Watered down gaming.

It's something that I've written about a few times here. Adult games that in most other countries that would receive an R18+ rating, get banned here in Australia because there is no such rating for computer games here.

Now I'm not talking about those weird Japanese hentai games that would probably require an X rating. It's blockbuster games like Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto and Left for Dead 2. None of these are kids games. All of them are designed to be played by adults. Like a lot of adult movies and novels, they may contain violence, coarse language and sexual themes.

Most games that are refused classification get re-released in a watered down and edited version so that it passes the Australian Government Classification Board's guidelines, often resulting in a washed-out game that lacks the very elements that make it great. Recently IGN did a review of the censored Australian version of Left 4 Dead 2. The review did not go well.

Look, I'm no sadist – I don't get off on violence, but I do like decapitating zombies. That's not wrong. I must have been leaking the lizard when the Australian Classifications Board suddenly deemed the undead 'too realistic' to be savaged by virtual machetes and cricket bats. Censorship sucks.-Patch, IGN.

It's clear that every time a game is refused classification, the game makers have to spend quite a bit of time rewriting code, altering artwork and perhaps even re-recording sound so it passes our classification system.

Essentially, it's the same as forcing the makers

of the Saw movies to rewrite and reshoot the gory bits of the movie just in case a five-year old child walks into the room while you're watching it. Would you go to see that?

So it's nice to see UK game maker "Rebellion Developments" taking a stand. They're simply not going to spend the time and money destroying their new game "Alien vs Predator" just so it can pass the Australian Government standards.

"The content of AvP is based on some of the most innovative and iconic horror movies, and as such we wanted to create a title that was true to the source material. It is for adults, and it is bloody and frightening, that was our intent. We will not be releasing a sanitized or cut down version

for territories where adults are not considered by their governments to be able to make their own entertainment choices."

-CEO Jason Kingsley, Rebellion Dev

elopments.

According to the "National Classification Code", "Computer Games" will be refused classification if they "are unsuitable for a minor to see or play;" which doesn't really go along with the first opening principle of the code which states:

"(a) adults should be able to read, hear and see what they want;"

-The Code, Commonwealth of Australian Law.

Hopefully a lot more game makers will make the same stand. The computer game industry is growing faster than both the movie and music industries. For example, Spiderman 3 holds the record for opening day ticket sales for a movie at $59 million. Grand Theft Auto IV clocked up $310 million in sales on it's first day. The result of banning blockbuster games will be a loss in revenue for Australian game distributors.

Some gamers aren't content to simply do without and will order the forbidden games through overseas websites. New Zealand has a R18+ rating for computer games and it's online games stores happen to be on the same Internet as we are! I did a quick Google search. Note the "Sponsored Link"?

The solution is simple. Give games an R18+ rating and don't sell them to children.

Problem solved.

The end of USB?

Intel are developing a fiber-optic connection standard that will replace USB, IEEE-1394 (Firewire) and HDMI to name a few. The standard will support multiple protocols and multiple devices on a single cable meaning that it will be used to connect your printer, camera, monitor, portable storage devices and just about anything else that connects to the computer using the same plug. No more wondering if you've got something plugged in correctly! Cables can be up to 100m long and transfer speeds will start at 10Gb per second. That's ten times faster than Gigabit ethernet - imagine transferring an entire blu-ray movie in under 30 seconds! Just another step in making our computers faster and easier to use. The technology is called Light Peak and we should start seeing this appear on computers and devices some time next year.

USB 3.0 is just around the corner too, and although it doesn't boast the speed and operational distance that Light Peak has, it will be backwards compatible with older USB devices, so it's unlikely that we've seen the end of USB yet.

My two favourite subjects!

I caught a news article today. Gene Roddenberry - creator of Star Trek - was given the first ever Mac Plus to roll off the assembly line. This story made news because that very computer is going up for Auction. In case you are wondering, no, it's not being sold on e-bay, but at an Auction in Hollywood.

Where No Mac Had Gone Before - Technologizer

The article has a few other interesting tid-bits for the Star Trek/Mac fan too.

The Value of Data

I've been going on about ZFS for a while now, trying to "have" it, searching and downloading and researching. Sorry about that. But for anyone who wants to understand why I'm so wrapped up in it, you have to understand the high value I place on my data. At the moment, we have a digital camera that we've taken thousands of photos with, a digital video camera (or two) with tons of footage, an iPod with enough mp3s to fill it over a hundred time. This is my stuff. I want it to be both safe and accessible. ZFS has the tools to do this. For those of you who like comics, the Nexenta have an eight page comic on their website. Check it out.

Linux + ZFS = Nexenta

I stumbled across Nexenta, another OS that runs ZFS but behaves like Linux. I thought OpenSolaris looked and behaved like linux, but hey, what do I know? Hoping it might have a more user friendlier approach to ZFS, I think I might give it a try. The community that supports Nexenta seems to be geared a little more to beginners, something that most Linux users are used to. So I am continuing the epic quest to set up a hassle free network access storage server.

ZFS Fail

So after a reinstall of OpenSolaris and starting from scratch and carefully going through the newly learned steps of setting up my home file server, I finally got it working to the stage when the server had a ZFS pool and could share it over the network and I could read and write to it. I recorded the terminal commands that I used to get it going in a Google Doc if anyone wants to try if for themselves.

However, every time I tried to copy anything big to it, it would disappear off the network until it was rebooted. Not sure what is causing this and the OpenSolaris community aren't newbie friendly. In fact, they're not helpful at all. The problem could be a hardware fault, but I don't know my way around OpenSolaris well enough to determine that and operating systems that require terminal commands to get anything done just seems so... '80's...

I'm not giving up just yet though. Today, Uncle Phil is donating his old PC to the cause. It's a PC that he doesn't use anymore because he now has an iMac, something that's been happening a bit in our circle of friends lately. Phil's old PC isn't shabby at all, with a Core2Duo processor and plenty of RAM so it'll be interesting if this makes a difference.

Here we go again!

A Win Followed By Another Problem

Yay! I googled and googled and googled and eventually found a few blogs with useful information and guides to get Windows to see OpenSolaris shares, and if Windows can do it, the Mac can.

If you've happened on this page looking for the answer I found, I apologize. It was like 4am when I got it working and I went to sleep pretty much immediately but I'll post a few pages from the history that I think were helpful.... I was pretty tired.

A good place to start if you're just considering using OpenSolaris for NAS (network access storage)
Simons Blog:A Home Fileserver using ZFS
I started following the guide at:
Corner 11:Adventures in Opensolaris - Build a ZFS pool as a network share

but he got a bit vague on a couple of steps but got me most of the way.

The Observatory:Accessing OpenSolaris Shares From Windows.

This one cleared up the steps I was having problems with.

Anyway, the point is that after yet another fresh install of OpenSolaris and lots of reading and typing terminal commands, I can now access my ZFS File server from my Mac. That's what the "Yay!" was about.

I've only been playing with OpenSolaris for about a week now in it's painfully obvious to me that I still have a lot to learn. A fact that hit home hard when I tried to copy something onto the file server. I couldn't. In fact, I couldn't even copy a file to the ZFS volume from OpenSolaris. So my next challenge is to decipher folder permissions. I think I have a clue... it's starts with chmod.

I'm sure there's a whole lot more reading and probably some lengthy terminal sessions involved... Mick suggested that I visit a OpenSolaris IRC Chat Room, a suggestion I took about a day before I received. OpenSolaris comes with Pidgin - a multi service chat client (like MSN or GoogleTalk but more useful) and checking out the IRC channel (#opensolaris at Freenode.net) was what I was doing while googling.

Is it too soon to say googled with a little 'g'?

I like to scope an IRC channel before I blurt out a question - especially a channel full of techies. I've worked as a computer tech so I know what it's like to be asked stupid questions - often the same questions from different people, and some tech-type channels have rules like "Don't ask questions that are already answered in our FAQ" and "No Noobs". So I said "hi" when I entered and sat back to see if I could understand what everyone was saying, to see if I had learned enough to jump into a conversation.

Considering OpenSolaris is kind of like the 'in-development-bleeding-edge' version of Sun Solaris, it wasn't surprising that these guys were talking like programmers and developers, not a newbie helpline.

Still, I might ask them about chmod... nah!

Foray into ZFS

So, as I was saying, I've installed OpenSolaris onto the old rig, which probably can't be called 'old' anymore because it's got a new motherboard, new RAM and a new CPU. I've discovered some things about OpenSolaris. It's a lot like Linux. It uses the Gnome GUI. Getting ZFS to work requires use of Terminal which is like a DOS box, only more useful, but is easy enough after a few online tutorials.

The PC has four hard drives all of different sizes. The first one accommodates the OpenSolaris install. The other three are all grouped together into a single partition that is both striped and mirrored and is also expandable! In layman's terms, it means this - those of you with large video/music/photo collections will be able to appreciate this: You have a folder shared across your network that any computer can access. It contains all your media. These are quite common now and are usually referred to as a Media Server or Home File Server. Normally when you run out of space on your hard drive you have a couple of options - delete something to make room or add another hard drive, the latter option being the one we're interested in. When you add another hard drive, you format it and share it as another folder on the network meaning you'll end up with folders like MOVIES1, MOVIES2, MUSIC.A-J, MUSIC.K-Z, etc... and that's just annoying. The ZFS feature in OpenSolaris allows you to "join" your hard drives together so that when you add another hard drive it simply creates more space on the partition. The hard drives don't even need to be the same size! On top of that, ZFS can sustain a hard drive failure, so if you have one of your hard disks crash, OpenSolaris will be able to rebuild the data that was stored on that crashed disk when you replace it with a new one!

This is very impressive technology, which is why I used so many exclamation marks. However, while there is a lot of documentation online on how to set up OpenSolaris and ZFS, getting it to play nice with my Macs over the network is insanely difficult and complicated.

OpenSolaris comes from a *nix background so it shares certain traits with UNIX, Linux and even OS X in some ways, but this very same *nix background brings with it a veritable Fort Knox of security features with dozens of User levels and Groups, and the vast majority of configuration options can only be accessed through a Terminal window using long and complicated commands. Needless to say, it's a steep learning curve for someone who hasn't had experience with Linux style operating systems and Joe Average can just forget about it.

It's a shame that getting network shares working on OpenSolaris isn't easier. Everything else was pretty much configured automatically. The network is there and configured, I can access the Internet with Firefox and can ping the other computers on the network. It came bundled with a few applications like Firefox and Thunderbird for e-mail, a package installer to get more software, a media player and everything on OpenSolaris works quite well... until you want to configure something on the system. Then it's that damn Terminal window again...

Although I've had it installed and running with ZFS for three days now, I've still yet to browse a single network share on the new OpenSolaris box, from either Windows or Mac.

Back to the forums I guess...

Super User!

I just discovered the # su command! All doors have opened!

OpenSolaris

I'm installing OpenSolaris, a free UNIX operating system on my old windows machine today. I'm hoping to turn it into a network file server and try out ZFS. This could be the fate of Blackpearl.

Conroy - Super Villian

Australian Senator Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communication and the Digital Economy won the Internet Villian of the Year Award at the 11th Annual Internet Industry Awards by the Internet Service Providers Association in London this week. Check out the story on iTWire.

Congratulations Mr Conroy, the entire world has formally recognized your Internet filtering scheme as the worst thing that's happend to the Internet ever. Well done!

Parties, Maps and the Flu

We went to Brisbane on the weekend to attend Jemma and Nick's engagement party. We took the X-90 down for the drive, the first time I've taken the little Suziki for such a long trip. It handled really well, although the seats stop being comfortable after about three or four hours.

The party was great! We caught up with a lot of Cilla's family and got to meet some of Nick's relatives which was really good. Nick's clan seems like a top bunch. We're looking forward to catching up with most of Cilla's family again at Xmas. Nick show me his new iPhone 3G S which is a very tidy bit of gear. iPhone is a bit smaller than I thought it would be. I really really really want one...

We had a few days free to do whatever and we were trying to think of who we know near there to drop in and visit. The Gilberts are pretty much just across the NSW border, and Mick and Anna aren't far away in Dalby, but the choice was made for us when Cilla woke up with a cough and the sniffles. I'm sure no-one want's a visit from someone with the flu (especially with a house full of kids) so we headed home.

We did drop in to Maryborough to stretch our legs and give our arses a rest, where we caught up with Reid and met his Grandmother Beryl. She didn't like my long hair at all and didn't hesitate to tell me so. She's a funny old dear. She cooked us up a little pizza and sent us on our way.

It was nice to crash in our own bed after a long trip but we were both sick as dogs. Of course there was that little voice at the back of our heads saying "...it could be swine influenza..." so on Monday we gave Queensland Health a call and let them know we had the flu. They interviewed me over the phone and asked me lots of question along the lines of "are you dying?" and "are you dead yet?" and finally said it was likely just normal people flu and I should just go see a doctor.

Our regular doctor was booked out so we booked in at another medical center. And what a wanker we ended up with! He quizzed us about smoking and then blamed that on why we were sick and then told Cilla, who works at a cafe at an airport that she'd be ready for work in two days. Knowing the risk of taking the flu into a cafe at an airport, she asked to have until Friday, but the doctor refused saying she can go back to work on Wednesday. So without a medical certificate from the doctor, Cilla has been forced to go to work before she's recovered.

And get this! The antibiotic that this doctor prescribed came with a "Consumer Medicine Information" sheet which says:

"Doxyhexal is an antibiotic and belongs to a group of medicines called tetracyclines... Tetracyclines will not work agains viral infections such as colds or flu."

So what the fuck is up with this doctor? To the untrained eye, it looks like he has no idea of what he's doing. To the conspiracy minded it looks like he's trying to spread the flu as far and wide as possible. Perhaps he's just an anti-smoking campaigner posing to be a medical practitioner. Whatever his problem is, he does nothing to promote trust in his industry.

---

Other news. Google have added Real Estate search to Google Maps. Try it out like this.

1. Visit maps.google.com.au
2. Type "real estate" into the search box
3. Click the "Search Maps" button
4. Click "Real estate on Google Maps" link in the left sidebar of the webpage - it has a little blue house icon beside it.

Now you should have lots of little red dots all over the map. These are properties for sale or rent. You can narrow the search field using the options in the side bar and you'll see dot's disappear as you do. This is a very neat tool and an extremely practical use of Google Maps.

Gotta love Google!

Who are the targets?

Senator Conroy and his Internet censorship goons have, until recently, been selling their compulsory filter idea as a way of protecting young Australians from kiddy porn, but if Conroy is allowed to implement his Great Barrier Firewall, he gives our federal government a filter that lets them block any information they deem unsuitable for your viewing.

Let me stress that point.

If we ALLOW our Federal Government to force this censorship scheme on us, it lets THEM decide what sites are not suitable for YOU to look at, download or purchase. They will have unprecedented contral over your access to information and what you are able to purchase because, as they have since revealed, the scope of their censorship goes far beyond blocking unsuitable porn.

Todays rant is inspired by articles in the news recently describing how Conroy already plans to expand the scope of his Internet filter to block out any websites that sell or allow you to download computer games that fall outside the MA15+ rating given by the Australian Film and Literature Classification Board. Australia is the only western country in the world that doesn't have an R18+ rating for computer games!

Do any of my readers play Second Life? Be prepared to kiss that little diversion goodbye - anything that lets it's players get creative and make whatever they want is definitely going to fall outside our ratings system!

Fallout 3 was banned in Australia for depicting drug use until a censored version was released.

Most of the GTA games have been banned in Australia because they depicted sex scenes. Censored versions have since been released.

F.E.A.R. 2 was banned because it was too violent. The publishers appealed the decision and it was reclassified as MA15+.

There is quite a list of games banned in Australia.

Basically, computer games get refused classification (and subsequently banned) because of drug use, sex scenes and violence - the very same reasons we have an R18+ rating for video and film releases.

The Interactive Entertainment Association of Australia (IEAA) recently conducted a survey revealing that the average age of the Australian gamer is thirty years old. Not really surprising considering the average price of a latest generation gaming console or games-capable PC tends to be out of reach of most pocket money budgets. So we know that the people buying games are - on average - adults. The same adults that can rent or purchase a whole range of R18+ movies depicting all kinds of drug use, sex and violence. In some places in Australia, these same adults are legally allowed to purchase X rated material. Yet when it comes to gamers, we are treated by our Government as children no matter what our age.

Savvy gamers in the past have simply ordered their game from a civilized country like New Zealand, a country like every other western country in the world that has an R18+ rating for their games, allowing adults to enjoy their games as they were meant to be.

Our very own Internet Villain Award Nominee, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy plans to put a stop to all that. His blacklist will now include any sites that provide access to games that have been refused classification in Australia. This means that any site that sells R18+ games will be blocked even if you wanted to buy a PG13 rated game.

And even if you think this is okay, even if you reckon gamers should wait until our Government to listen to the thousands of Aussie gamers crying out for a fair rating system for our games, you'd be naive to think that Conroys Internet Censorship scheme will stop at blocking computer games. The blacklist that blocks these 'unacceptable sites' can be added to at a whim. If the Government don't want you to see it, they can put it on their secret blacklist and you lose access to it just as if the owner of the site had pulled it down.

I have put a widget on the side bar of my blog where you can sign a petition at GetUp! who have had some success in promoting awareness about this censorship situation. This censorship scheme of Senator Stephen Conroy's has the potential to destroy the freedom we have online in ways that you won't realize until it's gone. It will give our Government the power to block your access to anything - independent news websites, entertainment sites, community networking sites, even blogs like mine could end up being blocked.

We have already seen the blacklist block legitimate business sites with the Queensland dentist who was added to the blacklist without any warning or explanation, costing them business because the site was down, costing them service and maintenance trying to figure out why their site wasn't working, and no, he will not be getting compensation.

A point I'd like to make here is that our current rating system was designed to apply to movies, films, television shows and also printed media and radio broadcasts. When applied to media, this kind of rating system makes sense. You can be assured that when you hire a DVD rated PG13 that your young teenager should be able to handle the content and you can make informed decisions on watching R rated or X rated content.

But, and this is a very big 'BUT', the Internet is not a one-way media. It is a communication system in which information is sent both to you and by you. Censoring the Internet is like censoring your telephone. It is like censoring your personal mail. It is taking away your access to information. It is removing any option to you to choose to view R rated or X rated material. It is removing your freedom of choice.

Don't let this happen. Sign a petition. Discuss the issue with your friends. Write about it on Facebook. Let Stephen Conroy and his pals know that we are Australian adults and we can choose for ourselves what we watch, what we listen to and what we play. We grown ups now, we like our freedom and we can decide for ourselves thank you very much.

Google Wave

Google have announced new technology called Wave. They say that they asked themselves one question.

"What would e-mail be like if it were invented today?"

As usual, Google have not failed to impress. After watching the keynote on their homepage on what we can expect to be able to do with Wave once it's released, I am excited. It marries Instant Messaging style chat to e-mail style conversations to forum style discussions with wiki style editing options... and much more than that!

Here are a few points in the video that I'd like to list that I'm really looking forward to.

• Character-by-character chat.

No longer do you sit and wait while you stare at the notice "Fred is typing...". Instead, you see Fred's message as he's typing it, so you can be already formulating your reply. If you begin typing your reply before he's finished, he can see you doing so, character by character as you type.

• Photo (and other rich content) sharing.

Something that is difficult to do with online photo albums today is allowing many people to add to a single collection. Wave makes it really easy to share photos and ideas under a single topic for everyone to see and add to. For example, your young child has a birthday party and you post some fun pics on a wave to share with everyone who was at the party, and other people could add photos that they took to the same collection.

Which brings us to

• Collaboration

This system really allows for groups of people to work on one thing all at once. The character-by-character nature of the communication means that many people can be editing the same document at once because you see everyone's changes and additions as they're making them.

• Spell Checker

They also demonstrated a new spell checker that is actually context sensitive. It can fix those mistakes that most spell checkers miss, like the difference between to and too, or there, their and they're. This is technology that draws upon Google's vast amounts of information at their disposal, by creating a massive database on language usage and how sentences are formed and what people are talking about. If information is power, then this is an example of an enormous amount of power being used for the common good of the Citizens of Earth... but wait, they're about to prove that spelling and grammar are not the limit of their power...

• Language Translator

I was just completely blown away when they demonstrated this. The translator supports forty different languages and can translate between any two of them. It, like everything else, is character-by-character, so as your French acquaintance is typing you can see their text appear as they type it, with the translation appearing below, as they type.

So while Microsoft are playing a fanfare for the launch of Bing, the search tool that censors your results but has a pretty picture behind it, Google are coming up with the next big thing.

Remember the original question? "What would e-mail be like if it were invented today?" One of the things that makes the forty-odd year old e-mail standard so successful is that it remains an Open Standard, meaning that anyone can write an e-mail program, run their own e-mail server and still send and receive e-mail with anyone in the world, regardless of what software or server they are using. This is the benefit of using Open Standards so Google are releasing Wave as an Open Standard too, allowing anyone to create clients, extensions and add-ons that take advantage of the new Wave protocol.

This is what Google reckon e-mail should be like, and I like it!

Let's see, what's new?

Well, Windows 7 is landing with a big splash. It hasn't even been released yet and already the NSW Dept of Education is installing it on student laptops. Not surprisingly, the students are liking it. It's actually quite good. I've had Windows 7 loaded up on my iMac with Bootcamp for a while now and it seems to work really well. It doesn't deliberately go out of it's way to piss me off like Vista did, although it has still inherited many of the classic faults of the Windows Operating System.

By loading up Windows 7 on my computer I agreed to a non-disclosure agreement which prevents me from discussing my Windows 7 experience with anyone but Microsoft, which is why I haven't blogged for a while. So I'm not going to tell you any more about it - except that it's the best Windows OS I've ever used and is easily as good (in terms of OS features, security and ease-of-use) as the previous version of Mac OS.

If you want to try out Windows 7 visit the official Microsoft Download page and you can try it for free until July 2010. You'll need a "Microsoft Account" to acces it. A Hotmail/Live/MSN account... y'know, one of those... if you use Microsoft/MSN/Windows/Live Messenger, that's the account you'll need. I wish they'd just settle on one branding!

Look out! Here comes another one! Bing!

This picture is an accurate representation of what Google has done to Microsoft's previous forays into online search. Google is so successful at online search that the two words are interchangeable. People don't search for something anymore, they Google it.

If we can give Microsoft credit for anything though, it's that they just don't give up. Enter Bing, Microsoft's latest brand sporting an uncharacteristically creative name which they hope will be the search engine of choice for Netizens of the future. I reckon Google are already preparing the backswing for this one.