I have completely redesigned my website! It’s much more functional now, and it looks pretty good too (albeit simple).

I did have to give up my old front page, which I liked a lot, but maybe that design will appear somewhere else eventually… I did keep the general color scheme, except I toned it down a lot. And more importantly, I got rid of all the useless content, and significantly reworked everything else. Soon I’m going to change my blog layout to match the rest of the website, but that’s a big project in and of itself, so I decided to worry about it separately.

I also ended up making my acfdb project public in the process, though I’m not quite ready to officially announce it. That comes soon.

So, what do you think?

Remember how I said (a very, very long time ago) that I was making an effort to play a lot of the most influential computer games? Well, after finishing Half-Life, I went quite a while without playing games.

Then, in November, I bought The Orange Box, and played Portal. Portal is an excellent though short first-person puzzle game that forces players to think hard about game physics — that’s a first. It features a “portal gun” which allows the player to teleport. I really enjoyed Portal, as did most people.

But what I’m writing about now is a game released in 2000, called Deus Ex. Developed by the generally disappointing group Ion Storm, Deus Ex is considered one of the best PC games of all time. I (not so) recently completed it, and I must wholeheartedly agree.

In 2052, you are JC Denton, a member of UNATCO, the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition. An early test subject for nano-augmentation, you have superhuman abilities due to modifications made to you at birth. The world is in a downward spiral, as the Gray Death pandemic is killing the lower classes; while a vaccine, Ambrosia, exists, it is in short supply.

You have just been assigned your first UNATCO mission. A terrorist group, the NSF, has captured a shipment of Ambrosia on Liberty Island and you are tasked with recovering it. As you continue to pursue the NSF, you end up at LaGuardia Airport where the Ambrosia is being kept…and you find that a UNATCO ally very close to you is actually working for the NSF.

Uncovering the mystery reveals sinister connections with FEMA, Majestic 12, and the Illuminati as you travel between New York, Hong Kong, and Paris. The final battle takes place at Area 51, where the future of the world is placed in your hands. Do you want to merge yourself with the global communications network and become benevolent dictator of the world? Do you want to destroy the network and plunge the world into a second Dark Age? Or would you prefer to return the Illuminati to power, guiding the world’s governments with an invisible hand?

The massive amount of freedom afforded the player by Deus Ex is incredible. Every area is designed to allow many ways to accomplish each task. It is actually possible to beat the game without killing anybody — and even without going to such extremes, players’ strategies can range from stealth to all-out violence. There’s no sense of the “right way” to do anything in Deus Ex — any way that works is great. The plot is highly fluid, and while players end up in the same places at the same times, small actions from hours ago influence who survives and who is friendly.

All in all, I thought Deus Ex was a great game with a great story. I’m playing Halo right now, which kinda bores me with its focus on massive battles. Can anybody suggest more great games?

Well, guys, I don’t want to be premature about this, but it looks like Blu-ray is coming on top against HD DVD in the DVD format wars.

Format wars are nothing new to the movies. A bit before our time, VHS and Betamax had a showdown to be the cassette tape format, and VHS definitively won. I would speculate myself on the reasons for VHS’s triumph, but this topic has been exhaustively discussed by people far more qualified than I. Google it.

Likewise, DVD+R and DVD-R now (mostly) coexist peacefully, as most people have +/- drives that can read and write both.

What’s the difference? + and – have different ways of storing data. The differences are largely esoteric, and have to do with both the physical configuration of pits and the logical groupings of data on the disc itself. That said, those esoteric differences are actually manifested in the performance of the discs, especially with regard to error correction. Both are highly usable, and because they are largely compatible, neither has stomped out the other.

Unfortunately, it seems that 4.7 GB is not enough for people nowadays. Even dual-layer DVDs, which store about 8.5 GB, are somehow inadequate for everyone’s oh-so-sensitive eyes. (I don’t get it. I’m relatively happy with VCD-quality 700 MB movies, and don’t understand why people need such high-definition movies. On the flip side, a lot of people are happy with 128 kbps MP3s, but I myself want at least 192 kbps, and even higher for classical music.)

Anyway, two new optical disc formats have been invented. HD DVD, championed by the DVD Forum consortium, stores about 15 GB per layer. Blu-ray, pushed by Sony, stores a ridiculous 25 GB per layer. Both owe their existence to still-expensive blue lasers which can write data more compactly than the lasers used by DVDs.

Both BD and HD players are rather expensive at the moment; the cheapest HD DVD player retails for $150, and most Blu-ray Disc players are over $300.  If Blu-ray players are more expensive, what’s the advantage, besides higher capacity?

Sony’s PlayStation 3 console, despite its poor showing against the Xbox 360 and Wii, can play BD. While it is expensive, the PS3 is the only example of convergent technology yet to hit high-density optical disc players. No other player can do anything else.

Another, and in my opinion, even bigger issue, is that consumers are unclear about the difference. In particular, in a market saturated with High Definition: HD-upscaling DVD players, HD broadcasts, HD-ready televisions…I think that “HD” is too generic a moniker. “HD DVD” sounds simply like a better sort of DVD, not a completely different format. Blu-ray has a distinctive name and, being backed by Sony rather than a poorly-defined group of companies, just has a sort of presence that HD DVD doesn’t.

Recently, Warner announced that it would start releasing high definition films exclusively in Blu-ray format. They are now the fifth studio to exclusively support Blu-ray, among such giants as MGM, Disney, and Twentieth Century Fox. HD, on the other hand, is supported only by Universal and Paramount.

Blu-ray and HD DVD are too expensive to coexist peacefully, at least for the near future. Each requires a several hundred dollar investment. I am pleased that it looks like one will die out, because coexisting formats just result in a nightmare for uninformed consumers. Good for you, Sony. Ever since Betamax failed, we knew you’d rule video formats again some day.

From today’s New York Times: “eBay is finally acknowledging that it paid too much for the Internet phone company Skype two years ago.”

In case you’re out of the loop, Skype is an internet telephony program which allows free calls between computers, and very cheap calls out of or into computers from real landlines. Two years ago, eBay acquired Skype for a whopping $2.6 billion, leading me–and everyone else–to ask, “Why would eBay, an internet auction site at heart, pay so much for a rapidly-expanding internet-based telephony service?”

My only answer was that eBay was viewing Skype in much the same way as dot-coms were viewed before the bubble burst: as a high-traffic site which could somehow, in some mysterious way, be able to generate huge revenues. Don’t get me wrong. High-traffic sites with useful services are valuable assets. Google makes its money from being a high-traffic site. But I failed to see the usefulness of Skype in diversifying eBay’s holdings. When eBay purchased PayPal back in the day, the acquisition made perfect sense, and paid in spades. But how could Skype be incorporated into eBay as PayPal was? Or even if they remained entirely separate, how could Skype actually generate revenue for eBay?

The answer is that it couldn’t. In 2007 Q2, Skype earned a paltry $90 million, and yesterday, eBay announced it was making a $1.43 billion payout to Skype in accordance with their prior agreement. According to Aaron Kessler, “a senior Internet analyst,” eBay’s problem was that “‘They saw a great asset with tons of users but no clear monetization path.’” I feel like that’s what I said two years ago.

Perhaps I should add “junior Internet analyst” to my business cards.

Elyse Apantaku has brought it to my attention that two days ago was the 25th birthday of the emoticon. That is, 25 years and two days ago, somebody first suggested that we use colons, dashes, and parentheses to indicate smiling and frowning faces. Clever guy.

Today, the New York Times ended their online TimesSelect subscription service, which offered online access to the Times archives. TimesSelect was available to all subscribers to the physical paper, as well as many university students and any individuals willing to pay $50 a year for the service.

Nowadays, a great deal of the material on the Internet is available for free. Revenues are largely raised through online advertising, itself a business so large that it funds much of Google’s activities. In fact, newspaper websites are perhaps the largest destinations at which users have to pay for information online. (And pornography, which has always been a burgeoning business in virtually every medium.)

As I see it, the reluctance of newspaper websites to rely on advertising is primarily twofold. While newspapers have always relied on print advertising to keep themselves afloat, they view the Internet as an extension of their print business, not necessarily as a new market in and of itself. (To wit: online-only news sources tend not to require subscriptions.) Print sources see their websites as a great opportunity to take advantage of the technology available and provide extensive archives. Since those who browse archives are probably hardcore enough to be willing to pay, why not charge for the service?

The other reason is that newspapers cost a lot to run, and subscriptions generate a better, more stable source of revenue than online advertising, especially for upscale outfits such as the Times which would be averse to “Shoot the Gangsta” type ads. Indeed, the Times was making over $10 million a year through TimesSelect. So why drop it, and so soon after it was introduced in 2005?

A major part of it is the growing importance of search engines. By opening their articles to all users, they are also opening those pages to search engines like Google, which can index them and attract more readers to the Times online. More readers, in turn, attract more ad revenue.

Transitioning from the walled garden to the open model of the Internet is certainly not a new idea, but it’s one that print media has been reluctant to accept. Such a bold move by one of the most respected print news agencies in the world is certainly something worth noticing.

Whoa. BioShock looks really, really cool. If I were really into computer games, I would probably buy it right now. It’s already available for preloading on Steam.

It looks like this may be one of those games that really raises the bar. The graphics are beautiful, the gameplay mechanics sound really interesting and unpredictable, and the storyline sounds quite immersive.

I’m very impressed. Who knows, I might even end up buying it in a few months.

Me: (at Office Depot) “Hi, do you have Bluetooth mice?”
Generic retail guy: “Yeah, all our mice are right over here.” (leads me to various mice)
Me: (one minute later) “I see you have some wireless mice, but none of them appear to be Bluetooth.”
Retail guy: “Right, you’d need to use the little…USB connector things that come with the wireless mice here to use them. We have laser mice and regular optical mice.”
Me: “Um, yeah, but I’m really looking for Bluetooth in particular because my computer has internal Bluetooth, so I wouldn’t need to use a dongle.”
Retail guy: “Well, if you think about it, it doesn’t really make sense to have a Bluetooth mouse, right? I mean, if you’re in a Starbucks or something, how does your computer know which to listen to? Know what I mean?”
Me: “No.”
Retail guy: “Well, how would your computer know you were using your Bluetooth mouse?”
Me: “Because I would pair my laptop and mouse. It’s just as if I had a dongle.”
Retail guy: “Yeah, but what I mean is, it wouldn’t make sense for there to be a Bluetooth mouse. If you’re in your apartment and you’re using the Internet, how does your computer use both at the same time?”
Me: “Um, look, Bluetooth mice definitely exist. I still don’t know why the Internet has anything to do with a mouse.”
Retail guy: “Well, how could your computer listen to the wireless Internet and to a Bluetooth mouse at the same time?”
Me: “…Uh, Bluetooth and wi-fi are totally different.”
Retail guy: “Oh, y’know, I…err…I got confused, I was thinking of something else. Never mind.”
Me: “Okay…”
Retail guy: “Yeah, so…I don’t think we have any Bluetooth mice. All we have is right here.”
Me: “Thank…you…?”

Yeah, he had no idea what he was talking about.

Hey guys, I know nobody ever looks at the code section of my website, but I’ve changed it around a little recently. Took down some useless junk, and put up a little–and I mean little–script I dashed off today. It uses an online service to look up the carrier of a mobile phone number. (Works on all the ones I’ve tried. Returns “Unknown” on land lines.)

But I was wondering. Is there any sort of service that people actually want that I should put up on my website? For example, I have a file uploader which I password-protect. Jonah has a text-message-sender that he keeps behind a password. Does anyone really want any sort of simple service like those? I’m all for making my website marginally useful to people I know.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6907018.stm

Apparently they solved draughts. I mean, checkers.

I never liked checkers anyway. The strategy just involves trying to block your last row and get to the opponent’s last row simultaneously.