This is a really funny play on the original iPhone commercial. Its not far off base in its humor, which is slightly sad. Hurry up with Windows Phone Microsoft!!!
Archive for the 'television' Category
I read this on Edgadget this morning. This is a nice turn of events. First Skype is allowed to provide us with VOIP and now we can use our Sling Boxes. There is only one thing left for AT&T to do. Make the network actually work in NYC. I cant even make a phone call in my apartment. Very disappointing, but Aki’s work cell (from Verizon) doesn’t work either. I guess we are either in need of a new type of technology or maybe AT&T will get smart and release the femtocell in the New York Market….
I was out walking around in Park Slope the other day and I noticed a huge group of people loitering on the sidewalk handing out flyers. Generally, I try to avoid these things as I get annoyed very quickly with people wasting my time. These people were dressed as the Verizon network people, wearing white coveralls and hard hats. I went over towards them, and they promptly handed me a flyer explaining the benefits of FIOS over Cable.
I agree with these things. I would get FIOS right now — IF IT WAS AVAILABLE!!! Verizon has been advertising for over a year now that FIOS is available in New York City. From what I can tell, its available in a very very limited amount of areas.
So, why is this group of 100-150 people being paid to advertise a service in a neighborhood that it doesn’t exist? Wouldn’t it make much more sense to pay the technicians to install the hardware to make FIOS work in Park Slope?
This was a bit annoying to me, and really makes me question the logic of marketing. I do call once a month and ask when I can get FIOS, and generally I am told the same, “Soon, we are working on it” canned statement.
Annoyances aside, I still will get FIOS the day it is available — but for a different reason than you might think. Of course I am interested in the fast internet speeds, but it is the TV service that I am more interested in. For one, I am anxiously awaiting the ability to watch NFL network again. When I lived in Canada this channel was included in basic cable, and it was watched by my girlfriend and my self MOST of the time in football season. I caught her watching it all by herself a few times actually — even when I was not home. Secondly, because the Scientific Atlanta 8300HDC is such a piece of junk (crashes at minimum one per week) I looked into what box Verizon uses. It seems that it uses the Motorola box, which has proven much more stable in my experiences.
Regardless, I will not be holding my breath for the service to be available any time soon.
I read this article on shacknews this morning. If you don’t want to read the article — it basically states that Electonic Arts (EA) is going to make sports games for Windows again in 2009 after taking a year off.
I am generally happy to hear this, but I hope they have really rethought their marketing strategy for the PC. I really like playing games via the interenet on PC because there is so much more you can do than in a locked down environment like XBOX Live or PSN. The other thing which is far superior on a Windows PC is the freedom to choose your controller. I can use the great xbox 360 wired or wireless controllers perfectly on XP or Vista OR I can choose to play with a keyboard and mouse. This is really where it is at for me and its why I spend more money on my PC.
I have to wonder what EA is thinking at this point. Cancel the series…Bring it back…. I don’t get it.
In the past EA has half-assed their Windows versions of Madden. They have left out control schemes, they have NEVER implemented force feedback, even though they natively support the XBOX 360 controllers, and they have used copy protection schemes that have rendered some of the games I have paid for unplayable in the past. I think these reasons are enough to indicate why people may shy away from buying the PC version of Madden.
I hope they do a good job with the game and I hope people buy it, but I dont think people will and here is why. We dont need to buy a whole new game every year. It is just too expensive and after a new version every year since 1992, there isnt that much more to add.
I do have some suggestions for EA regarding Madden:
- Make a new engine every 5 years for the game instead of every year. Use the model of First Person Shooters. Build a really good engine that is tweakable year to year to take advantage of lessons learned. This will lower some costs.
- Since you are now not reprogramming the game from scratch every year, dont sell a game every year. Instead, make money from microtransactions. ROSTER UPDATES are clearly something people will pay for. I think EA could STILL sell up-to-date rosters for Madden 92 and some people would buy them. I have never understood why this isnt supported and I really question the marketing people at EA for it. You can sell other things too via live, psn, or even steam — skins for stadiums, weather packs (fog, snow, hurrricanes, etc), new uniforms and many, many others.
- Here is another idea I have been toying with for Madden in particular. I think it might make sense to not even sell the game (still DO sell microtransactions, of course), but rather give it away for free and support it via advertising. The game is already riddled with adds. Why not add internet conenctivity to these adds and deliver personalized or local adds during game play. For example, say you are playing online and your opponent calls a time-out. A commerical for Taco Bell could run full screen while players choose their play again. At first people might find it invasive, but if the game was free, I dont think they would care, I for one would gladly trade some of my attention for a free game.
These are just a few of my ideas. I certainly hope that EA reads this and thinks my ideas are good. If not, well, I hope someone else does and uses the ideas first. Compeition usually helps out the consumer. If you are reading this, and you represent a game company or marketing company, please feel free to contact me. I have alot more ideas as to how to make money using networking and video games. I might jsut do some free lance work for you.
Does anyone know if there is a working VFW driver for an Nvidia 7800GT with VIVO? I have 2 of these cards and would like to use one of them as a video in on my HTCP as the video capture is pretty good on it. I have been unable to find any indication that Nvidia supports VFW at this point. I am hoping that someone has a hacked driver or something. I have other video capture solutions that do work, but I would like to use one of these as well. Please leave a message if you can help 
I have been trying to figure this one out for almost 1 year now.
I have a slingbox connected to my Dad’s Satellite. I can watch his DirecTV stream anywhere I am and since he has 2 tuners connected to it, I dont change the channel he is watching either. It is a pretty nice setup and it ran great for 2 years without a single glitch until my Dad decided to fire Verizon as his phone company and opt to try VOIP from Vonage.
Initially everything seemed to be working great. Vonage phone calls worked nicely. Sling was working as usual and all other internet services seemed to be unaffected by the new Vonage box plugged into the router.
Then one night, I was watching a hockey game when I wanted to call my Dad. I noticed a very big change in the quality of the phone call while streaming via Sling. I decided to change some settings in the router to compensate for this. I am using a Linksys WRT54GL router with Tomato firmware installed on it. I set up the QOS to give the higest precidence to Vonage and to limit the bandwidth of the Slingbox to 300kbps as I have my Sling Player set to stream at 300kbps on myside.
This change had some benefit, but did not alleviate the problem like it should have. Next, my Dad decided to opt in for Comcast’s Performance PLUS with PowerBoost package. This package came at quite a premium over the regular cable internet service, but was guaranteed to have 2mbps upstream. This would be plenty for the 300kbps Slingbox and 90kbps for Vonage to function together seamlessly. Or so I thought.
After checking the upload speeds with serveral websites as well as running a straight FTP transfer of a 100 megabyte file to my server at work, I decided that my Dad was indeed getting between 2 and 4 mbps uploads. Really pretty good.
So we tried the Vonage with Sling at the same time test again . Same results — choppy phone conversation but Sling worked well. This was really odd as I gave Sling the lowest QOS priority in the router. At this point I tried 2 other routers with exactly the same results.
I then decided to try the test in reverse. I would run my sling box while my Dad watched it during a phone conversation. I do not have a phone, but rater use the Skype In and Out services for my phone, but he remained using Vonage.
This test revealed an interesting finding. There was no sound issues at all and he could watch my sling box perfectly. I set my WRT54GL router up the same as his and tried 2 other routers as well for thoroughness. The only way to get the choppy phone conversation was when he was streaming something up to the internet while talking on Vonage. We checked the bandwidth during these tests and he was never even using more than 1mbps even though he clearly tested up to 2-4 mbps every time. Also, at this point I should say that I use Time Warner Cable for my Internet.
I was stumped as to how to solve this problem. My dad can upload files to my FTP server at close to 4mbps, but when he uses Vonage the total bandwidth he is uploading seems to be capped at under 700kbps. During a file transfer the speed will not just be split between the 2 applications, but rather the overal maximum transfer speed drops to this 700kbps. When we hang up the phone, it goes back up to 4mbps. Although I could not find a solution to the problem, I did suspect there was a casue.
I assumed at this point that Comcast was doing some kind of throttling on the bandwidth during Vonage calls. I believe that Comcast can easily tell that you are using VOIP with Vonage and could very easily change things to screw up your connection to make it seem like Vonage isnt working well. I thought my test of the changing FTP speed proved this point, but I had no idea what to do.
Then today, I read this news at the Wall Street Journal. This pretty much proved my theory. If Comcast gives their guarantee NOW that they will work with Vonage to make sure the connection is clear., this pretty much indicates to me that something was up eariler even though Comcast Denies it. They also denied (falsely) that they were throttling P2P traffic ealier this year.
I am positive that Comcast was doing something to make it seem like Vonage VOIP was an inferior product — this article further supports my theory. I will test Sling and Vonage again over the next weeks and see if my results are different.
I have some real complaints about Time Warner Cable. I could go on and on, but I think I am going to vent today on one item in particular. The 8300HDC cable box.
Firstly, I should point out that this box is made by Scientific Atlanta (Cisco). I am not sure of the details of the hardware and software relationship, but my guess is that with proper software support the box would work just fine. This, sadly as anyone who has this box knows, is not the case.
This box seemingly is everything you would want in a cable box. It has dual tuners and can record HD and SD video. It also supports the addition of an external hard drive for increased storage. I have not tried this yet, so I am unsure if the external HDD is supported in the sofware provided by Time Warner Cable. At first inspection, it seems to be a perfectly capable cable tuner.
This is where the illusion ends. The 8300HDC crashes all the time. Most often when it is recording HD streams (one of the main advertised functions of the box). Also, the box tends to reboot itself at least once a week. When it reboots, it does not turn itself back on, so my windows media center is unable to record anything. This provides me with alot of long all black avis with no sound. There is nothing I can do about this as I contacted Time Warner and was told that with DIGITAL cable this behavior was perfectly normal. They stressed the digital. This makes zero sense to me, but displays their blatant disrespect for their customers intelligence.
Aside from crashing, another complaint is that the firewire port seems to be disabled. I have no way to test this for sure, but after trying channel changing via FireSTB to no avail, I have given up. Previously, I had FireSTB working on a Motorola DCT-6200 with no problems at all. Again, I have no way to test this for sure but when I asked Time Warner they told me the firewire port is unsupported.
Due to this frustration, I decided to dump the 8300HDC and opt for a HD Tivo instead. The HD tivo gets great reviews and is continuously praised on a number of podcasts including CNET’s Buzz Out Loud. I went to Amazon.com and bought one. When it was delivered to me, I plugged it in and tested it out on analog cable only (more on this later). The box worked very well. I only wish that I could have actually used it.
I called Time Warner Cable and asked the tech if they had cable cards for use in Tivo. She replied that they did and that I could pick one up at the local Time Warner Office. I also asked if they had the dual tuner cards just like the one that is currently in the 8300HDC for rent. I was told yes, and that I could get that at the local office. I proceeded to the local office. I explained my situation with the box and the crashing and that I wanted a cable card for my new Tivo. The clerk had no idea what a cable card was, but offered me a new 8300HDC in exchange. I proceeded to show the clerk the card in the box, and asked if I could just have that one as it was exactly what I wanted. She said she would check. Another guy came back and said that there are no dual tuner cable cards and that I could only have one single tuner card. After some arguing, I was ready to get my 2 single tuner cable cards installed by a tech 30 days later. Then they told me the price differential. It was going to cost me $30 more per month for the cable cards and I was going to have to pay the tech $50 to plug the cards in to my Tivo. I was confused. I already had the 8300HDC WITH a dual tuner cable card inside of it for $30 less than what I would get less equipment for?!?! I questioned this, and it was explained to me that the cable box was part of my package deal, and by not having the box, I was breaking my package. I would thus have to pay more.
This seems like a scam to me. But who am I to complain to the cable company, they obviously do not care what I think. So, I took their offer of an exchange of the 8300HDC and went home. I boxed up my HD Tivo and sent it back to Amazon.com. Amazon.com is great by the way. They paid for shipping both ways, and I greatly appreciate this type of customer service. Time Warner Cable could really learn something from Amazon.com regarding customer service.
Now one more thing. Why is it that I am forced to have this box at all. QAM delivers digital cable very nicely with no box at all. My TVs all support QAM as well as the tuners in my computer. QAM works great, supports HD and Dolby Digital and takes much bandwidth than analog signals. Why is Time Warner cable not supporting QAM. I understand they dont want to put premium channels on QAM. I am ok with this. But why not ESPN, Food Network, HGTV and other channels that are included in basic cable? Is it becasue they are scamming us into thinking we have to have a cable box, and that if we want to watch tv in more than one room they can collect a rental fee per television? I think so. Marketing people are so transparent. Again, a scam in my opinion.
I assume that FIOS does not support QAM either, but as soon as it is available in Brooklyn, I am switching to FIOS. When you couple the fast internet speeds with the hassles and the blatant disrespect for my intelligence by Time Warner, I feel it is time to fire Time Warner as my cable privider. Bad Time Warner, Bad.