Design Limbo

The future of gaming is finally here and it is called OnLive. When I got back from vacation I made it a point to check out this new service, which recently started offering a Founding Members Program which waves the monthly fee for the services for a full year, nice.

The service is interesting to me on a couple of points. First it’s all online delivery of the latest games. Unlike GameFly which uses the standard Netflix model of sending out physical media, OnLive is all online, streaming delivery. Now that’s the future!

I have a Netflix account, have for almost 2 years. I have never received a Netflix disk in the mail. I only use their Instant deliver (online streaming) and it rules, although Netflix could speed up adding things to it.

Personally I don’t like physical media, it can get damaged or lost and after a while just ends up taking up space and adding to the garbage pile. Which is why I kept an eye on OnLive for quite a while and signed up right after the E3 announcement. I believe the OnLive/Netflix Instant model is the future and I’m all for it.

After getting the OnLive client installed on my computer I fired it up and started browsing. I decided I would purchase the 3 day pass for Batman Arkham Asylum and try it out. I noticed no input delay, no lag or anything that would tell me I wasn’t playing this game on my local computer. The sound was crisp and everything was very fluid. It took a little bit to get the game started, but that didn’t bother me at all. From my few hours of game play experience OnLive works exactly as advertised. I could use my keyboard and mouse combo, or my Xbox 360 compatible controller for almost any game I wanted, which is good because I cannot play FPS or RTS games with a controller, so the game type and input options were refreshing.

OnLive don’t do a very good job of communicate this, but the monthly fee is just for your access to the service, not the games themselves. I’m currently not paying a monthly fee so that doesn’t bother me, but depending on the retail cost of the service that might be a stretch. So far there seems to be three methods and prices for playing games via OnLive:

1. 3 Day PlayPass ~$4.00
2. 5 Day PlayPass ~$8.00
3. Full PlayPass (Retail Price of the game)

So lets say your playing Final Fantasy 13 on OnLive, where it could take you 80 hours of game play to beat. Lets assume you can play for 4 hours a day on average, without taking a day off, that’s 20 days of play. Lets assume a 5 day PlayPass cost’s $6.95 and you need 5 of them, that’s a total of $34.75, not including your monthly subscription fee. I bought a 3 day PlayPass for the Batman Arkham Asylum game and only played 1 day of it, I think it’s most likely you won’t be able to all the days of your pass.

When you buy the full game on OnLive you get it until they remove the game from the service, some of the messages I read was that it would be available till 2013, so you get 3 years. If you can’t already tell I’m not 100% sold on the cost model for the service, if I GameFly Final Fantasy 13, I pay 15$ a month and can keep it until I’m done with it. I get 30 or so days at 15 dollars, compared to 20 at almost 35, not including the service fee. But I have to deal with the physical media and I have to have the console.

OnLive wants to bill itself as a service where you don’t need “top end hardware” to play games. But I think there missing the mark on this one. People already have Xboxes and decent computers. You can’t play RockBand on OnLive or have a Kinetic for the Xbox on OnLive, so people will have consoles anyways. OnLive should be focusing on instant access to the latest games and value, because they won’t replace a computer or console, but instead will be a supplement to it.

I’m truly excited about OnLive and if your even a little be into gaming you should give it a try, they have casual games like World of Goo to sports games like NBA 2K to FPS’s. I’m optimistic that the service will thrive and eventually find it’s place in the gaming ecosystem and give us consumers more of a choice, why pay the full price for a game you can beat in a night, buy a PlayPass and only spend $5.

It’s a sad day really, one that I’ve been putting off for quite a while with denial, argument and massive amount of excuses. Something this near and dear to my heart took a long time for me to finally come around and make a change and realize when the end is here. So I bid Firefox goodbye, I will remember only the happy days and the fun days when you saved me from IE6 and gave me an amazing web experience.

The amazing web experience with Firefox didn’t go away all at once, no no, it was slowly chipped away with upgrade after upgrade until what I was left with was a slow, lumbering browser with tendencies to crap itself and hog resources. I tried to justify it, I have too many browser windows open, or my addons are causing those issues, not my dear Firefox. But that niggling feeling in the back of my head wouldn’t go away.

It really wasn’t until Chrome was released that I started to see the light. Even IE8 seems better to me now then Firefox, which really is saying something as IE6 so soured me on IE that I would rather program in BASIC my entire life then use any IE. When I first made the switch to Firefox almost no sites would render correctly or even accept Firefox in. Banking sites wouldn’t work with it and other web applications I used were IE only. Moving back and forth between IE6 and Firefox endeared me even more to it.

In multiple runs of the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark Chrome was fairly faster then Firefox, with Chrome in the 400ms to 500ms range and Firefox in the 800ms to 900ms range. This was the brand new Firefox 3.6 against Chrome 4.0.249.89 on my work desktop and my home desktop. No these weren’t fresh installs of Windows and browsers with no addons, because that’s not where I use browsers or view the web. Firefox has 2 addon’s installed and Chrome had 3.

In addition to just raw JavaScript speed Google Chrome also starts up much faster then Firefox and isn’t prone fits of crashing that Firefox is. At least a couple of times a week I have to kill a hidden Firefox.exe process because Firefox won’t open complaining of another instance running.

But Chrome isn’t the only choice. I’ve tried and liked Opera before, but this was at a time when Firefox was still chugging along well, and a co-worker is really liking the new Opera experience. But really those are the only two other choices left opposed to IE8 and Firefox.

It’s been a good 5 year or so run with Firefox, but I’m not seeing things getting better. Update after update my experience with Firefox gets worse and worse and eventually it will just be the new version of IE6 with less security holes. Not at all a fitting end for the browser that showed the world how great the web can truly be.

A long time ago I bought a bunch of 1U servers from EBay and was also to recover the hard drive partitions and found web pages and data from an ISP. If I dug further and tried to recover all the disks who knows what I might have found, billing information? network or administration passwords? Just because you format your hard drive doesn’t mean it’s safe.

A friend of my just bought a refurbished Sony Vaio from Sears and it came with some unexpected surprises in the line of wedding photos and videos, personal information and other data. It’s something that creeps up from time to time that someone bought a used hard drive off of EBay and it had someone’s personal information on it.

I recently bought a Dell Studio 1557 laptop just before PDC and had some issues with it, after working with tech support for a little while Dell sent me out a replacement. Now my broken one, with some personal data needs to sent back to them. Which could result in someone getting my refurbished laptop down the line, and possibly my data.

So what are you to do? Personally I use a program called DBAN that works very well and will write random data to your hard drive, making it extremely difficult to recover. I’m currently using DBAN on my old laptop before I send it back to Dell.

I used to work with a man who would buy a secondary hard drive when he bought a computer or laptop and swap out the one that came with the unit. Anytime he had to drop it off at computer repair place or send it back he would swap the drive back. This solution had it’s pros and cons, for example if a computer repair shop is trying to fix a problem on your OS, then you have to leave it in.

If your hard drive is completely dead you might consider a handheld eraser, which the ‘home’ version would run around $80.00. Whatever you do ensure that if your sending your computer away or having it replaced your data is either cleaned off of it or encrypted, with TrueCrypt.