A minor update to the 2.3 branch of Twitterlicious fixes the Twitpocalypse bug and a security issue.
If you have Twitterlicious 2.3 or above, it will automatically update. Otherwise get it from the usual place.
Stay tuned for some major new features.
Across the pond, the new iPhone 3G S has kept the previous iPhone 3G price points of $199 and $299. The old 3G has been reduced to $99 as a budget option. This is what Apple has traditionally done with new products.
But in the UK, according to new O2 pricing, the iPhone 3G 8GB has remained the same price, while the two new 3G S models are even more expensive. If you want an 18-month contract at £35 per month, it will cost you £184.98 for the 16GB, or a whopping £273.23 for the 32GB, on top of the contract price.
If you want a contract free iPhone 3G S, it’s £440 for the 16GB, and £538 for the 32GB. That’s over double the cost of the equivalent iPod Touch.
I thought we were rid of Rip-off Britain.
The Steam Group protesting the sequel to Left 4 Dead now has over 12,000 members.
I have a feeling that a good majority of the people in that group will still buy L4D2 when it comes out, and they’ve joined because there’s no harm in tying to get Valve to update L4D1 for free instead.
Valve’s games are known for their long shelf lives. Just look at the number of people playing the original Counter-Strike 1.6, and the number of free updates which has kept Team Fortress 2 very popular since it’s release in October 2007.
Left 4 Dead was released in November 2008 to widespread acclaim from gamers. It had it’s problems on launch: only two of the four campaigns were available on Versus mode and the numerous exploits and glitches, but the brilliant team-based game play made it an instant hit.
Valve’s decision to announce the release of a sequel just seven months into L4D’s life has angered many gamers in the community.
(Personal note: I paid £25 for my copy of Left 4 Dead and feel it was worth every penny. I could’ve paid £50 and I still wouldn’t feel ripped off. It may be an incomplete game, but I don’t feel aggrieved with the price or sequel at all. What I am worried about is how the community will react to the sequel, and what happens to Left 4 Dead once it’s sequel is released.)
In an interview with VideoGamer, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell promised additional downloadable content, in the way they updated Team Fortress 2:
One of the things that we’re doing is we seem to be in a transition between games as a package product and games more of a service. So if you look at Team Fortress 2, one of things that’s really helped grow the community is the continuous updates, where we release new maps, new character classes, new unlockables, new weapons. And we tell the stories about the characters, like the meet the sniper, or meet the sandwich. And that ongoing delivery of content really seems to grow the community.
So each time we’ve released one of those for Team Fortress 2 we’ve seen about a 20% increase in the number of people who are playing online. And that number is really important because it determines how many community created maps there are, how many servers are running, and so on. So we’ll do the same thing with Left 4 Dead where we’ll have the initial release and then we’ll release more movies, more characters, more weapons, unlockables, achievements, because that’s the way you continue to grow a community over time.
The announcement of L4D2 seems like a complete u-turn on this model, with many gamers saying they bought L4D because they expected Valve would be constantly updating it with new content. A thread on Valve’s L4D2 forum sums up the (nerd) rage being expressed:
- Significant content for L4D1 was promised, and never delivered
- Valve put little faith in L4D1 since they almost certainly started working on L4D2 right after release
- The fact that L4D2 is nearly identical to L4D1 will decimate the community for both games
- The announced date is not nearly enough time to polish content or make significant gameplay changes
- L4D2’s release will result in a drop in quality and frequency for L4D1 content, even compared to before
- The community has lost faith in Valve’s former reputation for commitment to their games post-release
And one more which I think is missed: L4D2 is very similar visually to L4D which would cause it to look more like an expansion pack rather than a proper sequel. This is something Valve can’t do anything about until they update or replace the Source engine.
Judging by the number of replies that agree in that thread (874 at the time of writing), a very significant proportion of the community is pissed, and all the good will Valve got from their spring DLC release has evaporated.
Valve has responded to the criticism with interviews for Ars Technica and Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
Their response boils down to:
1. Left 4 Dead is not as easy to update as Team Fortress 2
“Team Fortress gets to do these nice little discrete units of content, they get to do a map, there’s an internal consistency and an internal world that happens.” He described the content updates as “clean little things.” Bite-sized updates that add to the game, and over time change things. It’s not nearly that easy with Left 4 Dead, where one change affects nearly everything else.
Fair enough it may be harder to update, but they’re already working on making the L4D maps work on L4D2 so they must have a solution for introducing new content to existing maps.
2. There is a SDK coming out soon for user created maps
All the maps created with the SDK will work on the sequel. As for playing old maps with old characters but new creatures and melee? “We have some additional work to do there, we’re talking about how to do that. That’s what we want to do.”
Great for the PC community, this does nothing for the Xbox 360 community unless they allow a way to import them onto Live.
3. People didn’t feel aggravated about “buying” Half Life 2 again with the Orange Box
The Orange Box contains two expansion packs for Half Life 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2. Compairing the value of the Orange Box (considering I paid £15 for my copy) to a £35-40 copy of a sequel to a game I already paid £30 isn’t quite the same.
4. “Trust us”. We’ll still be supporting L4D
I think the short answer is: trust us a little bit. We’ve been pretty good over the years, even with L4D going back just a few months, about supporting games post-launch. Gabe’s always talking about providing entertainment as a service – it’s not about making a game any more.
Yeah, there’s certainly a chance of [more content for L4D], and we’re not announcing any of the specifics of that today. Like I say, stay tuned, there’s more coming, there’s more information we’re going to talk about for the sequel, there’s more content coming for Left 4 Dead in the fairly near term, that I think will sort of add to this picture and hopefully change some people’s opinions of what’s happening right now.
A lot of the community rage is coming from the uncertainty of what is going to happen to Left 4 Dead. Will it carry on with a separate community, will the content and community merge into Left 4 Dead 2, or will it die a slow and painful death where you can no longer find anyone to play with.
Gamers feel the money they paid for Left 4 Dead might be lost once Left 4 Dead 2 is released, and I think they have a right to be concerned. Hopefully Valve will be able to address this in a way that is beneficial to them and the community, but I seriously doubt Valve will back down and release L4D2 as a DLC now they’ve committed themselves.
Inside Sport has a fantastic article about former squash world number one David Palmer’s training routines and match preparation.
Sometimes our matches go for 40 minutes, sometimes they go for two hours. You get a 90- second break between sets, so it’s not like tennis. I like tennis and I think tennis players are fit, but I definitely think squash is the harder game. I admire Rafa Nadal for what he did at the Australian Open, but the difference with squash is that during tournaments we don’t have days off between matches, so we play five days in a row, no breaks.
The classic Another World game had a remake by the original creator Eric Chahi.
This is old news, however I think it’s worth mentioning as I’ve been trying to play the original PC version on DOSBox, when there’s the 15th anniversary special edition with the bonus level, more enemies, and better graphics in 1280×720 resolution for £10.
A recent cover painting for the New Yorker by Jorge Colombo boosted sales of the Brushes iPhone application to 2700 in a day.
On Monday, Mr. Sprang said the application had its highest selling day since it was first released into Apple’s App Store in August, with 2,700 copies at $4.99 apiece flying off the virtual shelves.
“That’s even bigger than when Apple featured the application on iTunes,” said Mr. Sprang, who estimated that on average the application sells roughly 60 to70 copies each day.
No more Duke Nukem Forever, for now. No official statement from 3DRealms has been released, although webmaster Joe Siegler has said:
It’s not a marketing thing. It’s true. I have nothing further to say at this time.
Microsoft has wisely extended their warranty for 360s suffering from the E74 error
I’ve know four or five of my friend’s Xboxes (all Falcon chipset) to fail due to this error, so it’s good to see Microsoft addressing some clear design faults. The bad news is that it seems the new Jasper chipsets still suffer from the same E74 problems.
After last week’s blunder which lead to U2’s new album being leaked online, Spotify have now landed the rights to stream the album a week in advance of it’s release in the UK.
No doubt this is a reaction to the leak, and it would be interesting to see if it would deter any would-be pirates.
Or as I prefer, Apple Safari Chrome.
If you have any InputManager plugins installed, you’ll probably need to uninstall them to run this. 1Password crashes and PithHelmet screws up the rendering.
There’s been a lot of commotion in the past week over a small minority of ISPs in the UK not blocking a blacklist of child pronography websites supplied by the Internet Watch Foundation. The NSPCC and Children’s Charities Coalition on Internet Safety (CCCIS) have expressed their “serious concerns” that up to 700,000 UK homes are on an internet connection that doesn’t block these sites, stating that “self-regulation on this issue is obviously failing – and in a seriously damaging way for children.”
Rory Cellan-Jones from the BBC has written an insightful blog post about the subject. In which he points out the work of Dr Richard Clayton:
He told me that, if the aim was to stop people coming across these images by accident, then the system was a failure because that didn’t happen anyway: “This material tends to be held on paid-for sites or is held by people who don’t publish it to the world because they don’t want to get arrested.”
Dr Clayton’s view is that the big ISPs use the system because they’ve been pressured to adopt it, but smaller firms are perfectly justified in opting out. “Everybody thinks they’ve done something by blocking this stuff but in practice it makes very little difference to who sees it and it’s quite expensive.”
What the article and charities fail to mention is that to side-step the blacklist is as simple as accessing offending websites through an anonymous proxy, of which there are thousands. And all of this can be done with minimal technical knowledge.
Fortunately the government has seen sense, and is accepting the 95% adoption rate by ISPs. It’s unlikely that calls from children’s charaties to bring in legislation will be heeded, as that can been seen as the first step in a slippery slope to over-regulation and perhaps even government censorship.
All for something that doesn’t even work.
Ryanair staff have chastised a blogger for finding a bug in their booking system that allows you to buy flights for free, and had a dig at WordPress too! Surprisingly they’ve openly identified themselves as staff from Ryanair, and their IP’s have been confirmed as from their companies designated IP range.
This is deplorable behaviour from Ryanair, and nothing short of a PR disaster if the popular press get hold of it. This is pretty indicative of the company as a whole though, so maybe I was a fool to expect something better.
U2’s upcoming album, due to be released on March 3rd, has already been leaked all over the internet after a mistake by Universal’s Australians branch.
U2 is a staunchly anti-piracy and pro-DRM group that advocates greater controls to ban individuals that download pirated material, and have accused ISPs that continue to ignore copyright theft of being facilitators themselves.
You can now download it as DRM-free 320kbps MP3s, although why you would want to listen to their dribble is another matter.
This shouldn’t really be news to anyone, but a study has revealed that UK kebabs have ’shocking’ amounts of salt, fat, and calories:
The worst doners inspectors came across contained 1,990 calories before salad and sauces – over 95% of a women’s recommended daily calories – 346% of a women’s saturated fat intake and 277 per cent of an adult’s daily salt intake.
Stanford University’s iPhone course has finished, and the resources for the course have been posted online. Included are the lecture slides as PDFs and code examples.
They’re probably not much use to experienced iPhone developers but might be a good starting point for anyone new to Cocoa and Objective-C.
The second Stig from Top Gear has been revealed to be former racing driver and professional stunt driver Ben Collins.
As the plane was on fire, some prayed, while others did what you were supposed to do: read the emergency instruction about how to open the door:
Some passengers screamed, others tucked their heads between their knees, and several prayed over and over: “Lord, forgive me for my sins.” But a man named Josh who was sitting in the exit row did exactly what everyone is supposed to do but few ever do: he pulled out the safety card and read the instructions on how to open the exit door.
Which do you think was more useful?