Spontaneous Monotony

When Warner Bros. (makers of the Harry Potter film series, among others) announced that it was going Blu-ray exclusive the other day many people predicted that this was the beginning of the end for HD-DVD. Now it seems that Paramount is about to activate a get-out clause in its HD-DVD exclusivity deal and switch to Bluray. Now of course this could just be dismissed as internet rumour-mongering (remember those ‘Xbox 360 with builtin HDDVD drive’ rumours? Wherefore art thou Romeo :P) if it wasn’t for a slight detail. This story comes from the Financial Times. It now seems that HD-DVD will not face a long, lingering fight against inevitable death, but instead has a date with a firing squad in the very near future. Time to start buying those Sony S300s folks!

BT have never really had ‘fans’, being the former monopoly telecoms provider and generally charging more than competitors for their internet service (in between making questionable use of their near-monopoly against said competitors). However, until recently their saving grace has been that the internet service is generally fast and reliable. Unfortunately it has been deteriorating rapidly in recent times. Many BT IP addresses are listed on spam blocklists (I’ve had quite a few ‘email not sent’ messages to this effect from my mailserver), and in the past week or so BT’s network has simply stopped connecting anyone to NCSoft’s network (their websites, as well as the Guild Wars, City of Heroes and Tabula Rasa games). Perhaps it is in fact the reverse - due to the aforementioned spamlistings, servers in between BT and the destination are discarding connections due to security concerns? Either way, BT’s fault.

Problems with the distance from the telephone exchange, or with the weather, are understandable if irritating. What isn’t acceptable though is for the actual service - connecting the paying customer’s computer with whatever servers he or she wishes to access - to be so indefensibly dire.

For a long time Gamespot has been one of the web’s most trusted sources of reviews. CNET’s corporate management have managed to destroy that reputation - built up over years - in a matter of days. There are two things that we know for certain - Gamespot editor Jeff Gertsmann recently gave a negative review to the new Kane and Lynch game. He was then fired. Now the rumour which has caught on is that the two were linked - that Gerstmann was fired after Eidos threatened to cancel advertising campaigns on CNET’s sites.

Of course, this leaves many people in search of a review site which still has some integrity left. One I’ve seen mentioned in a few places is 1UP - if anyone has any other Corruptspot alternatives then post a comment here and I’ll add them to the list.

Of course, that has not been confirmed (and given the confidentiality rules surrounding employment it is pretty difficult to do so), but the response of CNET staff has been as good as in many people’s eyes. Instead of giving the company’s side of the story, CNET’s moderators are closing any forum posts (often including abusive comments in their reply) which question the company’s conduct. One of the few surviving complaint threads is (at the time of writing) 1096 pages long. Not posts, PAGES! Given the level of aggro this is causing, I suspect that the costs in terms of lost credibility (not to mention loss of a great many paying subscribers, myself included) are far higher than whatever the value of the Eidos advertising was.

You might remember my positive assessment of the Asus EeePC. Well thanks to eBuyer and CityLink my Eee has now arrived. The default OS looks great - my only mistake so far has been clicking ‘documents’ expecting my home folder to appear and instead getting OOo Writer. Learning a new interface is fun though (if you’re a geek like me) and it was my own dumb fault (given that the icon was a pen and paper :P).

The Eee is, so far, everything I’ve expected - it connected to the WPA wireless router upstairs (getting, I might add, a better signal than my Buffalo USB stick-equipped desktop which is on the same floor as the router. Writing this blog entry on it, in fact.

Apparently the Asus EeePC launches in the UK on the 13th of November (Tuesday). For those of you who are getting one - and I suspect there are a fair few, given that it is still my most popular post - here is a link to a UK site taking preorders. NB: As with all links, I’m not responsible for anything that happens to you/your computer/your bank details/your cat when you go to someone else’s site. Don’t feel cheesed off at the £200-ish price - we are not being charged double the $200 that was quoted in the original publicity material. The version that the UK is getting is the midrange model - with 4Gb of storage, a webcam, and a larger battery compared to the 2Gb version selling for $200 in the US.

Bear in mind that for that money you’re getting an ultraportable laptop (7″ screen) capable of running full-capability software for taking lecture notes, browsing the web, etc. on the go, and lasting for 3.5 hours of real world usage. The relatively small amount of storage (4Gb) isn’t really a big deal - you’ll have about half of that left (I remember reading 2.3Gb somewhere) after the Xandros-based operating system has taken its share. Since it has multiple USB ports, you could always add another 4Gb of storage via a flash drive - those sizes are going for less than £20 nowadays.

Now that we have the full details of the Eee PC allow me to repeat my balanced, objective and utterly academic evaluation of its capabilities: me want

EDIT: Me have, or at least I will on Monday when the Citylink guy shows up. Got one of what seems to be (from the fact that they’ve now removed the product listing) eBuyer’s only stock of them for the forseeable future.