(It’s been a hectic few weeks, but I’m on the last few weeks of the semester and a few more things are in the pipeline before the end of the year, reader[s].)

In news that makes me want to hurl people from a window, Dan Lyons, current Newsweek tech reporter and former creator of the brilliant The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs has hung up his blogging cap fulltime after his editor made him delete postings about the brouha over Jerry Yang departing from Yahoo which described Yahoo’s PR as “lying sacks of shit.”

All things considered, it certainly isn’t earth shattering to consider that PR flacks may have an agenda favorable towards spreading the word of whoever pays their mortgage, but given that Yahoo current financial state could best be described by the term “massive nosedive,” Lyons certainly isn’t out of line for calling them out for spewing BS on his personal blog.

At the risk of excessive hyperbole, I just want to state my opinion outright: if you have a PS3, you need to buy LittleBigPlanet. This might seem a bit excessive, but LBP’s approach to gameplay essentially reinvents the wheel, as it’s equal parts game and platform.

The actual mechanics of the game are fairly esoteric; it’s Super Mario by way of Garry’s Mod, as the game is built around a traditional platforming framework (Point A to Point B), but LBP’s level construction tools give the game much of its replayability. The game is built around its user-created content, as the meat of the game revolves around players streaming levels other players created, but the sheer quantity and quantity of the levels that users have made in the beta alone speaks well for the game down the road.

There’s a compelling haphazard diversity among these levels, ranging from space travel and Guns’N'Roses covers to calculators, but when one looks at levels like these, it’s hard not to wonder about the possibilities that LBP could produce. Admittedly, among standouts like these, there is a fair amount of chaff, but LBP features a fairly thorough level rating system; players can choose to bookmark their favorite levels, which other players can see and, like in the similarly content-based Spore, tags can be assigned to describe the content of the level.

There’s a certain simplicity that’s inherent in the gameplay, and whether or not that’s a good thing depends on your persuasion; LBP has an unapoligetically simple premise, which might turn off players raised on Halo and Grand Theft Auto, but that it does so much within this premise makes the game especially satifying.

Here’s an audio report that aired on Impact 89FM on October 3, 2008.

Barack Obama (credit: L. Bomeli)

Spore

Looking at Will Wright’s career thus far, Spore falls into a logical progression. After all, once you’ve controlled ants, people and cities, what’s left but the whole universe?

The game is divided up into 6 sections, going from the start of life to interstellar travel. There’s a definite casual-friendly bent to the game, as Wright readily admits to, and it helps in making the game’s lofty ambitions conceivable.

The creature creator benefits from this, as it’s powerful enough to make an astounding variety of creatures but it’s also easy to pick up and use. The casual focus doesn’t work as well with gameplay though; I’m still a bit early in the game, but the lack of parts available reduces combat down to click speed over tactics.

Still, the Maxis touch is present and the ambition behind Spore does lend it a certain amount of appeal. I still have some reservations about gameplay, but the larger package is interesting enough to keep me coming back.

With rapidly increasing technologies like the internet and handheld devices sweeping the world, much has been made of the idea of media convergence and the emergence of new mediums in which gather and report news information. Along with this emerging market seems to come a new type of “need it now” demographic that constantly needs to be fed with the latest news and information. The media’s adaptation to newer mediums of communication and their demographics can be noted in no better way than looking at the news coverage or “overcoverage” of the 2008 presidential campaign. Media coverage of this election has been unrivaled by any past election—including the unprecedented coverage of the Democratic and Republican primaries. Media outlets have progressively moved to coverage in conjunction with the “need it now” demographic—which has produced new types of stories that make one contemplate the ethics, necessity and importance of a news story. Embedded journalists covering the campaigns tend to be story hungry and sometimes lose key focus by keying in on minute, petty events, at the expense of stories or issues that could matter to the public.

Evidence of this can be noted on both campaign trails. Recently, during a press gathering by a McCain spokesperson, a reporter asked the spokesperson a question about McCain’s economic knowledge. In an effort to explain his telecommunication policy record, the spokesman went on to say McCain helped create this, as he held up his BlackBerry cell phone. Although the spokesperson meant that some of McCain’s past decisions lead to telecom policies that enabled the development of products like the BlackBerry, media outlets, including CNN.com’s political “Ticker” had the quote up on the web so fast, they were forced to post an update clarifying the matter less than an hour after the original posting. In previous elections, something like this would not warrant coverage because of the technological constraints of the time period—however now with the ability to move information quicker than most can comprehend it, new decisions face news organizations. In retrospect, it seems that the media created a story out of a complete non-issue, or as the McCain campaign called it, a joke. The daily grind of trying to uncover news items and scoop stories pushed the news companies like CNN to publish something that turned an impromptu comment into a political issue which in the end was corrected and had very little, if any influence on the election.

Another case of “overcoverage” by embedded campaign media can be observed in the case of “Sweetie-gate,” as some have called it. While Barack Obama was on the campaign trail touring a factory in Michigan, a reporter from a Detroit television station tried to sneak a question in as he was walking and talking. Obama replied, “Hold on one second there sweetie.” Once again, a portion of the campaign (that happened to be caught on tape) became the focus of political stories and discussions across the nation. Reporters quickly scrubbed through old footage to see if this was an expression Obama routinely used. With all the media pressure, Obama called the reporter and left an apology on her voicemail.

In both of these cases, the attention of the media was diverted by the necessity to constantly report a story and be quickest to all things during a campaign. Although the media largely covered each case at the time, the stories became moot and irrelevant in the long run, all at the expense of covering other issues more relevant to the general public. Also, if there is no politically relevant news, there needs to be less of an incentive to “create” political news by hyping up these types of situations and diverting national attention.

I’m working my way through Spore right now, and a review’s coming up, but in the meantime, I thought that warning the public about the threat that zombies pose to our Olympic gymnasts would be adequate. (look carefully)

Details are emerging on Comcast’s new network management techniques and the future conceptual model of internet usage hangs in the balance.

Comcast’s new model for network management replaces two policies that were inherently flawed and show evidence of half baked planning.  The old strategy was a combination of packet forgery and an arbitrary but effective practice of eliminating the top 1000 accounts from their 14.4 million-household subscriber base.  These policies were not only counter to the fledgling notion of digital liberty, but they acted against a major market force in the duopolistic battle for ISP supremacy: peer to peer filesharing.  This combination of possible competitive weakness, increasing pressure from the FCC, and uneasy if underinformed lawmakers caused a shift in policy that has been orchestrated at the highest levels of Comcast’s management.  It has required soul-searching by executives that have spent the last twenty years trying to eke ever-higher margins from the delivery of television, the previous generation’s medium of choice.

With this background in mind, let’s consider the new approach.  Like the old, it is two-pronged.  The first strategy reworks the technical architecture of their packet-delivery system.  By actively collecting data on the per-modem traffic volume within each CMTS, Comcast is expanding on the more rudimentary “token bucket” approach that allowed it to allocate spare network capacity above provisioned speeds to subscribers.  The major difference here is that Comcast is using traffic thresholds to cut into existing traffic streams rather than to increase throughput.  As many CMTS headends become more congested, this is a cost-effective way to delay network upgrades while affecting a very small number of subscribers in a small way.  While my personal preference is that they build out, I understand that the current economic realities may not allow for that sort of largess.  The new system, as outlined here, sets conservative yet generally reasonable thresholds of 70% sustained CMTS usage for 15 minutes and 80% sustained usage of provisioned speed within a household for 15 minutes as grounds for relatively unintrusive, non-discriminatory QoS augmentations.  As such, I argue that this is a satisfactory approach to network management.

It is the second proposed strategy that causes me great alarm.  Comcast has outlined a 250GB transfer cap per billing cycle on the combined upstream and downstream traffic consumption of each subscriber.  This cap is mentioned as a footnote in the document describing the protocol-agnostic management techniques.  The disturbing thing to note is Comcast’s own admission of the cap’s irrelevance to the issue at hand.  Quoted directly, Comcast notes, “that cap does not address the issue of network congestion, which results from traffic levels that vary from minute to minute” (Comcast 2008, 2).

Why, then, does the cap exist?  One word: video.  Comcast’s major source of profitable revenue is its myriad agreements with television content providers.  As providers find it more economical to deliver content over the internet and users demand hassle-free on-demand viewing, “television” programming is moving online.  Comcast’s 250GB cap is a purely pyschological device.  At 6 megabits per second, Comcast’s standard transfer rate for downloads, it would only take about 93 hours of continuous usage to hit the cap for an entire month.  Even if Comcast successfully made the argument that 250GB is a generous amount of data transfer, the real effectiveness of the policy lies in the thought patterns it generates in the average user.

Wary of having their service cancelled and without good tools to monitor their usage, subscribers will either consciously or unconsciously self-censor their behavior online; they will ration bandwidth based on their perception of what is excessive.  It is this alteration of perception that Comcast hopes will drive households back to the TV, where the content is controlled and the profits are assured.

As an exercise in sheer oneupsmanship, it seemed damn near impossible to trump last fall’s Rock Band, considering the progression that led up to that point. After 3 iterations of strictly guitar-based gameplay, fleshing out the experience to include vocals, bass guitar and drums was nothing less than absurd; one could be forgiven for wondering if a literal kitchen sink would eventually be involved.

While RB’s competitors are covering similar ground for their fall releases, stuffing in their own proprietary plastic instrument peripherals, Rock Band 2 ($59.99, X360, PS3, Wii, PS2) takes a decidedly less ambitious approach, for better or worse.

Developer Harmonix has always described the game in interviews as a “platform,” and in that sense, it might be better to call the game an expansion pack, loaded with numerous incremental upgrades, instead of a full fledged sequel.

The game comes packaged with 84 tracks, 20 more than in the original, and selections run the gamut from classic rock to metal, though there’s a heavy slant towards recent bands; a majority fall under the “Hey, didn’t I hear this on a movie/T.V. soundtrack?” category.

This isn’t necessarily an issue, though, as with most rhythm-based games, how much enjoyment you get from Rock Band 2 depends on how well you know the song and the game strikes a good balance between solid tracks and songs meant to be drunkenly group-sung during your next party. (With said drunken parties, the self-explanatory addition of a “No-Fail” mode definitely helps in avoiding buzzkills from a friend failing everyone else out of the song)

Outside of the track additions, the single-player experience’s the only major aspect of the game to get any considerable attention; the traditional single-player campaign, where players would unlock songs by progressing through the track list, has gotten rolled into the “World Tour” mode.

While both modes served the same purpose in the original, having them merged together makes the process of unlocking songs slower than it needs to be (though the usual codes still apply, for those of a less moral persusasion). “World Tour” mode has, thankfully, been made more flexible, as band leaders have been taken out; players aren’t bound to instruments either, so missing one person won’t force players to stick to Quickplay.

Challenges, band battles and drum trainer round out the additions; the first two have bands facing off on playlists with various constraints for personal & leaderboard notoriety. Finding other players is also a relatively pain-free process.

While playing Rock Band online could be best described as an exercise in self-loathing and patience, finding players was quick and dropped players could leave without forcing the session to end, a definite plus.

Drum Trainer is relatively straight forward, as each mode (Beat/Fills) throws a variety of rhythms for players to master at adjustable speeds. For players struggling to master drums, the lack of instruction beyond the lines doesn’t really lend itself well to training, but for players who need the practice, it works well enough.

On the whole, Rock Band 2 serves its main purpose well enough; namely, more Rock Band, though whether or not that’s an issue depends on your enthusiasm for the franchise. RB 2’s relative unambition is its biggest fault, though.

Considering the scene a year ago, where Guitar Hero (now bundling a full fledged music creation suite), was getting derided for “playing it safe,” the role reversal at play is definitely a bit disappointing. After all, having Rock Band come to its second outing by rehashing its older work seems a little… well, un-rock and roll, to say the least.

McCain adviser: Blackberry a ‘miracle’ he ‘helped create’

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/

Heh…

   With the release of the 2.1 firmware, Engadget reports on the latest version on unlocking the iPhone more commonly known as Jailbreaking. However, Engadget poses an interesting question: With the app store, do we need to Jailbreak phones anymore?

   I have multiple thoughts on this. On one hand, the app store does fill the functionality that unlocking an iPhone would give me, making it pointless. On the other hand, the App store as a distribution point isn’t as open as I would like it to be. Add into the mix the restrictions Apple places on applications and I understand why one would still unlock the platform. In the end, as long as people want to hack the piece of hardware till their hearts content, people will still unlock the iPhone.