Spontaneous Monotony

I’m not normally prone to blog posts which are essentially plugs for websites, but this one has impressed me to such an extent that I’m making a great big plug-shaped exception. Project Syndicate is, ostensibly, an association of newspapers (UK members include The Guardian and The Scotsman). So far, so many shouts of “stop wasting my damn time you idiot”.

The interesting part, though, is the series of articles (most of an international affairs bent) it includes. How about a commentary on the situation in Gaza by Jimmy Carter, or one on the Middle East in general by Joschka Fischer? All of the articles focus on analysis, and academic content, rather than the headline-grabbing news stories found in even the better newspapers. This is one you don’t want to miss.

PS: It’s not subscription-based and there are no ads that I can see. You just read the site. Also their RSS feeds don’t include the full text to combat scrapers, but it does at least include a paragraph - more than many news sites do for example.

Given the mood I’m in at the moment I don’t have any problem with picking on the BBC for this. The iPlayer displays “100% complete” when more than 99% of the file is downloaded - it can’t either display “99% complete”, or “99.3%”. Hey, to be fair, we can’t expect computers to like, determine the answer to a calculation accurately, it’s only 1978.. oh hang on.

However, I think something has gone wrong in the iPlayer, because my own single line Python program assures me that 328Mb != 330Mb.

I just got an email in from Gamespy offering places in the Xbox 360 beta of Battlefield: Bad Company. It’s only open to people who have a Gamespy Founders Club or IGN Insider subscription (there were public keys, but those have been given out already), those  who meet that requirement (and have an Xbox Live Gold account obviously) can follow the link for a beta 360 experience. Unlike the Call of Duty 4 beta, there’s no waiting time (the CoD4 one was a good idea, but the errors that led to people not being sent keys turned into a fiasco) - as soon as you fill out the form, you get your key onscreen.

The beta itself starts on the 25th of March - there’s no indication as to whether this means the usual Xbox Live launch time of 9am, or 12:01 GMT, or 12:01 Pacific Time, or whatever.

PS: Sorry for the atrocious pun,  couldn’t resist

After its discussion on This Week in Tech, I decided to start using my dormant Twitter account again (hence the new links in the sidebar). The plugin I’m using to do this is a bit carp. For example it is showing my most recent tweet as being 3 weeks ago instead of 7 minutes and, rather astonishingly, placing the allegedly ‘3 week old’ tweet above ones it (correctly) dates as an hour hold. Never mind - it’ll do until I can find/write something better. A side effect of this is that those of you who are RSS-averse (or just want to do everything via Twitter) should now be able to get new notifications of posts on here by following me on Twitter.

When one of their longtime editors was fired after giving a prime advertiser’s game a mediocre review score, fans deserted Gamespot in droves. Now there’s been another screwup - not on the same scale, but still showing the complete lack of professionalism at the site critics christened ‘ca$hwh0re’. Lost Odyssey, which coincidentally does not have any advertising on Gamespot, was slaughtered in their review for ‘loading times exceeding 60 seconds’ (I paraphrase).

Now that the game’s out (in the US at least) many users are posting on Gamespot’s forums pointing out that the loading times are perfectly fine - about 10 seconds being the longest, typical of any 360 game. Gamespot have claimed that the discs Microsoft gave them are different from the retail copies, but to be honest that in itself is stunningly poor form on Gamespot’s part. They should have made sure that the game had begun pressing for retail distribution - and that their copy was retail equivalent - before they even wrote the damn thing.