Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
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17
May
2009
Free Website, Advertisement Banner, & More!
If you’re looking for some freebies to help promote your business or non-profit organization, then you’re in luck. Over at Gravista Graphics, we’re offering a limited time survey competition to win a fully-featured website, customized with your business logo (which can be designed by us) and all content that you’ll need including contact information (with custom-designed forms), service and rate information, and pertinent images which can also be provided by us.
All you need to do to be eligible is to complete this simple survey. All applicants will receive a complimentary animated web banner to help spread the word of your business (.gif format), standard rack card design, and two logo designs for you to choose from.Yes, that’s right, just for submitting a survey, your business can receive a free logo for any use you see fit (business cards, t-shirt design, etc.), a free rack card design, and a free advertisement banner for your web affiliates.
Along with these gratuities, you’ll also be eligible for limited-time savings on many of our services as well. The survey itself is 100% confidential, we’ll never share your contact or business information with anyone, so what do you have to lose? Just head to www.gravistagraphics.com/survey.html and fill our all necessary fields to get this great offer. The deadline is June 15, 2009, so hurry before the offer ends!
14
Mar
2009
Site Changes & New Hosting
If you’re a regular visitor then you’ll notice that there have been some major changes here at The Soft Parade. The previous hosting I was with, Host For Web, had perhaps some of the worst service I’ve ever experienced in my ten years dealing with web-based businesses. Semi-frequent down times, slow server response times, and they also messed up my administration password (to access the control panel, FTP, root e-mail, etc.) and had to reset it several times in order for me simply to login to access my own files. If you call that “reliable service,” then you need to invest in a good dictionary to look up the meaning of those two words.
Anyway, since I was being jerked around like a fat middle-aged man who’s wallet is $20 lighter in a dimly lit alley I decided to invest in hosting with ProNet Hosting. I get more for less money and have had very stable service so far with good server speeds and loads of awesome features. I actually got this new hosting to start a new venture I call Hearts of Iron Central, a news and information site for Paradox Interactive’s Hearts of Iron strategy game series, and decided to bring over this site as well.
With the change I’ve upgraded the website’s software to the latest edition and installed a new, much more attractive (in my opinion) theme and some good tweaks to make it truly my own. Chances are there will be some missing pictures and media, and I’ll spend the next little while working to get everything back online. If you happen to see any bugs, please register here at the site and leave a comment in this post so I can get everything fixed.
I hope you enjoy the new and improve Soft Parade!
5
Jul
2008
The Progression of Gamers & The Gaming Community
While talking with some of my staff members at Planet Half-Life today, I was reminded on just how gamers have progressed throughout the years. I personally got into modern gaming (3D accelerated graphics) in 1999 when the first games I bought were Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear and, of course, Half-Life. Rogue Spear (and the entire R6 series) pretty much dies off as soon as they’re released, there’s no longevity to them, but Half-Life is a game that you can see trends happening with the entire gaming industry.
With each new benchmark in PC gaming comes a new crowd, and from what I can see, there have been four different generations of gamers. A gamer is a gamer whether you started playing Doom and Rise of the Triad or you just bought Team Fortress 2 last night, but each gamer can be labeled to a certain generation, even if only a few years separates them. I’m 21 years old, and yeah, I was playing Doom and RoTT on my 486DX2 back in the mid 90s in single-player mode, but that’s not my generation.
Doom (Left) & Rise of the Triad (Right)
That generation I’m speaking off is what I call Generation Old-School. Sure a lot of us were playing the games back in those days, but a true gamer is someone who goes above playing a few single-player levels, a gamer is someone who engulfs themselves in the game (or games), plays in heated online battles with their friends, enters tournaments, and so forth. This generation of gamers belongs largely to the people who are making the games today that newer generations are playing. Once people got a taste of how addictive shooters and strategy games are, they began building on that and making their own versions and maps of these games (called modders, modifying [modding] the game.
A prime example of an Old-Schooler is Mihn Le, a.k.a. The Gooseman. Le is a Vietnamese-Canadian who in 1996 began playing with the SDK (Software Development Kit) of the immensely popular game Quake. With game developers now releasing the tools needed for development, amateur programmers and artists can make their own games for people to enjoy, and the people that enjoy these amateur-produced games are just the kind of people I was talking about earlier when I mentioned those to who above and beyond and engulf themselves. Le is perhaps the epitome of the Old-Schoolers as he is the single most important reason that Half-Life continued to be played years after it was released (Source: GameSpy, an article by my old friend Kevin Bowen). Why is that, you ask? Because he, along with his friend Jess Cliffe, were the creating force behind the #1 most played online shooter known as Counter-Strike.
14
Jun
2008
Canadian Bill C-61, Going Too Far?
Most people by now have heard about the RIAA, the Recording Industry Association of America. For those of you who haven’t, it’s a trade group representing the American recording industry (that is to say music). The RIAA’s purpose of existence is to prevent downloading of illegally obtained music (such as through Torrent sites or P2P programs like Ares and Limewire), but they have a notorious reputation of going too far. The RIAA has no jurisdiction in Canada, so while old deceased ladies in the United States are being taken to court (Source), Canadians were able to download music, use their iPods without worries, and copy their purchased CDs to their computers.
That’s all going to change with Bill C-61, the introduction of the Canadian DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). Not only will downloading your music for free be illegal (understandably), but Canadians will lose rights to being able to record television shows, rip their purchased CDs and DVDs to their computers and iPods (coverting CDs to mp3s or DVDs to avi), and even posting family photos taken by a stranger. Yes, that’s right, if you ask that friendly Japanese couple at Peggy’s Cove to take a picture of you and your wife with your own camera, that couple owns the right to that image.
This harsh set of restrictions is the brainchild of Industry Minister Jim Prentice and Canadian Heritage Minister Josee Verner. The bill, which had been first introduced late last year but delayed (largely in part due to the publics repulse) will impose a $500 fine per violation of downloaded or infringed copywritten materials, that is to say for every mp3 you’ve downloaded or taken off of your favourite CD, it’s going to cost you $500. More staggering is the $20,000 fine per violation for making available copywritten materials, such as uploading to a website or having available on a P2P client program.
As with a lot of new legislature since the election of the Conservative government, Bill C-61 comes as a direct result of American pressure and American interests, and goes far beyond American restrictions on the subject. In layman’s terms, C-61 sets to limit our privacy, freedom of speech, consumer rights, and will put a serious strain on education and libraries with the digital locks that will be placed on virtually all digital media (movies, music, television, etc.).
24
Apr
2008
Steam & the Rest of the World
Starting off for the few of you who don’t know what Steam is, it’s a digital distribution and game management platform (software) that Valve Software developed to initially distribute and manage their own software library but has since exploded as the leader in digital distribution (more here). Digital distribution allows publishers of all sizes to sell their games online without packaging or CDs/DVDs thus cutting out the middle man of shipping and the like. Great, right?
For me as a Canadian, yeah, it saves me a trip to EB Games, keeps all of my CD keys safe and registered to only my account, and I need only open the program to have access to the dozens of games I have through Steam. But lately more light has been placed on customers outside of North America and the unfair treatment they’re getting from the publishers using the platform to distribute their titles.
That unfair treatment I mentioned is inflamed prices or complete unavailability outside of North America of certain titles. For example, you can purchase the popular and multi-award winning title “Call of Duty 4″ for around $49.95 (on average) throughout North America on Steam. But in Australia, that price is $88.50 for the exact same title with the exact same content. This is still cheaper than buying from a local EB Games in Australia which retails the game for $99.95, but why so expensive when there are no costs to physically manufacture the product (disks, manuals, boxes, etc.) and no shipping costs?
Sure, the Australian dollar is weaker, there are sales taxes, and probably some other stuff that the average consumer can’t see, but are the big-name publishers taking advantage of foreign Steam users with them already used to grossly inflamed prices in-store?
19
Mar
2008
Apple, Kiss My Ass
You’re now added to the list of companies I’ll never buy from again. Why? Well, I’ll tell you. Last summer I bought an iPod Nano 2GB for $179.99 from The Source; I thought it expensive for the size, but whatever. So I used it problem free all that time until the other night when it stopped playing songs, they simply wouldn’t play, but the iPod functioned (menus, changing options, etc.). So I manually restarted the iPod (holding down the Menu and OK buttons together for a few seconds), that didn’t work. I factory restored it through iTunes, that didn’t work. I formatted the entire iPod, restored, and updated the firmware, that didn’t work.
So now it’s time to research. I checked out a lot of forum posts (some on the official Apple site, some third party) and they all recommended I do everything I did. If that wasn’t to work, then that means the hard drive is corrupt and would need to be replaced. Well, as much as I want to replace a 2GB hard drive for over $100 on a $180 piece of shit that has a bad reputation for failing, I don’t even more.
So, Apple, you can kiss my ass. My sister’s 30GB iPod Classic is messed up too (freezes every few songs, odd skippings), and my ex’s iPod’s battery can’t hold a charge. Three people, three different iPods, three different problems. Microsoft, expect to sell another Zune in the near future, I’d trust your products long before I’d ever even conceive an Apple purchase again.
2
May
2007
Mr. Gates, I Owe You An Apology
For those of you who’ve been to my site and have read my rant about how much trouble I had with Vista, I realize now after over a day of “tinkering” with my laptop and having Vista on my desktop (without problem) that Microsoft isn’t to blame, but it’s actually Acer Technologies.
My desktop PC is what I use to experiment on for the most part, as all of my important work (school stuff, web site, pictures, etc.) are all stored on my laptop, so backing up the PC is just a more simple process. So I install Windows Vista on there, and not a single problem arose. I downloaded all of the appropriate drivers for my motherboard, chipset, video, etc. and everything is looking good, running smooth, and being very cooperative. The problems I had with Vista and my laptop didn’t exist on my desktop, and since my desktop is 100% up-to-date, I figured one of the Microsoft updates fixed my biggest hangup – Windows Live Messenger not working at all.
Excited at the prospect of Vista on the go, I backed up all of my work (both onto my second drive on my laptop and my PC, it’s better safe than sorry) and popped Vista back on. First problem – my chipset couldn’t be detected. The manual for my laptop doesn’t say anything closely related to anything that’s inside of this little plastic rectangle, nor does the Acer website. After a while of searching on Google for someone who had the same problem as I did, I discovered I needed the nForce 400 set drivers. It was annoying, but hey, it happens. I downloaded all of the other drivers, installed them, and all went well, there were no unknown devices in the device manager or what have you. Old Vista/Acer problem number one, please stand up and acknowledge yourself.
Apparently, the onboard Bison Acer OrbiCam webcam doesn’t much care for Vista still. When loading the software for the Acer Orbicam, the software will load in the background, but will not initialize. Annoying, so I want to end the process, so I open up the task manager and end the task… it won’t end, no matter how many times I try. So I reboot and dismiss it, it’s only a camera…
Now it’s time to load up my software. Everything so far is going well, I have Microsoft Office in, I have Winamp, Ares, Limewire, everything I use day to day. Now comes Windows Live Messenger. It installs, but after the installation, my CPU is going nuts but nothing is happening. I again open the task manager, and long behold the msnmsg.exe process, and like with the Acer OrbiCam, it won’t close. So I reboot a few times and try and try again, nothing at all.
So now I’m pretty pissed off again, hours have been spent trying to get this thing working as it should, but it doesn’t. So it’s back to the Acer website, and to my surprise, they have information on WLM 8.1 not working with Vista (see here). Reading it though, it says the problem is with the Acer EmPowering software that I didn’t load. But whatever, I install the version it tells me to and follow the instructions to the letter, no luck. I got one of my two e-mails to Acer Tech Support back about the OrbiCam problems, their ingenious solution is to update the drivers with the ones available on their website, something I mentioned that I did in my outgoing mail to them.
So, here I am again, on Windows XP. It wasn’t a fun process, but at least I got here, and with the benefit of a smooth running system clear of clutter. For those of you who are thinking Windows Vista is nothing but a nightmare, I won’t lie… it might be for you. If you’re going to upgrade to Windows Vista, make sure that all of your hardware is compatible. To do so, visit the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor and run the software, it’ll give you a detailed report on whether or not your system is compatible, and what changes need to be made if it isn’t. Vista is to XP as XP is to 98SE, the changes are numerous and beneficial, and if your system can take it, then you’re in for a pleasant treat.
However, I don’t recommend buying Acer products. Their customer service is about as good as a swift kick in the ass. But I suppose that there are worse out there… *cough* Dell. But I’ll save that for another time!
