One of my all-time favorite shows is NYPD Blue. I’ve been taping them off ABC in recent years, but what I really want is to get them all on tape. A daunting task, given that the show has been on for years now. If nothing else, having them on TV on a regular basis would be nice. FX, the Fox cable cash-in channel, has been airing them for some time but my cable provider doesn’t carry that channel. A short while back I heard that TNT would start carrying the show, so I got all excited. I just checked the TNT Page, however, and they say that the episodes they’re airing tommorow feature Bobby Simone, so they’re not beginning the series from episode one. However, this FAQ entry tells me that what happened is that FX’s rights expired in August and so TNT and CourtTV (?) started bidding on the rights, and they both won. Both channels will show two episodes per day, one in the morning and one in the evening. Court TV’s morning episode will begin the rotation at season one, the evening rotation with season two. TNT’s morning episode starts at season five, the evening starts with season six. Apaprently once they get to the end of the syndicated seasons they’re going to start over, so once season 12 or so ends on TNT they’ll start with season one again. I’d rather start watching/taping them from season one, but of course I don’t get Court TV.

Am I crazy enough to attempt to tape them all? Will I remember to set the VCR every day? Will my wife ever let me purchase enough videotapes? Stay tuned…

Moe has a new quip up wherein she complains about the confusion over the word “download”. I.e., customer calls in and says “I downloaded the Internet off your site” or “It won’t download” when they can’t send email. While I try to make this site something other than a retort site to other people’s ramblings, I’m going to make an exception in this case. Here are some more postulations on the word “download”

For starters, while the phrase “I downloaded the Internet” is daunting beyond imagination, I can’t really tell you what the word “download” really means, because it has such a broad definition that technically its usage isn’t wrong per se, but its overuse has run into misuse. For example, the game developer Volition has released a game demo for the upcoming title Red Faction. The demo is over 100MB in size. I go to a webpage that allows me to download it and I click on it. Since it’s not a web page (.html) I’ve clicked on, and is instead an executable file (.exe) it does not “open” the file automatically, it asks me if I want to open it from the current location or save it to a disk. Of course I save it to my hard drive – it’s 100MB and I may want to install it later, or install it a second time. In fact, because I know this already, I don’t even bother to let the web browser ask me the question – I right-click on the file and tell the web browser to save it to begin with. That is downloading.

Right now I’m listening to KTSR, a local College Station radio station. I open up Windows Media Player and tell it to open a particular URL. However, I am not saving the audio of the radio station to my hard drive – it’s streaming off of the Internet. It’s buffered to a memory and then played through the player, then it’s purged from memory. This is not downloading.

However, these definitions of downloading are my own personal ones. I guess the real difference is that you keep the first kind of activity, whereas the second one you don’t. However, past web browsers and email and e-commerce and whatever, there really are only two things you can do on the Internet – send and recieve. Some call these upload and download, but all it is is sending and recieving. When you type in www.bluesnews.com, your web browser sends a request to the Internet, and then it recieves the information that constitutes Blue’s News – the text, the links, the annoying “shock the monkey” ad, everything. So, you recieve Blue’s News, but by the “upload/download” definition, you’re downloading Blue’s News.

Now here’s the fun part – Blue’s News doesn’t know whether you are in fact viewing their web page or saving it to your hard drive. Why you would want to save it is anyone’s guess, but the Blue’s News server doesn’t know the difference one way or another. This becomes important in a minute.

There is a woman named Cindy Margolis. She is a very attractive blonde with breast implants who currently holds the Guinness World Record for “most downloaded woman” on the Internet. Of course, Guinness draws the line right there and never defines what “downloading” is. According to my definition, this would mean that she’s the woman whose picture is saved to people’s hard drives most often, which I seriously doubt is the case (since like I mentioned earlier the web server can’t tell the difference). No, the definition of downloading that they’re using is the one where any downstream traffic (anything you’ve recieved) is a “download”. By that logic, if you go to her site and hit “refresh” five times, you’ve “downloaded” her five times.

But it gets better. There’s another woman named Danni Ashe (three guesses on what her site is called) who has taken issue with Cindy Margolis’ claim and counter-claims that she is the most downloaded woman on the web. She even started her own site to extoll the virtues of her own numbers and placing Cindy Margolis much further down the list. So why did Guinness not give her the title instead? Well, Danni Ashe’s site which has given her all the popularity in the first place is a porn site. (that’s not a porn link, BTW).

Not to get on a tangent here but the hell of it is, while many (including Guinness) will shun Ashe for being a porn queen, the difference between her and Margolis is that Ashe actually did something to achieve her fame, granted that something was pornography. Margolis is pretty and that’s about it. She has had professional photography done of her and she places said pics on her website and that’s it. She has her own web-based talk show and it’s expanding to a televised one in syndication soon, and she’s had guest spots on Ally McBeal and other shows. Her past jobs include a stint as a fembot and brief appearance on The Price is Right. However, while she calls herself a model, she doesn’t do anything. She’s not on the cover of Cosmopolitan, she doesn’t pimp makeup, she isn’t in music videos or walking down runways, she just looks pretty. The sad part is, that appears to be enough.

The problem with both of these notions, however, is not that they’re fighting over who has downloaded more, but rather two other things. First, the aforementioned problems of the term “download”, and the fact that the numbers are frivolous at best. For starters, these two women attempt to lay claim to the title of “most downloaded woman on the Internet”, but that’s assuming that every time someone “downloads” them from the web it’s from their site. I’d be willing to bet that Britney Spears is probably not only viewed over the Internet more often, but saved to hard drives more often – in various states of Photoshop-induced undress.

Blue’s News used to have a web hit counter on their site. They still have it – if you go to the bottom of the page and highlight it you can see it. A short while back it hit 100,000,000 hits, and they decided to mention it. However, the counter has been broken several times through server moves and CGI difficulties, so 100,000,000 hits were probably hit some time before that, but it was still significant, mainly because it was the next base ten round number. Web statistics do not have a central agency – they are not like a fishing competition where there’s a judge who weighs them at the end and disqualifies those who use little BB pellets – so these numbers are probably not accurate and could very well have been made up. Danni Ashe is not the only woman getting nekkid at her site, but she’s probably counting every photo on her page as a “download”. For that matter, web pages are not merely text and photographs – web pages have hundreds of graphics on them. Perhaps each individual picture is getting counted.

If I look at your webpage, I have downloaded nothing. Period. If I save you picture to a hard drive I have downloaded it. Period. Don’t go telling me I downloaded your picture when in 20 days it won’t even be in my cache anymore.

Next week, I’ll tackle the concept of “logging on” to a website with no actual content to “log on” to (i.e., “Log on to mcdonalds.com!”).

A while back I mentioned a game called Mageslayer from Raven.While it’s no longer being published it’s now at Home of the Underdogs for download. I fired it up again – it felt good to have the hardware to push it this time. Picture Gauntlet from the 1980’s. Now picture it in 3-D. No, I’m not talking about Gauntlet Legends – while that was a fine game on it’s own merits, it wasn’t really Gauntlet. Mageslayer now this is Gauntlet, right down to the ghosts and the generators. Give it a go if you’re interested in that kind of thing.

So last night I introduced my wife to the Dreamcast version of Dragonriders: Chronicles of Pern. The game is based off of a series of novels by Anne McCaffrey, of which my wife is a fan. Recently I fired up the Wheel of Time demo (Unreal engine powered FPS based loosely on the Robert Jordan novel series) and she hated it. Mainly because it’s too evil and menacing looking (or at least the levels in the demo were) and she didn’t want to play it. As a result, I don’t assume that a franchise tie-in will neccessarily garnish interest from her. So I fire up this game for her and instantly she’s enthralled. I hear “Dragon Riders” and I instantly think Panzer Dragoon – you know: big, fire breathing dragon you get to ride and shoot fireballs onto poor villagers. First thing that happens in the game is a large dragon tells its owner (I think), the hung over protagonist, to find the special hyde cream and brush to clean him, so you have to make your character find these things. This is when it hits me that this is basically an adventure game, which is good in one respect – I’m all for the adventure game’s triumphant return. On the other hand, it’s disappointing since I was hoping you could fly the dragon. A little research tells me that eventually you do get to fly it, but it’s not the main crux of the game.

So she plays this game for hours, which I figured is a good sign. The whole time she’s making comments that only someone who had read the books would know, and she understands the dialogue as if she had already talked to some of these people. This is great and all, but the whole time she’s expressing how frustrating the game is to play. I can’t blame her – though I didn’t play it myself I sat there and watched her for a while and if you thought the control scheme in Resident Evil was bad – this one makes those games look refined. There’s clipping errors, an annoying and frustrating interface, and the same habit that Resident Evil: Code Veronica had where the camera perspective changes from “following you” to “stuck in one corner”. Oh, and the camera sucks as well. In one scene you have two paths in a cave to go through – one of which has this killer snake. Well, you go down either path and you disappear for a second until you get far entough down the path to change the camera to “following”. Problem is the path curves and so you get stuck. My wife literally had to switch to the first-person perspective crossbow to see where in the hell she was, then blindly try to navigate some more, repeating this routine until she got out. Annoying.

Also there’s the usual spate of problems – gameplay too linear (you have to talk to person A before person B, even though you run into person B first), unfeasible situations (a large rock wall crubles to dust with one swipe of an axe) and pointless lines of questions (no consequence to answering something wrong). Plus, you can’t skip dialouge, so you inadvertently wind up having to listen to some conversations multiple times). On the plus side, the voice acting, while not perfect, is not bad. Far better than Shenmue – that game made me want to scream. Also, it does do a good job of synching the voice to the mouth movements – but no one other than Hank Hill shows his teeth that much. Overall, it’s a passable game whose main draw is its license, which is enough to draw in fans of the books enough to forgive its flaws – witness the ability of my wife to keep playing while complaining about the game. I guess it’s a telltale sign as to why GameStop sells this one for $20 ($30 for the PC version). It’s also somewhat indicative of what was one of the original Dreamcast fears – that the systems WinCE abilities would make for straight PC ports with little to no consideration for the complexities of consoles – witness the 66 VMU blocks (close to 1/3 of the card) needed to save.

On an unrelated topic, I also decided to pimp my dot-com I also help do on the side. View it as the lone non-pop-up ad on the site. Or don’t – I don’t care.

Microsoft exec says XP will revive PC sales. Hidden meaning: your PC won’t run this. My favorite line: “it gives consumers a lot more reasons to upgrade than did its predecessors”. Next Headline: Self-deteriorating Car to help auto sales. Oh wait, that’s my car.

My wife’s running Windows XP now. Not sure if it likes her GeForce 2 better, but the point is slightly moot since she plays few 3D games.

BTW, the new link to AuntieZen above is to my longtime friend Donovan. Not sure if he’s just got a ramblings thing or if he’s trying to sell/promote something (like himself).

I forgot to mention that it looks like Moe moved. Check her out and be careful – she might pee-on you.

And in a truly meaningless coincidence, in addition to being the sixth birthday of Windows 95, today is also the tenth birthday of Linux. I know this is a truly cruel critique, but for all the hype paising Linux and damning Windows 95 (some of which I also partake in), Linux powers less than 5% of the world’s computers, whereas Windows 95‘s decendants power over 90% (5% of the world runs a Mac). Looks like MS uses it’s time better.

Oh sure, you can make the argument that the reason Windows powers 90% of the market is because it’s a desktop OS aimed at the mass consumer, and that were you to look at the number of non-desktop applications Linux would hold an advantage. Well while Linux has more than 5% of the server market, the lion’s share still goes to Microsoft. You could also argue that Linux also had to not only convince others to chuck their current operating system for a free unsupproted one, but that it had to more or less single handedly create the open source movement. True, but look at what Windows had to do. First off, they had to convince all the users out there to run their DOS programs in Windows – not a small task. Also, they had to convince all the programmers out there that development of software, especially games, was better in Windows. They did this with DirectX which took four versions to hammer out but they got there. Then they also had to convince the users of the world to buy more powerful machines to run this whole shebang in the first place.

Did it work? Well, I’m not writing this on a Linux box. The developers ultimately decided that DirectX was better (Carmack notwithstanding) – rather than code for 50 different video cards, program for one standard. Let the driver makers do the rest. It doesn’t work that way 100% of the time, but most developers like it. Even the ones who use OpenGL use DirectX for the non-graphic sections. The end users went for the platform which runs everything. And the fact that people have to upgrade their systems periodically stimulated the economy (though this last point is kind of rude).

All was not roses and sunshine however. The marriage of 32 and 16 bit code was not a perfect one, as anyone who has experienced the “Blue Screen of Death” can attest to. The inclusion of legacy code (to run DOS and Win16 programs) neccessitated that the kernel was initially unstable. Windows XP looks to do away with this entirely – which will no doubt break any 16 bit drivers still bouncing about after six years – as it completes the graft of the NT based kernel into the desktop Windows OS. Additionally, every time a major OS revision rolls around, many vendors jump on the opportunity to charge full price for an “upgrade” (though this is less prevalent now that the mass distribution of the Internet makes casual patching a way of life). And don’t even get me started on what many computer manufacturers will do if you “break” your system with a new OS upgrade. Some will offer advice on how to get the new OS working, others (Best Buy) will act like you just tried to put NEXTStep on your system and tell you to go fuck yourself.

Linux has its supporters, and their merits are not lost. True, Linux is “free”. Linux patches take hours, not weeks. Linux likely runs faster. However, picture if you will that your house needs a new roof. Who are you going to have roof your house – a ragtag bunch of persons who have never met each other in person and don’t do this sort of thing for a living, or are you going to hire a team of paid professionals. Sure the last one costs you more up front, but the first one ultimately costs more in the long run, and not just in terms of money.

I have to hand it to the Linux supporters, though – anyone can bitch about Windows, but it takes someone really dedicated to run something else. If you gripe incessantly about how much you hate Windows and Microsoft but continue to run Windows and Office then you’re a hipocrite. Most of us dislike many things about Windows and Microsoft, but we just grunt and bear it. I’d rather have a flaky OS that can do anything I want it to than an OS that is stable but can’t run anything.

So happy birthday to Windows 95, Linux and R2-D2.

Regardless of whether or not you liked the film A.I., you have to admit this is pretty cool: Seems ILM (you know, Star Wars) used Unreal Tournament to map out the Rouge City environments (you know, the city with the giant, er, women) in the movie to show to Speilberg before they bothered to go ahead and make them in the movie. Check this article for more. I wonder if they’re going to release the maps. Deathmatch with Jiggalo Joe!

Oh, and I nearly forgot, the bad news is that the Nintendo GameCube has been pushed back to November 18th, almost two weeks later than their November 5th original date. The good news (I suppose) is that IBM, who is making the chips in it, is getting their logo on it. The weird part is that yesterday at Spaceworld pre-show conference (Spaceworld: Nintendo’s own personal annual convention) they unveiled new footage of Mario Sunshine (tenative title) and the next Zelda game (which doesn’t even have a tenative title). The Mario game looked pretty standard, but the Zelda game went for a cell shaded anime feel. You’ll have to look at it here to see what I’m talking about. On the one hand, I love Zelda and I believe Miyamoto can do no wrong. On the other hand, a Zelda cartoon? I don’t know. Obviously this, like with the Attack of the Clones titled film, is something I am going to have to wait until all the cards are in on, but my initial reaction was not good on seeing this footage. I was halfway convincing myself it was allright footage until someone pointed out how close it is to the Powderpuff Girls. Must… go… play… Majora’s Mask.

Have you ever had a problem you couldn’t figure out for a while and you looked all over creation and you still couldn’t find anyone else who had posted the solution to the problem and no one you knew knew the answer to the problem, so you mucked with it long enough to figure out what was going on and you figured out how to fix it and then it came in really really handy many times after that and you look like a fucking genius since you figured it out? Well I just had one of these sorts of things happen recently and I want to spew it forth so that it doesn’t bite anyone else in the ass. Basically, I had a problem wherein I installed the DirectX SDK and I fired up some of the Direct3D examples. No go. I have a Voodoo3 3500 (the Voodoo3 part is the important bit) with 128MB of system RAM. Some of the examples told me I didn’t have enough video memory. Others told me they couldn’t create a Direct3D device. I had the latest drivers, I had DirectX 8 installed. No go. I posted my problems to GarageGames and though the people there wanted to help, they couldn’t. Odd, since many of them claimed to have the same setup as me. I tinkered with BIOS settings, reinstalled DirectX and my drivers multiple times, even reformatted and reinstalled Win98SE. Nothing. Then, on a hunch I visited Voodoo Files. I noticed that there were relatively new drivers out from someone for the Voodoo3/4/5, so I downloaded them. When I install them they have the official 3dfx screen and everything. When I reboot, I can suddenly fire up all the Direct3D samples (except for a few, which tell me that their particular feature isn’t supported by my card). I can even still run my TV tuner bit. A little bit of research reveals that the latest official 3dfx drivers (which are old at this point, as 3dfx is dead) do not support DirectX 8, which is the root of this problem. Ironically, if I had fired up the DirectX 7 SDK I wouldn’t have had this problem. So, if you have this problem with your Voodoo3 card, fire up these drivers. The only thing I wonder is: are these “hacks” of older drivers, or are they reverse engineered? Or is this someone out there who used to work for 3dfx who is still updating drivers with a copy of the driver source he hung on to? The official 3dfx installer is the most curious part. Also, now the Red Faction demo works.