Entries Tagged 'Practical information' ↓
July 14th, 2008 — Practical information
Everyone knows that this is Microsoft Windows Solitaire, installed on hundreds of millions of PCs and being played by hundreds of thousands of office workers and airline passengers right now to relieve the boredom. Intended originally by Microsoft to humanise the Windows interface, literally “to soothe people intimidated by the operating system”, it grew in importance as a training tool for the then unfamiliar WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) way of doing things that today we take for granted.
There are now three different Solitaire versions installed with Windows. In fact they are the first, second and third most popular games in the world in their own right! In order of current popularity they are Spider, Klondike and Free Cell. Many major corporations now de-instal these games, so great is the productivity loss attributed to employees addicted to playing them instead of working.
Spider is a two deck version of the game and is a relative newcomer to Windows, first coming with the Plus pack for Windows 98 and now with Vista, ME and XP. (Unsuprisingly the Vista version has several major bugs.) Played with real cards it was, famously, the favourite of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Klondike (the original and most famous Windows version) was developed in 1988 by then intern Wes Cherry, who famously received no financial benefit from his work, half the card backs were designed by his then girlfriend Leslie Kooy. The card deck itself was designed by Macintosh pioneer Susan Kare. It was release as part of Windows 3.0 in 1990.
Freecell as a game is much easier to complete. It was invented in the 1960s by a then 10 year old Paul Alfille, in 1978 he had coded it on to a mainframe. And then it went viral. Alfille sold the rights to Freecell to the University of Illinois, but Microsoft never paid the university any royalties. It was first included with Win32s, then with Microsoft Entertainment Pack Volume 2 and then the Best Of Microsoft Entertainment Pack before it was made a part of Windows 95 and has been a fixture in Windows ever since.
So Microsoft never paid a cent for the IP rights to Freecell, Spider has no IP rights to buy and they acquired the code for Klondike for free. It is amazing that the most played game in the world has this history. Especially compared to the many millions that game publishers still pay for celebrity and film rights to brighten up otherwise lacklustre games.
And now there is a gold rush of companies putting solitaire on the latest darling of game publishing, the Apple iPhone. Ambrosia Software’s Mondo Solitaire, Acid Solitaire from Red Mercury, Gameloft Platinum Solitaire, Maverick Software Yulan Mahjong Solitaire and four more. Yes, the Apple App Store is launching with no fewer than eight different publisher’s take on solitaire, with doubtlessly many more to come. And it is hardly surprising that so many people have had the same good idea at the same time. It is the world’s most played game.
June 3rd, 2008 — Practical information
I have had this before and last time it was a trojan, so I knew what to do. I didn’t realise that it was going to take two days. Apparently about a third of all the world’s PCs are infected.
First I updated to the latest version of
Ad Aware and the latest definitions file. This found and deleted some stuff, including
Virtumonde, but after doing this it was still there. I paid for the latest version of
Norton with added bells and whistles and did live update and ran the standard scan which showed nothing. So I ran the full scan, which takes ages, and it found and corrected several things. But still Virtumonde was there.
ClamWin with the latest database update did little more.
It was
Spybot Search and Destroy that got there in the end. Virtumonde had installed itself over 30 times on my computer and was disabling the Windows security centre and taking down the firewall. Spybot could find them but crashed repeatedly when asked to delete them as it told me it had run out of resources. Installing updates helped and repeated running gradually reduced the number of Virtumonde infections to zero.
Over the two days I ran all four of these programmes repeatedly as either the action of one would unearth something that one of the others would fix or it just reinfected. In between scans I ran
CCleaner to tidy up and restore the registry to good running order. Throughout the whole process the computer often got far worse, so sometimes it was like stirring treacle. And many times I had to turn it off at the power socket because it had frozen. Occasionally it went into pop up frenzies and often advertising downloads took over the computer.
So now it is fixed and none of the scans can find any more nasties. The computer is working better than it has for ages as the whole process fixed a lot more issues than just the Virtumonde. But I am not convinced, all these scanners are only as good as their databases, which inevitably lag behind the real world.
So why don’t you try it on your computer? Run all four scans and see what you find. You will quite possibly be in for a nasty surprise. And always update the scanner database before using it, without the latest definitions you are wasting your time.
March 28th, 2008 — Practical information
If you work in the video game industry please feel free to connect with me on Linkedin. I am an OpenLink networker and welcome all such connections. You can find my Linkedin profile here.
March 12th, 2008 — Practical information
Here I will list a whole pile of websites that are useful to the game industry professional. Some I have mentioned before, but putting them all in one place is pretty convenient. This is information overload.
There is enough information there for even the keenest budding game industry professional. Please add any great industry sites you may know using comments. Bloggers and journalists feel free to copy this anywhere you want.
March 7th, 2008 — Practical information
Some people think that Wikipedia is the sum of all human knowledge. With 9.25 million articles it is certainly big and the fact that anyone (supposedly) can add to this store of knowledge should make the content exhaustive and authoritative. There are several articles in Wikipedia that I was a central player in. And from my expert position I can see the flaws in these articles:
- Liverpool Software Gazette. This was my idea. I published and funded it and edited several issues.
- Imagine Software Where I was Operations Director in charge of sales and marketing, inter alia.
- Codemasters. Where I was one of the first employees and was in charge of marketing, inter alia.
- Dizzy. The repeatedly chart topping game brand which I did the marketing for.
So I thought that it would be good to apply my intimate knowledge of these subjects by contributing to Wikipedia. I had already written articles involving all four subjects and those articles are on this blog. So the simplest thing was to add the permalink for those articles to the External Links section of the Wikipedia entries. Then anyone researching could drill down and get the extra knowledge. So:
You would think this is what Wikipedia is all about. People who are experts on a subject adding their knowledge to the collected expertise of the encyclopedia. So you may be surprised to find that the editors deleted these entries. I wasn’t, though, I had already been warned that the Wikipedia editors are now a destructive force standing in the way of knowledge. That deletions of quality expert additions is now the norm and that a lot of people have given up trying.
Which is a great pity. The enormous problem that Wikipedia has is that it is a monopoly and like all monopolies it is deeply flawed. If they had to face up to competition they would have to get their act together. So it is good to hear on the grapevine that this is a project that Google is planning. In the interests of human knowledge let’s hope so.
February 27th, 2008 — Practical information
Most of the knowledge available to keen gamers about the gaming industry can be of a pretty low quality. This is because that knowledge is third or fourth hand. As a very minimum it has been “spun” by a marketing department (I have done loads of this) and then “interpreted” by a journalist. But there is a way round this, keen enthusiasts can get their knowledge directly from the horses mouth, if they read the right blogs.
Whilst there aren’t many blogs from the publishing side of the video game industry there a quite a few from the development side. And they are excellent. These are the guys who actually make the games that everyone plays, so they know what they are talking about. And when they analyse a game they do so with an authority no magazine could match. These guys are the complete opposite of the fanboy, they are intelligent, informed and incisive. There are quite a few in my blogroll but here are a random selection:
For anyone with any interest in games the above blogs are just pure gold. Japanmanship, for instance is written by a game developer who works for a Japenese games company, lives in Japan and speaks Japanese. If you want to understand the game industry in Japan there is no finer source of knowledge. It amazes me when fanboys with a millionth of his knowledge and experience argue with him on forums.
Note to bloggers, journalists etc, feel free to copy and paste the above list or even the whole article to anywhere you want.
February 13th, 2008 — Practical information
For those that don’t know: “First Tuesday is a professional networking forum for established technology entrepreneurs and companies seeking venture capital, investors and related service providers. Founded in 1998, we now have 38,000 members and our 10 branches across Europe host meetings on the first Tuesday every month.”
On the first Tuesday this February the subject of the London seminar was “The Opportunities in 2008 for the UK Games Industry”, so I went along. It was very well attended with game industry, city and traditional media people, many of CXO level. There was social networking before and after the seminar which was very valuable.
The seminar itself was started by Phil Elliot of Gameindustry.biz with a look at the facts and figures of the industry. For anyone who likes this kind of stuff I can recommend VG CHARTZ which provides a wealth of up to date data. Not only that, it has a lively forum where this data is analysed. Unfortunately there is a low signal to noise ratio due to typical fanboyism, but if you filter that out there is much value.
Roger Walkden of AWOMO gave us an enthusiastic sales pitch for something that looks like a combination of Second Life and Steam, unfortunately he doesn’t have Counter Strike to launch it with. It looked good, I hope they have the stamina to see it to fruition.
Amongst the other talks a very brief presentation by Dick Davies of Ambient Performance caught my attention. They create private virtual worlds for business and the military. The possibilities here are, quite literally, infinite. It is when I see things like this that my faith is restored that video gaming is still at it’s very beginning, that it will become by far the biggest media in the world and that we have a huge amount of innovation to come.
Considering that the seminar was about this year’s opportunities it was a pity that there wasn’t a little more attention devoted to the emerging mobile platforms of nGage and iPod/iPhone, the effects of industry consolidation with the growth in big media investment and the convergence of social networking and gaming. But you can’t cover everything and what they did cover made the trip more than worthwhile.
And a little clue emerged about what Rupert Murdoch is up to, the guest list for this event included Corporate Development Director, News Corporation.
