Microsoft's operating system strategy - this must be wrong?

Word on tech street this week is that Microsoft is looking to make a significant change with the next release  of Windows and make it available on the ARM processor architecture as well as x86/x64. The original Bloomberg story hints that this is so that Windows can get a foothold in the tablet computer market. I hope they’re wrong.

Windows (the one based on NT, not CE) is a desktop operating system. Unfortunately for Microsoft, they cannot pull off the same trick as Apple has achieved with OS X – to reskin the user interface of their desktop operating system to work on mobile devices. This is because Windows wasn’t written to ever support that, and it’s codebase makes it difficult to achieve. Even if it was possible, is there really much point? The main reason for doing it would be to take advantage of the vast library of existing applications for the platform, but these haven’t been designed for mobile/tablet devices either and are going to be clunky to use.

The only chance of success I can see with an ARM-based version of Windows is in the netbook segment. These devices usually have traditional keyboards and pointing devices which is the only effective way to use Windows. Having said that, it's not going to be the biggest of markets - tablets are where it's at thanks to the iPad.

Can it not be this simple?

The variations of Windows CE are a different story. Windows Phone 7 looks like an excellent system – it has a user interface that makes the iPhone look dated in a number of areas. They did the right thing with this OS – break with the past and backwards compatibility and start again. It might still become a failure but that will be due to being massively late to market compared to Android and iOS, rather than because of any failure in the product itself.

Tablet computing represents a real opportunity for Microsoft. The market is younger and less established than with smartphones, and although the iPad has an significant early lead at the premium end there’s still a huge opportunity in the mainstream segment. Competition is already building up in the shape of Android tablets, so they need to act quickly.

Microsoft’s best bet for success with tablet computing is not Windows. They should use Windows Phone 7 as a starting point and produce a real tablet computer OS. Earlier this year it looked like this was going to happen with a bizarrely named OS called “Windows Embedded Compact 7”, a variant of Windows Phone 7. The system was even demonstrated on an Asus tablet and looked very promising, but even more bizarrely Asus has now dropped it in favour of Android.

Windows Embedded Compact 7, apparently

Whatever Microsoft does next – and it’s rumoured they’ll be telling us at CES, they need to do two things. Firstly, announce something that actually does the job and does it well – they have shown they can do this with WP7. Secondly, whatever they present must be shipping or guaranteed to ship very soon. People are sick of their vapourware, and it’s a pointless tactic when there’s viable solutions such as Android out there.

Android 3.0 is now rumoured to ship in March, and a revised iPad is expected in February so time is running out

Movie review: The Town

Ben Affleck’s second directing effort is a crime drama set in the Boston neighbourhood of Charlestown, following the career of a crew of bank robbers led by Doug MacRay (Affleck). The film opens with a hit on a bank where things don’t go quite to plan and slightly-unhinged James Coughlin (Jeremy Renner) grabs female bank worker Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) as a hostage. They let her go almost immediately, but a few days later Coughlin is concerned that she could lead the police to them and wants to eliminate her. MacRay objects to such an extreme solution and decides instead to follow her to try and determine if she poses a genuine risk.

It’s fairly obvious that MacRay feels guilt for what Claire went through and feels the need to try and help her, which means he doesn’t keep his distance very well and the two meet and strike up a tentative relationship, with MacRay seeing Claire as a way out of the life he wants to get away from. As you would expect, their relationship leads to some tense moments where MacRay’s cover is nearly blown, and his life is further complicated by the police starting to take an interest in him and his crew as they investigate the bank job.

I thoroughly enjoyed Affleck’s first film - Gone Baby Gone - being particularly impressed by the natural style and engaging characters. It has a unique feel, stripping back Hollywood gloss but not going over the top with grittiness in representing the lives and locations of people living in less than ideal conditions. The Town takes a very similar approach and benefits greatly from it. It’s difficult to categorise easily – it’s tempting to say his work has a documentary style because of the sense of realism, but this is doing a disservice to the high quality production, cast and stories he delivers.

If there was one criticism I had with Gone Baby Gone, it was that the behaviour of the characters occasionally went beyond the limits of credibility, or perhaps more correctly - the film didn't do a good enough job of justifying their actions. The same is also true of The Town to a lesser extent – the characters are mostly excellent but one of them in particular is sometimes a little unbelievable: Claire is overly giddy and flirty with Affleck in a scene where they’re having a drink together - out of place given that they are strangers who met in a laundrette moments earlier. Her trauma from the bank job seems to disappear and reappear to suit the story and on the whole it's not a very convincing piece of acting. On the other hand, Ben Affleck plays his part well and makes the character likeable despite his chosen career, although the character’s emotional issues caused by the departure of his mother early in his childhood could have been explained more concisely.

Apart from those minor criticisms, The Town is an excellent film and almost certainly my favourite of 2010. The action scenes aim for realism rather than overblown thrills but still remain tense and exciting. The Boston setting gives the film a unique feel - a welcome departure from the usual crime story locations of New York or Los Angeles. It falls just short of being a classic but is another excellent piece of work from what is turning out to be a surprisingly good director.

Cars: The Chrysler 300C is not a Bentley

I’ve always liked the Chrysler 300C – the reviews say it’s not that great from behind the wheel but it’s made-for-gangsters styling is nicely done and translates well outside of the US, which is usually a problem with American cars. But soon after they appeared on British roads, a disturbing trend for replacing the standard grill with a Bentley-style grill became popular. As if that wasn’t enough, yesterday I saw a 300C that actually had Bentley badges on the boot lid.

There’s an obvious issue right away – it’s a pretty desperate move to stick badges from a more expensive car onto a cheaper car. It’s worse than the young lads who buy Fords and Vauxhalls and de-badge them. If you don’t like the brand, perhaps you shouldn’t buy the car? But turning your 300C into a fake Bentley is worse for a more important reason – you’re completely misunderstanding the car and the person who designed it. It is actually the case that the design of the 300C was inspired by a well known British car brand, but it is in fact Rover, not Bentley.

Now before any 300C owners get upset, it’s not as bad as it sounds. The Rover in question is the P5B Coupe, one of my all time favourite cars from an era when Rover was a very well regarded brand. These days, the Rover name is mud, ruined in two phases - firstly by putting the badge on warmed over Austin’s in the early 1990’s, and secondly by continuing to sell severely outdated models in the years before the business collapsed in 2005. But decades ago, the P5, P6 and to some extent the SD1 were cars that cost a few bob and were the preferred means of transport by Prime Ministers, Government ministers and even the Queen.

How are the P5B and the 300C similar? Firstly, the P5B was innovative for offering a coupe option which brought a low roofline and shallow windows, but retained the four door saloon body. This is heavily echoed in the 300C. The standard 300C front grill (not the Bentley one!) and headlamps are very similar in concept, and more so at the rear with the tall thin tail lights.

By the way, the Rover is the one at the top!

Are there any 300C owners out there principled enough to put the original grill back on their car and add some Rover badges?

Movie review: The Expendables

One Saturday morning back in the summer I saw one of those cheaply-produced movie shows that mostly consists of trailers for upcoming films and - if you’re lucky – an interview with one of the stars. There was a piece about a new film called The Expendables and after watching some clips and the enthusiastic and funny interview with Stallone I was sold - it looked brilliant. A film that pays tribute to the great action films of the 1980’s, with an all-star cast. To top it off, I think Stallone did a superb job of the recent Rocky and Rambo updates. Many people cringed at the thought of another Rocky film after the franchise was destroyed by increasingly bad sequels, but what we got was a sincere and honest film with an engaging and surprisingly credible story. It was also smart enough to realise that the only truly great Rocky film was the first one because it also knew that what actually matters is the characters and story rather than the overblown fight scenes of the sequels.

Speaking of character stories, that is exactly what The Expendables isn’t. Who are these guys? How did they meet? What are they trying to do? None of these questions even come close to being answered. The answer is almost certainly that it doesn’t matter, they are ‘expendables’ after all. My problem with this is that for an action movie to be good, you have to enjoy the action scenes. For action scenes to be good you have to care about the outcome, and for that to happen there has to be some sort of connection with the characters involved.

I’ll keep the plot summary brief as you’ve probably either read it elsewhere already, or quite possibly don’t care: the basic premise is that a fictional island called Vilena is being ruled by a corrupt ex-CIA operative and a home-grown dictator. Barney Ross (Stallone) and his crew are offered a big payout to overthrow him, so they head over there on a recon where they meet a girl who’s one of the few locals putting up any kind of resistance. There’s soon trouble and they have to flee but Barney is fixated by the girl and vows to return and save her.

Without any characterisation in the film, the action sequences have a massive job to do because they have to deliver real spectacle to keep the viewer entertained - which they do with mixed success. There’s a great scene where Jason Statham pops out of the nose of a seaplane with a cannon and they carry out an aerial strafing attack on a jetty, finishing it off by dumping fuel out of the aircraft and igniting it. But some other scenes are less impressive - in particular I found the car chase sequence with Gunner Jensen (Dolph Lundgren) dull. The grand finale is also a bit patchy in places.

Some of the jokes and plot devices in the film are particularly dated. Lee Christmas (Statham) has an on-off relationship with a woman who has a new man that turns out to be a woman-basher. Eventually Christmas finds out and beats the living daylights out him while she looks on in admiration. Very contrived and something that should have stayed in the 1980’s. There’s also a scene where you feel embarrassed for Jet Li acting out a supposedly funny dialog about being short.

The Expendables isn’t a terrible film but the problem is the feeling of it being a wasted opportunity given the talent involved and all-star cast. A follow-up is apparently in the works, but it really needs to offer more than just a simple concept and an outstanding cast. I’d like to see a prequel that fills the story out a bit more, but the age of some of the actors is going to make this difficult. Perhaps some scenes showing the FBI looking over the character profiles of the expendables crew would be enough to provide some kind of identity to the characters. Either that or get Michael Bay in to direct the action scenes and push that side of it a bit more.

Maybe stick to Rambo and Rocky next time Sly – from his other films I’d recommend First Blood, Rambo (2008), Rocky Balboa and even the cheesy Cliffhanger as offering more quality and fun respectively.

The best Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas experience (in 2010)

After completing GTA IV and the Liberty City stories, there didn’t seem many options left for getting a GTA fix. But there was one interesting possibility: due to my lost decade of gaming I’d never played GTA: San Andreas, and word on the street is that it’s great - quite possibly better than its successor. But I don’t own any old consoles, so playing the game wasn’t going to be straightforward...

Xbox version

The obvious choice was to get a copy of San Andreas for the original xbox and play it on my 360. It would be hassle-free to get running and I could use the excellent 360 controller. A copy arrived in the post from an eBay seller and I fired it up expecting great things. What appeared on the screen turned out to be a massive disappointment. I was surprised at how poor the visuals are, even for an old game. It runs in a non-widescreen mode and the 3d rendering is very basic, but the biggest issue is how blurred and washed out everything looks. It reminded me of the old composite video outputs from 1980’s computers. To be fair, my use of a 720p Optoma projector throwing an image roughly 8ft across is not an ideal display for pre-HD gaming, but even so the results were very poor. My hunch is it must look better running natively on the original xbox.

Left wanting from the xbox version of the game, I was interested to see how other platforms fared. A video on Youtube shows a comparison between the xbox and PS2 versions, but I find it inconclusive. Lighting looks better on the PS2 version but other elements looked worse. It didn’t really matter anyway because I don’t have a PS2 (or a PS3 to use in backwards compatible mode).

Over to the PC

The only remaining option is the PC version. I have an Atom/Ion powered HTPC, optimised for quiet/cool running but it should be powerful enough to run a 2005 game. So another eBay purchase got me the PC version of San Andreas. Although the game is old, it will run on Windows 7 - the OS detects the game and applies some compatibility settings, turning off Aero to avoid issues. When I got the game running it was obvious from the start that is was streets ahead of the xbox version. Significantly, widescreen resolutions are available and 1280x720 suits my 720p projector perfectly. As you would expect, the graphics on the PC version are still basic by today’s standards, but even so they are a massive step up from the Xbox. The game’s display options page offers a number of settings, so I upped the visual quality to very high and added some anti-aliasing. Although not a powerful machine, my HTPC copes nicely even when the draw distance is  increased to prevent pop-in.

Configuration woes

So all would be well, except for the Achilles heel of the PC platform – control methods. The game works fine on the keyboard but that doesn't suit me – my keyboard is a really cheap wireless model with no keypad. Besides, the GTA IV control system using the xbox 360 controller is superb and this is the experience I wanted with San Andreas too.

I bought an xbox 360 controller for Windows and tried to get it working with GTA:SA. Using the games built-in configuration options was hopeless – the biggest issue being no support for using the second analogue stick to move the camera around.After trawling through a bunch of GTA forums I discovered a utility called SAAC which allows a much fuller set of configuration options for San Andreas. This is an excellent piece of work and a credit to its author. Unfortunately it took some serious faffing about to get working. I had to grab a patch that installed some older DirectX DLL’s just to get it running. When it did run, GTA refused to load, crashing on startup. Eventually I realised that this was because my version of the game is 1.01 which doesn’t allow any hacks or plugins. To fix this I had to find a 1.0 version of the game EXE file and use it to downgrade my copy. Once this was done, GTA would finally run. Except for one annoying issue - the widescreen resolutions had disappeared. Apparently these were only added into 1.01, so I had to find another patch to re-enable them on 1.0. Grrrr!

I used an existing SAAC profile for the 360 controller off the internet, but tweaked a few settings to bring it more in line with the GTA IV control system. One minor issue is that I couldn’t replicate the left/right trigger set up for targeting and shooting because the triggers are on the same axis and conflict with each other. Strangely, they work fine in vehicle mode to handle braking and acceleration.

Success at last

Once the controller was working well, I finally started to settle into the game. It’s still great fun six years later. The dialog between the characters is entertaining and frequently very funny. The opening sequence of the game where your character and his gang are on BMX bikes is hilarious to play. As I spent time with the game only a few more tweaks were necessary – I had to increase the dead-zone on the analogue stick in SAAC (the D slider) to stop the character walking around on his own. I played about with the graphics a bit more and got a nice compromise between frame rate and detail – but this wouldn’t be necessary on more powerful PC’s.

So it is possible to get a good game of San Andreas in 2010, and if you can’t you’re just a buster man - a buster!

Call of Duty: Black Ops - campaign story

I've recently blogged a full review of  Black Ops, where it came in for some criticism for dated graphics and poor computer AI. Although I felt the game is of fairly average quality, one high point for me is well fleshed out story line and it's brilliantly chosen Cold War setting.

Story background

The Cold War is a unique forty year period in history - for the first time ever humanity was in possession of weapons so powerful that the two major superpowers of America and the Soviet Union could lay waste to the entire planet. The threat of a full-scale nuclear war was something the world had to live with and during the Cuban missile crisis we were on the brink of it actually happening.

Fortunately the act of firing nuclear missiles at each other remained unimaginable for both sides, but the USA and USSR remained in a state of tension, fighting proxy wars against each other in Korea, Vietnam and later Afghanistan. Rather than fight each other directly, they funded and supported third parties who fought against each other. The main driving force behind the conflicts was America trying to prevent Russian communist rule from spreading further around the globe - much of Eastern Europe fell under Soviet control at the end of the Second World War.

With such a tense setting, Black Ops has massive potential for a great story line and it tries to make the most of it. The story begins with your character - Alex Mason, seemingly being interrogated and midly tortured - while facing questions relating to involvement in various operations in the theatre of the cold war. As your character recounts these episodes, you get to experience them by playing out the mission. This is an excellent way to allow lots of flexibility in the time frame and geographical location. A summary of the campaign story follows below - with spoilers - so don't read further if you don't want to know the key plot twists and turns!

Opening sequence and early missions

The opening sequence of the game takes place in Cuba where you carry out an assassination attempt on Fidel Castro. Although never officially acknowledged, Castro survived a huge number of attempts on his life, the majority of which are thought to involve the CIA. As the mission draws to a close, Mason does shoot Castro but it later appears to be a body double. You are captured and Castro hands you over to Nikita Dragovich, who throws you in Vortkuta prison. At this stage you meet Victor Reznov - a former Russian captain who becomes a central character in the story arc of the game. He helps you accomplish a difficult escape from Vorkuta but is seemingly killed.

Back on US soil, there is a lengthy cutscene where your character walks through the Pentagon and the White House, leading up to a meeting with JFK about the threat that General Dragovich represents. Dragovich is involved in a plot use a Nazi-developed biological agent against the USA, and President Kennedy asks you directly to put a stop to his plans. The campaign against Dragovich begins with you infiltrating Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan - initially in disguise - to stop a missile launch and kill Dragovich. Arriving too late, the missile launches successfully but you have an opportunity to shoot it down. At the end of the mission you destroy a limo carrying Dragovich but fail to verify his death. This turns out to be a poor decision as you will later find out.

Vietnam

The next chapter of the game takes place in Vietnam and has you taking part in the battle of Khe Sahn as well as seeking intelligence on Soviet involvement in the war. At one stage you are reunited with Reznov, which you might find a bit odd - and you would be right.

In the middle of the Vietnam section of the game is a mission called Project Nova (my personal favourite), which is a flash back of Reznov relating to his experiences at the end of the World War II. He was part of a squad led by Dragovich and Lev Kravchenko who found a smashed boat containing Nazis and V2 rockets loaded with the Nova biological weapon. Dragovich tries to kill Reznov at this stage but the arrival of the British SAS scuppers that plan and Reznov survives.

Back in Vietnam, intelligence relating to a downed cargo plane that could be carrying a biological weapon needs to be investigated.When the plane is found there are a few nasty surprises - firstly the weapon has already been retrieved by the Russian special forces who then capture you and hand you to the Viet Cong.

Recalling scenes from The Deer Hunter, a very tense scene involving Russian roulette takes place, but Mason manages to make a break for freedom along with his comrade Frank Woods. After finding a helicopter the pair fly to intercept and kill Kravchenko. Reznov reappears again in this mission. When Kravchenko is located he puts up quite a fight and clobbers Mason pretty badly, but Woods intervenes and stabs him. Kravchenko's last act for hate's sake is to set of his grenades, forcing Woods to throw him and himself out of a window to save you.

Intelligence in Kravchenko's office makes it known that Steiner - the Nazi scientist who developed Nova - is continuing with development on Rebirth Island. Your character gets into the compound and after a fight, Reznov kills Steiner, and it's at this point that the story starts to unravel.

The big reveal

The CIA arrive to late to stop Steiner being killed, but they arrive just in time to see your character - Mason - kill him. But didn't Reznov do it? Well, it turns out that Reznov doesn't really exist, or rather he doesn't exist in reality after the escape from Vorkuta. Reznov is a creation of Mason's mind, caused by the brainwashing he suffered while held captive in Vorkuta.

So who brainwashed Mason? Well initially it was Dragovich, who was trying to programme him to assassinate JFK - but Reznov later brainwashes him to have him kill Dragovich, Kravchenko and Steiner as an act of revenge.

If you've seen the film Fight Club, the framework of the story will seem familiar. Just as Tyler Durden was a figment of Edward Norton's character who he became at certain stages in the story, it is the same with Reznov and Mason.

Redemption

Even though Mason has been compromised by the enemy, the US still needs Mason because he may possess the ability to find Dragovich and stop his now imminent plan to activate sleeper agents in possession of Nova weapons across the USA. If this Dragovich isn't stopped, World War III would start when the USA counter-attacks Russia with nuclear weapons.

Under further interrogation, Mason remembers that the numbers station - the trigger for the sleeper agents is onboard a Russian ship. You immediately scramble to attack this ship using a helicopter, and then land on the ship and clear it of enemy personnel. After searching the ship it becomes clear that there is an underwater base beneath the ship, connected by a tether. Mason proceeds down to the base and finally confronts Dragovich. After a fight sequence, he is defeated and the transmission from the numbers station is prevented.

Call of Duty: Black Ops vs Modern Warfare 2

This comparison review is a follow on from my full review of Black Ops, and again focuses purely on the single player experience. After finishing Black Ops last week I returned to Modern Warfare 2 after a break of nearly twelve months. The game was a Christmas pressie last year which I played and completed disappointingly quickly but found very enjoyable. So how does the older game stack up against it's younger rival?

If ever there was a way to prove how average and overhyped Black Ops is, it's to go back and play MW2 again. It's a considerably better experience in almost every way. The presentation is far better - the story interludes are a fictional computer user interface that projects satellite tracking information onto maps, while narration in the background explains the story. It's very professional and polished, although at times it can be a bit difficult to follow the story as it jumps around the globe and frequently changes from one character to another.

Amazingly, the graphics are signficantly better than Black Ops. The second mission in particular (cliffhanger) demonstrates some superb blizzard effects that reduce visibility, and in general this part of the game looks gorgeous all round. Throughout the entire game, enemy characters look better drawn and more detailed, and the splatter of blood when they take a hit provides an effective confirmation that your shot has hit the target - something that I found lacking in Black Ops.

The overall flow of the game is far better - scripted sequences integrate well with the main action and feel less jarring than some of the Black Ops equivalents. One standout sequence has you exiting a dry deck shelter on a US submarine and using an SDV to rise up underneath an oil rig and take it by force. Brilliant stuff.

My main criticism of Black Ops was the hopeless enemy AI, and while MW2 doesn't compare to the very best examples out there such as the Halo franchise, it is good enough to not draw attention to itself and provides a satisfying challenge, with enemies hiding in cover properly and ambushing you during some of the missions.

Although I can't comment on the multiplayer element, MW2 is a much better single player game. Black Ops had so much promise because of the inspired setting - the Cold War era is rich in opportunities to provide compelling missions, but this time round I can't help feeling it was a slightly wasted opportunity.

Call of Duty: Black Ops campaign mode review

I’ve just completed the Black Ops campaign mode and here’s a review of my experiences. This review focuses entirely on the single player aspect of the game as played on the Xbox 360.

Black Ops is developed by Treyarch who are I tend to think of as the B-team of CoD development. So far they've delivered CoD3, CoD WaW and a number of Wii ports of the Inifinity Ward titles. With Black Ops they seem to have made a particular effort to deliver a first-class CoD experience, especially with the storyline of the single player mode. The framework of the story is clever - your character is seemingly being interrogated and asked to provide information on various events that took place in the American Cold War campaign to contain the spread of Communism across the globe.

The game starts with a very small introductory mission in Cuba. You battle through a street and then dive into a car to escape. The car controls are bizarre - you appear to control forward and reverse movements but not the steering. This heavily scripted scene feels jarring - wouldn't it have been more believable if the player character had simply jumped into a passenger seat rather half-controlling the car?

The first half of the game feels particularly weak to me. The missions are dull and rely almost entirely on frenetic pace to provide excitement. Khe Sanh in particular is a bad mission. The gameplay is tedious and the colour scheme makes the visuals look badly dated - it reminded me very much of CoD 3 graphically. A big issue with Khe Sanh currently being discussed in various forums on the web is that you need to kick some barrels of napalm, but the game doesn’t prompt you properly to do this. Given the highly linear nature of CoD games and lack of interactivity with the environment, I think this is a very valid criticism. Unaware of what I had to do, my solution was to run like hell and get shot up badly, but eventually I made it to a checkpoint that triggered the next part of the mission.

As I reached the half-way mark in the game, every mission had been a big disappointment. It was so rare that any kind of strategy element was brought into play. You are bombarded by unrealistic numbers of enemies, but they are all spectacularly dumb. To add to this, the turkey shoot is ruined by your computer-controlled allies almost always running ahead and getting in the way of your firing line. They often occupy the only decent cover points as well, leaving me to regularly lurk behind them in a cowardly manner - which isn't in keeping with the way the game portrays your character as something of a badass!

Just as things looked dire, I embarked upon a mission that flashed back to end of the Second World War, base on the memories of the Victor Reznov character. At this point my experiences of the game improved dramatically. The snowy colour scheme of the Arctic circle setting really lifts the visuals and the smaller (but more open) playing area with lots of cover is fun to sneak through. The references to Nazis and the presence of V2 rockets at the site really adds a historical weight to the story. It gets even better as the second part of the mission involves repelling an attack from the British Secret Service. Pitted against their snipers I had to pick up a sniper rifle myself, a welcome relief from the close range combat of the rest of the game.

A particular highlight of the later parts of the game for me are two helicopter control missions, which are far from gimmicky sub-games - the helicopter control is nice and the destruction you can wreak makes for lots of fun. The final mission which involves an assault on a ship (and more which I won't ruin the surprise of) is also excellent stuff, and features the return of the helicopter.

The final twist in the in the plot is signposted in the last few missions, and then rammed home really hard in the final scenes. It draws upon the plot of a number of films (Fight Club is a primary example) but works reasonably well.

Summary
This applies to all of the CoD games I've played, but I would much rather have a smaller but more intelligent set of opponents in every standoff. A room of six intelligent, well dug-in opponents would have been far more tense and enjoyable than a constant barrage of enemies arriving from a respawn point. Consider Halo where the computer controller characters will change from attacking to retreating if you switch to a particularly devastating weapon - that type of intelligence is desperately needed in CoD.

Compared to a title like Halo Reach, I found the visuals very disappointing in places, and almost certainly a backwards step from Modern Warfare 2. The notable exception is the character animation in cutscenes - face renderings are excellent.

The Call of Duty franchise has become a series of fairly average games which are overhyped to a point where they are purchased regardless of quality. I'd like to see a minor reboot of the franchise to become a more intelligent and strategic game, with more genuine tension.

If you strike me down...

That classic old line from Star Wars popped into my head as I read this week’s story about how a new unofficial LimeWire client called LimeWire Pirate Edition has been released to the public. The firm behind the official client and P2P network took a battering in court recently from the record labels, and was ordered to withdraw the software and take steps to disable the network as well – basically, kill the whole platform. LimeWire was dead, but a fortnight later some enterprising individuals have brought it back to life. And this time it's going to be a lot harder to kill - just like Obi Wan. Despite the fact that I think artists should get paid something for their works rather than us all ripping their work off for free, I can’t help but smile. This was always going to happen.

Can’t we all be friends?

As Techdirt points out, Limewire actually tried to work with the music industry. Just like Napster and others did before it. Many of the early platforms that tried to work with the music industry to go legitimate are dead. iTunes and Amazon are rare examples of successful operations, but of course they have big names behind them.

Now that we have established legal download services, why has a non-legal platform been resurrected so quickly? The simple and obvious answer is demand. iTunes is starting to look expensive - the record labels pushed through a new pricing scheme recently which was supposed to charge a little more for new songs, but less for older songs. In almost every case I’ve looked at, per song prices have gone up. Regardless of the recent increase, the service already felt too expensive. The average price of an album seems to be 7.99UKP. For what? The right to download some files using our own connection and store them at our cost as well. We now do half of the distribution function ourselves, yet we still end up paying pretty much what a physical CD costs to buy in a shop these days. Given the massively lower overheads of online sales, we’re being ripped off again, just like we were back in the late 90’s paying 14.99 UKP for a CD.

History repeats itself

Another demand generator for non-legal download services is films. Broadband speeds have made it possible to download movies over the Internet, even spectacular high definition versions. And instead of legal download services being there ready to take up that demand, we’re in the same situation as we were in with music in the Napster era. Legal options are few and far between, and inferior to the free options. Torrents have plenty of DRM-free high quality 1080p movies, yet legal movie download services such as iTunes only offers highly compressed 720p files with restrictions on what you can do with them.

In its heyday I was a Napster user, but I now buy music legally through iTunes. Not because of some moral obligation but because the quality is always good and it’s far less hassle than using P2P networks. With the iPhone I can download music at any time - even at work or on the train - which has increased the amount I spend.

Will we ever get to this point with movies? Or will the gatekeepers continue to try and battle non-legal services rather than compete with them? Well one little known fact is that  in some parts of the world they do try to compete. R5 DVD releases are versions of new films that are released early and cheap to combat rampant piracy. The quality of the copy is not quite up to the same levels as the final DVD/BluRay releases we get in the rest of the world, but the fact remains that they exist to compete with pirate copies. Meanwhile the rest of the world has the same old options – wait forever for the DVD/BluRay release and get ripped off (especially BluRay) or get it earlier, for free.

Where we’re headed

People want high quality, low cost, DRM-free, easily available media online - it’s that simple. And they will pay for it as long as the price is fair. There is no alternative, even if corporations and certain lobbied-up governments think there is. It's clear already that people will find ways to make it happen. We live in interesting times where a small group of people can hack together a content distribution platform that can be used by millions. The arrogance of large media corporations in thinking they are owed a living and can gouge prices forever is staggering, as is their refusal to compete with free. How much longer can the situation continue?

Software design matters #2: The Apollo 11 Moon landing

Kick-started by John F Kennedy's legendary speech, the Apollo space programme was the incredible story of the efforts of over 400,000 people, all aligned towards achieving the goal of landing a man on the moon. We always remember the massive Saturn rockets (still the most powerful space rockets ever produced) and the skill and dedication of the Apollo astronauts who piloted these machines. Yet at the pivotal moment of the first moon landing on the Apollo 11 mission, it was ingenious software design that allowed the systems to cope with the unexpected and continue to function.

On the 20th July 1969, as the lunar lander descended towards the surface, Armstrong and Aldrin had left the rendezvous radar switched on. This was smart astronaut thinking - it meant they could abort the landing and quickly reacquire the orbiting command module if something went wrong. The radar was generating data and sending it to the guidance computer as a steady stream of interrupts. Normally this would be fine, but during this critical part of the mission the guidance computer was maxed out trying to manage navigation and the descent engine.

Unable to cope with it's tasks, the computer system overloaded and issued a 1202 program alarm. This flashed up on the astronauts display and a warning buzzer sounded in the cabin, no doubt significantly raising the stress levels of the astronauts who already had the expectations of the world on their shoulders. During this tense time the astronauts had to wait for Mission Control to interpret the error code and decide whether it was a threat to the mission. The error code was looked up to mean 'Executive Overflow'. The problem was completely unexpected because although the astronauts had followed exactly the same procedure in the simulators back on the ground, the rendezvous radar switch was a dummy - no radar was actually connected so the computer didn't receive data, preventing it from becoming overloaded.

So how did the guidance computer software save the say? Well, it was written using a revolutionary scheduling system that could not only multi-task but understood the priority of the tasks it was assigned. In the event of an overload, it could ignore lower priority tasks and focus on what was essential. Lower priority tasks could be flushed and restarted when CPU time became available again. This is precisely what the Apollo 11 guidance computer did - essentially it self-recovered. NASA took a calculated risk that the landing would not be put in danger, and despite the 1202 error occurring a few more times during the descent, the guidance computer continued to do it's job, and shortly afterwards Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were walking on the surface of the moon.

The technology aspect of this story sounds familiar because today pretty much every computer and even smartphone has well executed multi-tasking, but this software was written in the mid-sixties at a time when programs had to be stored on core rope memory - or lol memory as NASA used to call it!

It would be twenty years later before the ground-breaking Commodore Amiga brought multi-tasking into peoples homes with it's AmigaDOS OS and Workbench GUI. The Amiga was famous for being able to run multiple simultaneous tasks at once while remaining highly response to the end user; often more so than modern day Window machines. Stay tuned for an Amiga post coming soon :)

Previously in this series: Apple capitalises on NextStep in a big way

R3PLAY - 6th November 2010

I attended R3PLAY today and had a great time. As well as all the pure fun that was to be had playing the  games on a seriously impressive range of systems, it was the overall buzz of the show that really resonated. How? Well:

Brilliant atmosphere - rare systems like the Japan-only NeoGeo and NEC PC-FX  - machines that I read about in cool games magazines as a teenager, the Atari Mega ST, the cult vector-graphic Vectrex and various Sega/CBM/Sinclair/Acorn machines were all there. These beauties were not just on display, but ready to play by anybody who sat down in front of them. If you put your drink down on the table near the machines as you played, no-one told you off for your "dangerous" behavior. Some systems had loads of spare carts available for you to choose from, just spread across the table. As you changed cartridges and played your game, never once was there a sense of being watched: that sense of "looking out for bad behaviour" that you so often get in this country. The organisers and equipment owners assumed that you weren't some monster there to steal stuff or knock drinks over the expensive/vintage equipment.

Open-minded scene - something obvious from attending the show is that the retro scene isn't consumed with arguments about about new vs. old. To use an analogy, I used to drive an MG (a modern one) and it was clear that some folks in the owners club didn't accept these cars as true MG's. This isn't the case in the retrogaming scene - the hall was full of PS3's and Xbox 360's as well as retro. There was the chance to sample some of the latest games, including the Wii GoldenEye that's not even released yet.

Jeff - later in the afternoon I entered a room and barely noticed the Llamasoft sign outside. Looking around, it soon became obvious that each of the varied systems was running Revenge of the Mutant Camels or similar. Then I became aware of a guy stood in the corner - it was THE Jeff Minter! I chuckled as I heard a guy talking to him say "yeah so I sent you a friend request on Facebook yesterday, if you wouldn't mind accepting it?". The guy has groupies!!!!

Pinball is still huge - in a wide side corridor there was a fairly large collection of pinball tables. Before arriving at the venue I was looking forward to getting onto these beauties and satisfying an unrequited pinball addiction, but it seemed that the almost total removal of pinball tables from pubs and other venues across the country had others feeling the same way - the tables were jammed up almost all day. When I did get chance to to have a quick game it was on a basic table with very tired flippers - getting power behind a shot was impossible.

History - the show was definitely not without depth - the British Computer Museum from Bletchley Park were in attendance and had some very interesting exhibits. The partially dismantled Digital PDP system they had was amazing. The mainboard had hundrens of pins and a massively complex loom of hand-crafted wires running across it; it just goes to show how difficult it was in the 1960's and 70's to build any kind of computer.

Games played today included Crazy Taxi, Streetfigher IV, Speedball 2, Afterburner Climax, Wii GoldenEye, F-Zero, Vectrex Scramble, Outrun, Outrun 2. Of the two player games we played my parter in crime Chris B managed to thrash me at everything except for my surprising turn of form at IK+ on the Amiga. Green belt rules!

Xbox 360 Kinect

I’m starting to get worried about the Xbox 360. It's a superb piece of kit but the Kinect – Microsoft’s attempt at motion control – seems too clever for its own good. And it’s starting to attract some criticism. Nintendo and Sony have developed systems that are at the same time simpler and more flexible, particularly at the moment when we’re in a transition period between gamepad games and motion control games.

The technical brilliance of Kinect is the crux of the problem – it relies 100% on motion detection and this means you have no wand or any other type of controller in your hand. This means you have no physical buttons at all.  It’s an amazing piece of technology but in terms of the games it can support, it seems incredibly limited. The early Kinect version of Forza 3 under development allows you to steer the car using your arms, but they haven’t figured out how to do acceleration and braking yet.

Consider a Kinect version of any modern game and the lack of buttons always seems to be a problem. How do you fire a gun? How do you switch weapons? Or throw a grenade? So it’s not going to work for first person shooters.

Maybe Kinect isn’t intended to bring motion control to existing games – perhaps the idea is to bring in a whole new genre of game that is designed with pure motion control in mind right from the start. It might just take some time for developers to get the hang of it. Meanwhile, the PS3 is already getting patches to existing games that can take advantage of their Move system straight away. The more conventional system integrates much more easily with existing titles.

It’s funny how the PS3 was always hyped to be more powerful than the 360, and when this didn't materialise into the games released the argument was that it would take time for developers to harness the power. I’m not convinced by this – they haven’t managed it even now and although the theoretical processing power is higher, it seems like in the reality of game design it’s just not accessible. With motion control, Microsoft look to be heading down the same path – it will take time for developers to get to grips with Kinect – question is – will they ever?

dotcom madness

The dotcom boom is now getting on for ten years ago. Here’s a list of some of the crazier acquisitions and cash burning that took place:

Boo.com set itself up as an online clothing retail site and burned its way through $135 million in 18 months before being liquidated.

Geocities.com purchased by Yahoo in January 1999 for $3.57 billion in stock. In 2009 Yahoo shut the service down in almost every country after failing to make anything useful or profitable out of it.

lastminute.com floated on the LSE in March 2000 with shares priced at 380p. The shares rose initially but within two weeks dropped to 270p. A year later they were trading at under 80p. Five years later the company still hadn’t made a profit and was sold to Sabre Holdings.

Lycos bought by a subsidiary of Telefonica (owns o2 in the UK!) for $12.5 billion in May 2000. In August 2004 they sold it on for $95m. That’s a loss of over $3 billion for each year they owned it.

It really was a crazy time - a lot of people got rich but a lot must have lost their shirts!

John Sculley interviewed by Cult of Mac

Cult of Mac has a fascinating and surprisingly open interview with John Sculley who was Apple CEO from 1983 to 1993. He was originally brought in because the board felt that Jobs was too young to run the company. It's a very long interview so here's a few highlights:

The one that Steve admired was Sony. We used to go visit Akio Morita and he had really the same kind of high-end standards that Steve did and respect for beautiful products. I remember Akio Morita gave Steve and me each one of the first  Sony Walkmans. 

Slightly amusing in the modern-day context of the iPod. Now an example of Steve Jobs perfectionism:

The Apple logo was multicolor because the Apple II was the first color computer. No one else could do color, so that’s why they put the color blocks into the logo. If you wanted to print the logo in a magazine ad or on a package you could print it with four colors but Steve being Steve insisted on six colors. So whenever the Apple logo was printed, it was always printed in six colors. It added another 30 to 40 percent to the cost of everything, but that’s what Steve wanted. That’s what we always did. He was a perfectionist even from the early days.

And a snippet about the relationship between Apple and ARM:

The Newton actually saved Apple from going bankrupt. Most people don’t realize in order to build Newton, we had to build a new generation microprocessor. We joined together with  Olivetti and a man named  Herman Hauser, who had started Acorn computer over in the U.K. out of Cambridge university... ...when Apple got into desperate financial situation, it sold its interest in ARM for $800 million. 

Sculley on his experiences at Pepsi:

One of the things that fascinated him: I described to him that there’s not much difference between a Pepsi and a Coke, but we were outsold 9 to 1. Our job was to convince people that Pepsi was a big enough decision that they ought to pay attention to it, and eventually switch. 

The rest of the article is here

Amusing sports headlines

It seems the world of sport and certain forenames and surnames throws up some interesting combinations:

Stoner on pole for Australian GP - crikey that's some achievement. I would not like to be riding a bike that quick while laughing and trying to find something to eat.

Tired Gay succumbs to Dix in 200 meters - surely Reuters were in on the joke, how could they not be?

Please post any more you have in the comments!

Digg fail

Digg released their iPhone app in March 2010. I installed it and started using it soon after, and really liked it. It was perfect for killing time – you know what it’s like when you’re on public transport or waiting for an appointment, and a read of a quick story is just what you need. Digg is ideal because you get a nice selection of popular stories that the users submit.

A couple of months ago the app flatlined. It crashed on startup. After a few weeks of disappointment I reported the issue to Digg. They said they were aware of the issue and pointed me to a page on their site. Apparently an API update that Digg put out broke their own iPhone app. How on earth could they get into a situation like that?

It’s now mid-October and the iPhone app is still broken. You can’t try the old uninstall/install trick because it’s been removed from the App Store. A third party offers a premium Digg client but he has had to place disclaimers on the description page for the app pointing out that the Digg API changes are causing issues in his app too.

Since it’s a Web 2.0 organisation I’ll use Web 2.0 terminology: digg = epic fail!!!

Top 5 Wired articles

1) The Web is dead. Long live the internet - a really interesting analysis of our changing habits in relation to Internet usage. A key point being made is that the web - thought to be universal - is being replaced in some cases by native apps running on smartphones and tablets. The internet is still the delivery mechanism for the data that drives these apps of course, but the front ends are returning to native client instead of web. I found this fascinating as it exactly mirrors how my usage of the internet has changed since owning an iPhone. In some cases (i.e. eBay) I find the smartphone app preferable to the full blown web site.

2) Push! Kiss your browser goodbye! - Ties in nicely with (1). This article from March 1997 also tries to argue that the web is dead, but this time the successor was to be push technology. Anyone who remembers the hype around this, and names like PointCast will know that this was a short-lived attempt to make the web easier to use, and quicker to mine information from. The question is, although the article turned out to be completely wrong, is it somehow proved a little more correct now that we have smartphone and tablet native apps for accessing the web?

3) Morass of Molasses Mucks Up Boston - a fascinating account of a disaster that took place in 1919 in a neighborhood of Boston. At first you might well chuckle at the idea of a torrent of thick syrup running through the streets (I did) but eventually it becomes clear that this was a deadly event - around twelve people died.

4) ‘Comets’ Debut Trans-Atlantic Jet Age and Boeing 707 Makes First Flight - two separate articles that recount the very beginning of jet-powered passenger flights, telling the story of the early success of the British DeHavilland Comet which later lost ground to the Boeing competitor due to smaller capacity and a string of metal-fatigue related crashes.

5) Love Canal Calamity Surfaces - another disaster account, although you can probably get a chuckle out of the place name. This has to be one of the most shocking cases of gross negligence ever comitted: a local authority buys a site containing massive pollution from toxic chemicals and decides to build a school on top of it. To make matters worse, a residential area grew up around the school. The business that originally owned the land warned how serious the pollution situation was and sold the land for $1, but the new owners still continued to build on the land without any form of proper cleanup. How this was ever allowed to happen is a mystery to me when you look at the effects on the people who lived there - before the place was condemned and evacuated.

Linux on the desktop

PC World has reignited the debate about desktop Linux, arguing that it's dead. They are careful to point out that this doesn't mean Linux as a whole is dead - we have Android phones and servers to thank for that.

Over the years I've tried desktop Linux a few times. The first time was in 1996 and it was torturous. In 2003 I gave Fedora a go and that was much better but the lack of software options proved an issue at the time. In the last year I've installed Ubuntu on a dual-core laptop and tried to live with it. The laptop install was made necessary because it was given to me with Windows XP pre-installed. When I ran Windows Update it installed SP3 which broke wifi networking. After digging around it turns out updated drivers are required for SP3 and the manufacturer (Broadcom) hasn't released any.

So Ubuntu 9 (later 10) was installed in an attempt to get a usable machine for surfing the web and some occasional gaming - without having to shell out for a Windows license. First impressions were excellent. The UI could be tweaked to suit my preferences - I don't like the dual bars across the top and bottom of the screen you often get with Gnome - and the Package Manager worked like an app store - only free! It really is impressive how close the OS comes to being a viable modern desktop OS. Only one issue ruined the experience but it proved to be a show stopper. When resuming from sleep, the display was corrupted forcing a reboot. In my attempts to fix this I had to try and use Grub 2 to set kernel parameters. After hours of wasted time trying to understand how Grub 2 worked I gave up, this insane boot manager ruins what was becoming a usable desktop OS.

Maybe it's best to stick with Windows and OS X for the time being. Disappointing as Linux looks on the verge of a breakthrough.

Eric Schmidt talks about American political system

Ars Technica is reporting that Google CEO Eric Schmidt has made some interesting comments about the American political system. It confirms what many of us have thought for some time - that democracy in Washington is something of an illusion, and large corporations have a very strong influence on the Government decision-making process.The hypocricy is of course that Google has it's own lobbying operation, clearly it feels compelled to be a player in the game that it wants no part of.

Microsoft are in a similar position at the moment - they are campaigning alongside the EFF for reform of the US patent system to make it easier to invalidate bad software patents. At the same time they are following their rivals down the path of building up a stockpile of patents, and sending out increasingly threatening messages towards Android handset manufacturers.

Looking past the hypocricy of their actions, I think it overall it's a good thing that these guys have enough of a conscience to highlight the issues of political corruption and a screwed up patent system. Although they are participating in the behaviour they criticise, realistically they have no alternative. A corporation has a responsibility to it's shareholders to maintain a profit and defend itself against competitors. Nothing less will be accepted. The behaviour is caused by the broken system they operate in, not the cause of it.

Meanwhile Apple has been a big loser in the patent world this week, very well summed up by Thom over at OSnews. How the hell can sliding album covers around be worth $600 million?

Software design matters: Apple capitalises on NextStep in a big way

It's well known that Apple have had an amazing resurgence over the last ten years. In 1997 before the return of Steve Jobs, the company was nearly dead. The Macintosh hardware strategy had caused them real problems, and MacOS desperately needed replacing. Apple knew this and tried to develop a replacement - the Copland project - but this took years and ended in failure, bogged down by the requirement of full backwards compatibility with the legacy MacOS.

When Steve Jobs arrived back at Apple, he brought with him a secret weapon - NextStep. Famously, this is the OS that Tim Berners Lee used to develop the World Wide Web. It's a Unix-like OS but with a microkernel rather than monolithic kernel of Linux and many other Unix variants. The upper layers of the OS are written using object oriented principles and design patterns. Applications are developed in Objective-C, with built-in support for message passing. Available to all applications are cleanly separated libraries to help out with common tasks. These libraries are known as kits. If this sounds familiar it's because it is exactly the architecture of Mac OS X today, which is essentially a reskinned version of NextStep. An example of a well known kit is WebKit which Safari is built on top of.

In recent years Apple has been massively successful at creating or reinventing certain device classes such as the tablet or smartphone. Their success is largely because they tailor the user interface very well to suit the hardware and usage profile of the device, made possible by an investment in software architecture. Use of OO principles and design patterns such as Model-View-Controller means applications can be quickly redeveloped for new devices while sharing the same underlying code. This removes the maintenance issues of duplicate code.

Compare this to Microsoft. Their OS platform was heavily optimised to run on the limited PC hardware of the 1990's. Although this was an achievement, it came at the cost of clean design. For example, optimising load times was often the primary reason for grouping code into the same DLL, rather than because of the functions they perform. They had a dependency nightmare.

When Microsoft introduced tablet computers a full eight years before Apple's iPad launched, they used an OS that was almost unchanged from desktop Windows. They were probably well aware that a small Start button program launcher and window controls are not ideal for small touchscreen devices, but the architecture of Windows made it very difficult to make changes in a maintanabe way.

This is an often-overlooked and very important reason why Apple has jumped so far ahead of Microsoft in the market for new devices.

Note: Microsoft have recently been working very hard on untangling the Windows codebase, and the changes are already in Vista and Windows 7. These changes are already delivering significant architectural improvements to the Windows Server product line.

Liberty City rice rocket

As one of countless examples of the amazing levels of detail crafted into Grand Theft Auto IV, today I boosted a really interesting car I hadn't seen before in nearly two years of playing. From the front it looked exactly like my late-model IS200, with the black-backed headlights. But the carbon fibre bonnet had a huge air scoop, and the car was a coupé rather than a saloon. Most interestingly, a dump valve could clearly be heard, and the car was very quick. Barrelling down the straights caused motion blur to kick in and the camera to automatically shift angles.

I picked the car up nearly destroyed after attacking it and damaging it heavily during a Ballad of Gay Tony drug mission. A lick of paint was definitely required, and was well worth the wait!

Telegraph Road

In relation to our parents, we always like to think of ourselves as individuals. The truth is that they pass on certain personality traits and tastes whether we like it or not. When it comes to music, I inherited a closet liking for Dire Straits. My father (whose liking for them was not closet in any way) played them endlessly, and with the Love Over Gold album I can clearly remember him being blown away by it as a piece of work.

Telegraph Road is a song that I find exceptional for an unusual reason in music - the sheer scope of what it covers. If a film started with a single man creating a settlement in the Old West, and ended centuries later with the failure of the huge industrial machine that grew up from that settlement, it would be impressive stuff. But Telegraph Road achieves this in a song. That's unheard of. By the standards of radio friendly singles, it's an epic with a 14 minute running time, but considering the story it tells, it's a work of genius.

One thing I was ignorant of about Telegraph Road is the inspiration for the song, and when I found out the story, it surprised me to learn that it is a place I'd already been fascinated by for the last few years - Detroit. This is a huge topic and something I will keep for future posts, but the stories from this troubled city are incredible. Apparently Mark Knopflier was in a tour bus on US Highway 24 (also known as Telegraph Road), when the inspiration for the song arrived. He certainly hit the mark with the story, and the latter verses of an unhappy man looking romantically back on the good old days are still hugely relevant to Detroit nearly 30 years later.

Bootnote: Love Over Gold also includes a song called Industrial Disease. Although it sounds like it could also be about Detriot, it's apparently about early 1980's Britain - our industrial decline and the associated social problems. The song is humourous rather than serious, but remains surprisingly relevant. One line in particular says 'these are classic symptoms of a monetary squeeze'.

Zeitgeist review

Zeitgeist is a 2007 documentary by Peter Joseph, described in the Amazon summary as "extremely controversial". When it was recommended to me by a friend, I had to give it a go. The piece is split into three sections; the first deals with religion and asserts that Christianity is a fabrication rather than being a story of real divinity. The second section deals with 9/11 and puts forward what is essentially a conspiracy theory that the attacks were carefully orchestrated to provide a reason to go to war. The third section broadens the scope to suggest that for the last 100 years or more, critical conflicts and financial events were the result of manipulation by a small elite group.

Religion
Somewhat unprofessionally for a review, I skipped the first section. It starts with an over-long clip of audio with an almost completely dark screen, which tried my patience somewhat. I also had my reservations about this segment given the subject matter. In the interests of disclosure, I should state that I am not religious myself, but I make an effort not to be anti-religious. The argument of religion being fabricated certainly make sense to me, but it's my belief that religion was created was with good intentions - to provide a moral framework for people to live their lives by. Unfortunately the message of various religions gets twisted to serve the agendas of people who should know better.

9/11 Section
The second section of the documentary looks at the 9/11 events and I found this part un-watchable. It has an almost music-video feel to it, and quick cuts of planes hitting the towers timed to audio seemed tacky and insensitive to me. The continual chatter of selective news networks coverage that supports the ideas being presented was something I quickly found irritating - it wasn't backed up by more in-depth sections that actually expanded on the opinions being expressed. More worryingly, certain sections appear to be composed of video taken from the news networks but without their audio track, instead we get voice-overs from unknown commentators. If I'm right this is a cheap trick to add weight to the ideas being put forward by showing presenters from major news networks.

The men behind the curtain
As the third section started my interest was waning in Zeitgesit, but fortunately I stayed with it because the third segment is easily the best of the three. It takes the concept of 9/11 being stage-managed and applies it to the other major conflicts in recent history - the two World Wars and Vietnam. It explains that in all cases, vested interests pushed the case for war because of the opportunities for private enterprise to make huge profits. This certainly ties in with other material I've seen, like footage of the Halliburton seminars showing the new world of opportunities for services and products that the Iraq invasion has made possible.

The theory goes that acts of provocation against the United States are engineered so that the US public approves the decision to go to war when they were previously against it. The First World War provocation scenario presented is the sinking of the Lusitania, which doesn't quite add up to me. At the time, Germany had changed its terms of engagement for submarine warfare and was openly attacking non-military ships. It was only a matter of time before they attacked a ship carrying enough American passengers to cause outrage.

The provocation scenario presented for the Second World War was that FDR had been baiting the Japanese forces into attacking America,  and eventually they did so by bombing Pearl Harbour. It goes without saying that Pearl Harbor changed US public opinion from wanting to stay out of a war which they felt was irrelevent, to national outrage with men signing up to the armed forces in huge numbers. Again I'm slightly sceptical of this, a lot of the examples of baiting are really just actions like financial embargoes which are often used during times of conflict, especially against countries battling US allies (the UK in this case). Of more interest is a fabulous piece of muckraking on a member of the Bush family (none other than Prescott Bush, grandfather of George), who was involved in a Wall Street finance operation that had it's assets seized for the duration of the war because of suspicions that they were trading with the enemy - Nazi Germany!

The Vietnam scenario is described in much starker terms as a deception on the part of the US Navy in reporting an event between North Korean and American ships which never actually took place - the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Evidence on the usual sources such as Wikipedia appears to back up some of the claims made in this section.

Summary
The final section draws to a conclusion that I found very disturbing - like the worst dystopian visions of science fiction, we are heading towards a World Government which will control the entire population. To the ruling elite of the wealthy and intellectual (although I would question whether the two go hand in hand), this model will make it far simpler for them to achieve their objectives compared to the more fragmented democratic models we have now. A second key assertion is that we will be individually tracked and validated into society by the use of RFID tags. Dissent will be suppressed by turning off the tag which then strips the individual of the ability to carry out transactions or prove their identity. Although terrifying, just because we are capable of imagining such a nightmare scenario, it doesn't follow that the outcome is a foregone conclusion. There are far too many obstacles in the way of such a massive change to world order.

For all the posturing in Zeitgeist that the media is simply a drone controlled by 'men behind the curtains', it remains true at least for the present that there are still a few shining examples of news organisations which remain impartial and investigative, and uncover corruption and scandal around the world. The US movie industry is also a powerful liberal voice and regularly creates anti-establishment entertainment that is seen by audiences worldwide.

Zeitgeist is in places a thought-provoking documentary which presents some very big concepts in a clear and concise way. The controversial angle is certainly entertaining and provokes the viewer to really consider the ideas presented and how plausible they are, which is - I would hope - exactly what the authors intended. My only concern is that it could work as a form of brainwashing for people who take everything in without questioning or evaluating what they are being told.

Introductory post

Hello and welcome to my new blog.

The name Blitter is meant to be a play on blog and twitter, I like twitter but get frustrated by the 140 character limit and wanted something a bit more flexible. Unfortunately (as is always the case with Blogger), the blitter domain was in use so I had to use a hacker-style number instead of letter trick!

Blitter is also a real word of course - well in the tech world anyway, made most famous by the Commodore Amiga computer - wiki

The first blitter chip in personal computers (Amiga 1000)

Twisted? Well hopefully not, just a play on words