S. Don’t forget to check out the return of the Global Geek News Podcast!

Greetings Readers!

After the huge response I have received from my post yesterday about Sony’s updated Terms of Service/User Agreement for the PlayStation Network, I have decided that I should write a follow-up post addressing some of the points that have been brought up.  I was trying to get in contact with somebody at Sony who could respond, but like Gamespot, I have not had any luck.  Before I get into this post, I would like to thank everybody that shared the link for yesterday’s post as it is now the third most viewed post on the Global Geek News Blog behind the Twitter Etiquette and Twitter Etiquette 2 posts.  OK, here we go.

Probably the biggest comment I have received so far is in regards to the protection of children from online predators.  This is certainly a valid point, which lead to Sony adding the following statement to the new Terms of Service.

You may not provide anyone with your name or any other personally identifying information other than your own Online ID, or the name, password or personally identifying information of any other person or business through any means, including messaging, chat or any other form of PSN communication.

While I agree with the purpose behind this statement, I think it goes a bit too far.  I think giving this information should be up to the users and their own personal judgment or that of their guardians.  I have met countless people online, and if I was restricted by this rule, I would not have many of the great friends I have today.  I also play online with friends, and I don’t to risk banning because I refer to somebody by their actual name rather than their Online ID.  Protecting the children is a honorable goal, but restricting everybody to protect a few is going too far.

Another popular opinion that I have seen is that this Terms of Service is no worse than most of them that are out there.  When I am bored, I am known to read Terms of Service type documents, so I know this is not the case.  While I will agree that many Terms of Service are overly restrictive and often rarely enforced, to say this is no worse than others is just plain wrong.  When Google did something very similar when they launched Chrome, trying to say that everything created through their browser was essentially theirs, they were immediately called out on it and they backed off.  That is what needs to happen here.  It is time that Terms of Service are not so one sided, and many such documents are beginning to reflect that as technology becomes more open.  I know that my legal section for this site is nowhere near as ugly as this terms of service.  In the interest of fairness and to show that I am not out to destroy Sony, I will be reviewing the ToS of the other consoles and writing about them later this week.

Another hot button topic seems to be the giving of information to third parties.  From what I have read, many people seem to be against it, especially when they realize that it is personal information that is being given.  Personally, I generally don’t much care if companies gather anonymous usage statistics on things I do.  As long as no personally identifying information about me is not sent, especially in an insecure manner, I don’t mind contributing to make a product better by allowing companies to see how I am using a product for future improvements or what bugs I am running into that need fixed.  When my personal information is sent, especially to third parties who can also distribute it to whomever they choose, that is when I have a problem.  It is even worse when there is no way to opt out of such a policy.  With the way it stands now, if I don’t agree, I don’t get to use my PS3 or PSP, and that is that.  Giving personal information out in such a manner is a huge security and privacy problem.  The more people that have your information, the higher your chances of identity theft.  Also, such information transfer is illegal in some places.

The last major point that has been made that I want to talk about is that these are just meant to cover Sony’s butt if somebody decides they want to sue them.  While I will agree with that, I believe they went much farther than that, especially when they refuse to do anything about lost data purchased from the PlayStation Store, even when they are the one to have caused the problem.  As I stated before, protecting children and stupid people in general is certainly an admirable goal, but there are better ways to go about it than doing something like this.  Courts have thrown out Terms of Service in the past because they are overly restrictive and just plain bad that no reasonable person would accept them, something that could very easily happen in this case.  A balance must be struck between Sony protecting its hardware, network, and contracts and the consumer and allowing them to use their system in the way that they choose.

Don’t forget to check back later this week as I will talk bout the Terms of Service that come with the other consoles and the possibility of comment from Sony on this issue!  I am also likely to talk about this on the next Global Geek News Podcast, so keep an eye on that!  Like always, follow me on Twitter or Friendfeed if you want to be notified of when new posts go up.  Until next time, don’t forget to comment (And be a constructive commenter)!

Follow me on Twitter!

-Jeremy “pcnerd37″ Bray

Greetings Readers!

Being a member of the Playstation Network and various Playstation related programs (Gamers Advisory Panel), I recieved an email on Friday informing me of changes to the Terms of Service and User Agreement for the Playstation Network.  Since it was a slow day at work, I decided to read the changes to the service, most of which are beyond disgusting.

While these agreements are made primarily for the company to cover its butt in the biggest way possible so that it can avoid dumb lawsuits from Jack Thompson impersonators, the new changes went much farther than that.  There are a few new rules in there that are to be expected, basically trying to keep people from exchanging personal information and trying to protect children which is all well and good, but they did not stop there.

Lets get right into the bad stuff with the fact that basically you no longer have any privacy on the PlayStation Network.

However, SCEA reserves the right to monitor and record any online activity and communication throughout PSN and you give SCEA your express consent to monitor and record your activities. SCEA reserves the right to remove any content and communication from PSN at SCEA’s sole discretion without further notice to you. Any data collected in this way, including the content of your communications, the time and location of your activities, your Online ID and IP address and other related information may be used by us to enforce this Agreement or protect the interests of SCEA, its users, or licensors.

Unless you want to risk termination of your service and have very little functionality out of your PS3, you will now have to be very careful about what you do as Sony is watching and listening for TOS violations so they can disable your account.  But, if you thought that this is all they are using your information for, you would be wrong.  It is being shared with third parties.

Third parties, including publishers may administer access to some content, including delivery, gameplay or customer service. To enable third parties to provide such access to you, we must provide them with your personal information. If you do not consent to allow us to share your personal information with third parties for the purpose of providing you with access to PSN content, you will not be able to participate in PSN.

So now, all of your private information is now at the hands of third parties and whatever they choose to do with it.  You have no say in what personal information they get, and if you don’t like it, you aren’t allowed to use the PlayStation Network.  I suspect this is the first step in finding ads on the PlayStation Network outside of promoting new items in the store.

Of course the fun doesn’t stop there.  Stories have been floating around for some time about the horrible DRM and stuff related to downloading store content and that you basically get one shot with content and thats it, but now, if something happens, even if its Sony’s fault, you are out of luck.

You bear all risk of loss for completing the download of any content and for any loss of content you have downloaded, including any loss due to a file corruption or hard drive crash.You are solely responsible for the storage and safekeeping of your content. SCEA is not responsible for providing you with replacement copies for any reason.

If that doesn’t sound bad enough, they state earlier in the terms that they can update your system at any time and can remove functionality or cause data loss, leaving you with nothing to do but twittle your thumbs.

Some content may be provided automatically without notice when you sign into PSN. Such content may include automatic updates or upgrades which may change your current operating system, cause a loss of data or content or cause a loss of functionalities or utilities.

So if Sony fails to properly test an update and it hoses your console, you can kiss all your downloaded content goodbye.  If you want it back, you will have to buy it all over again.

Speaking of DRM, hacking your PS3 or PSP to give yourself more control over your content is no longer allowed.

You may not bypass, disable, or circumvent any encryption, security, digital rights management or authentication mechanism in connection with PSN or any of the content offered through PSN.

Nope, we still aren’t done yet, there is even more bad news.  Sony has also decided to pull what Google did with Chrome and own everything you create.

To the extent permitted by law, You authorize and license SCEA a royalty free and perpetual right to use, distribute, copy, modify, display, and publish your User Material for any reason without any restrictions or payments to you or any third parties. You further agree that SCEA may sublicense its rights to any third party, including its affiliates and subsidiaries.

These are the biggest problems with the updated Terms of Service for the PlayStation Network, but certainly not all of them.  If you are a PSP or PS3 owner, or just really care about privacy and consumer rights, I highly recommend reading the rest of the Terms of Serivce here.  The updates are all in red.

The changes are disgusting on many levels and should be fought.  The more attention this issue gets, the better the chance we have of changing it, so make sure to forward this to everybody you know!  Until then, all your actions are belong to Sony!  Don’t forget to post your thought in the comments as well.

Follow me on Twitter!

-Jeremy “pcnerd37″ Bray

Greetings Readers!

In case you haven’t heard, Microsoft has announced that the name of Windows 7 will be… Windows 7.  Sounds fancy doesn’t it?

In the announcement, they listed some reasons why they went with the name, such as not wanting to go with a year because its not a yearly release and that an aspirational name like Vista wouldn’t do the new OS justice.  Since this is the seventh release of Windows, they say that Windows 7 just makes sense.

While that logic would have made sense if they had been going with this naming scheme from the beginning, the average consumer won’t give any thought to this being the 7th Windows OS.  My theory?  I think the marketing department was on vacation when this decision was made after thier latest batch of ‘I’m a PC’ commercials which still don’t make sense.

This is just the latest example showing how out-of-touch Microsoft really is when it comes to branding a widely used product.  Microsoft needs to get some marketing people with a little bit of creativity and that actually understand the average consumer.  Calling the new OS Windows XP 2.0 would have been a better idea since they are looking to put Vista behind them and people already love the experience of XP rather than Vista.  Personally, I will always be a fan of the Longhorn name until the day I die.

The first thing people will hear about the new OS is its name, so it needs to be something that inspires curiosity and confidence at the same time.  While the name certainly isn’t everything, it is probably the single most important thing from a marketing standpoint.  Until the new Windows OS can prove itself, it will have to rely on marketing, something that is already very restricted with this name choice.

Only time will tell if this is a good move or not, but I’m predicting this merely be the first mistake of the new operating system.

Do you think this is a good name?  Do you have other ideas for names?  If so, leave a comment!

Follow me on Twitter!

-Jeremy “pcnerd37″ Bray

Greetings readers!

As I was getting ready for bed a few minutes ago (yes, I am very tired), I did one last check of my Google Reader to find that the rumors of a new Nintendo DS unit were true.  It wasn’t until I read the whole article that I realized just how horrible this really is.  While it is clear that Nintendo is clearly trying to play catch-up to the Sony PSP in terms of capabilities, it apparently decided to find the biggest gun it could to blow its own foot off.

Lets address the playing catch-up with the PSP before we talk about how they are clearly shooting themselves in the foot with this new version.

There seems to be three major areas where the DSi is trying to play catch-up to the PSP.  They are increasing the screensize slightly to compete with the larger PSP screen, they have added an SD card slot, and they are finally getting a real wi-fi experience.  To be honest, as long as the DS or in this case the DSi remains a gaming platform, a slightly larger screen really makes little difference as its not a multimedia platform that is trying to play videos among other things.  While an SD card slot is a big leap for the DS series, the PSP has had the expandable memory capabilities since the day it launched.  This opens up a whole new world of possibilities, especially when it comes to hacking and homebrew, but from the sounds of it, it likely wont be used for much other than photos and content purchased over wi-fi.  Speaking of wi-fi, the DSi is finally going to have a browser, something that the PSP had shortly after launch with the 2.0 firmware (actually there were browser capabilities from the launch if you consider the one that you could use from the Wipeout Pure game).  While I have no details at this time, I asssume it will likely be the Opera Mini browser considering Opera is the browser of choice for the Wii.  Being able to get stuff from an online store is also something that Sony has had for a long time with the ability to put all kinds of content on the PSP such as demos.

That said, it is only fair to point out some of the new features that it will have that the PSP does not.  Actually, there is only one distinguishing feature, two cameras built into the system.  There is a three megapixel camera on the outside and a smaller one on the inner hinge of the system.  I can’t say this excites me any as I would choose a normal digital camera over something tacked on to a system like this any day, although I will reserve judgement on its performance until I get a chance to try it.  Apparently you can sync your photos with the Wii photo channel which is cool even though I have always found that channel completely useless.

Now its time to talk about where Nintendo went horribly wrong.  First, and this isn’t a big deal, but the new DSi will be 12% thinner than the DS Lite.  Never once have I thought to myself, I wish this was thinner.  I do understand how people want their portable electronics to be smaller, but not at the expense of functionality, which is the first bullet through Nintendo’s foot.  In order for the device to be a hardly noticeable 12% thinner, the GBA slot has been removed from the system.  Killing the ability to play thousands of titles going back 20 years is probably the dumbest move I have ever seen Nintendo make (Yes, worse than the VirtualBoy).  Just because I have a dozen or so Gameboys laying around, doesn’t mean I want to have to scrounge through boxes for them to be able to play some classic Tetris if the mood should strike.  Just because the content is old and doesn’t max out the DS capabilities, doesn’t mean that you should kill the backward compatibility that made the system great.

Like I said, I have close to a dozen or so Gameboys and other Nintendo portable devices laying around, so I am used to having a change in form factor every couple of years.  From the Gameboy, to the Gameboy Pocket, to the GameBoy Color and so on, Nintendo is known for bringing some refreshes to its mobile lineup every couple of years.  The difference between how the Gameboy line evolved and how the DS line has now evolved is where the real problem lies.  With the Gameboy line, the size and shape of the system would change, the screen would change to add colors or a backlight or whatever, but the way you interacted with the system never changed.  You always had the same buttons no matter what version of the Gameboy you were on.  The DSi on the other hand, breaks this wonderful model.  By adding a second touchscreen, Nintendo has fundamentally altered how you interact with the system and as such, splintered the market.  You now have hundreds of titles that can’t take advantage of the new touchscreen and titles going forward will either not be backward compatible or will have a very stripped down experience when going from two touchscreens to one.  This is yet another move from Nintendo that baffles me with stupidity.  In all fairness, Nintendo said the DSi was a compliment to the DS line rather than a replacement to the DS Lite although I don’t know if that will be the case for long and will only cause consumer confusion.

While I applaud Nintendo for trying to catch up to the PSP in functionality, albeit 4 years late, the boneheaded decisions made for this new model make wonder if its not time for Nintendo to do some major house cleaning and get some people with common sense in the company.

If you want a little more information about the new handheld, you can find it at Engadget.

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-Jeremy “pcnerd37″ Bray