CrunchGear |  |
- Thunder 30 amplifier from Orange
- It’s time for Microsoft to turn itself upside-down
- FIFA officially rules out using goal line technology at this year’s World Cup. In other news, FIFA is dumb.
- EA hits the streets to show off Bad Company 2
- A call to arms: Reboot the public bathroom
- The many varied opinions of Final Fantasy XIII: Was Square Enix trying to please too many people simultaneously?
- Duckshead Revisited: Apple approves DuckPhone after minor changes
| Thunder 30 amplifier from Orange Posted: 06 Mar 2010 04:00 PM PST
Stage aesthetics all contain a common trend. Generally, the equipment should be seen as little as possible, leading to pretty much every guitar amplifier in existence being black. Orange Amplifiers said, “To hell with all that nonsense” and proceeded to create some of the most visually offensive and sonically powerful amps on the market. Their latest release, the Thunder 30, should start coming out into the wild sometime this spring.
What you get are four EL84 class A power valves pumping out a total of 30 watts. A new addition to Oranges is the twin channel setup. Your standard clean channel and a dedicated overdrive/distortion channel with shape control. They also threw in an FX loop not found on previous models. Configurations include the head alone, or in a front loaded 1×12 combo. We’ll have a full review for you guys as soon as we get our hands on one.
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| It’s time for Microsoft to turn itself upside-down Posted: 06 Mar 2010 01:22 PM PST
Gates once famously said his greatest fear was “someone in a garage who is devising something completely new.” So the solution is simple: start building garages.
The trouble, I feel, lies in the middle layer of the cake — as it does so often in real life (damn the jelly). The issue is that the best ideas often occur on the lowest levels, as much because those levels are highly populated as that they are the youngest and freshest, and these ideas must trickle up. That is, from what I understand of Microsoft (very little), in fact how it was designed. Good projects gain members and budget by degrees and snowball until they reach product status. The idea is that the whole process is smooth and practically automatic. And isn’t it pretty to think so? Unfortunately, when you factor in the inevitable corporate friction, you’re looking at years of development for a product which may or may not even be worthwhile. By the time the sausage is made, everyone has already moved on to quail. If there were an easy solution to this I’m sure everyone would take it, but Google’s seems to be the best approach when you’ve got a steady supply of golden eggs, as both they and Microsoft do in the form of advertising and enterprise revenue respectively. Microsoft is simply too big and too inflexible to really push truly interesting products out the door as fast as they need to. This isn’t any sort of big revelation, but it’s a problem with a solution: turn the company upside-down. Give the people with infinite power to crush and elevate projects direct access to the “garages” (or rather, give the garages access to them) and let them rule their arbitrary way. If they’re really as smart as they should be in order to hold a position of such power (no guarantee there), then you’ll nip non-starters in the bud and get millions into the market-breakers. The Microsoft method of slowly advancing employees’ responsibilities has created so many middle men that there is hardly any other kind of person working there any more. The best examples for this are also the best examples of the current system failing. I’ll be honest: these are in fact my favorite pet projects of Microsoft’s and are by no means successes yet, though in my fantasy alternate universe they might have been.  Item: SurfaceWhat does it tell you when an innovative and forward-looking project has had the same hardware for some four or five years, and despite getting a nod from Gates himself in 2003, took four years to reveal — and three years later it’s still completely inaccessible to consumers? Sure, it’s “not a consumer device.” Who do you think made that decision? Not the project team, who almost certainly envisioned a number of consumer applications. Someone limited the scope of the project and restricted its growth, even when the iPhone came out and vindicated the consumer concept. The aborted tablet project of the early 2000s and Surface might have been pushed together by a budget-slinger with vision, and they might have put out the iPad in 2006. Which brings us to the Courier.
We had word yesterday that the Courier is running Tegra 2 and will implement some Zune stylings. Well, that puts it at least on a hardware par with the iPad and it fits with the increasingly Zune-reliant design of Microsoft’s handheld devices. Unified interface? Office applications? E-book functionality? Check, check, and double check — but instead they lay money on an awkward and underpowered shrink-down of Windows 7. Again, who made this decision? Some board room jockeys likely voted 7 to 4 to “emphasize existing properties.” If there was an informed and alert adjudicator with a nice big slush fund, this thing might have been hands-on at CeBit.
Once again: whose idea was it to wait until WinMo 6 had completed its graceful conversion into a complete wreckage? Well, someone worked real hard on the 6.5 app store and Today screen, and they wouldn’t want to steal 6.5’s thunder (cough) by announcing its successor at the same. Here is where, a year and a half ago, a smart person with a free hand might have said “sorry guys, you’re polishing the knobs on the Titanic. Finish what you’re working on, then you’re going to App development for the new hotness.” No sales would have been lost, and 7 would have launched (consulting arbitrary number calculator) six months earlier. Or something. Okay, okay. I admit it. The only point I’m really making (in so many words!) is one that’s so obvious that it’s hardly worth saying: “Smart people should be giving money to promising projects and culling projects that have no future.” Any company could use more of that, and in the end this is mostly just a rant about the inertia that takes over big companies. But Microsoft has a track record of getting beaten to the punch because of a simple lack of boldness. They’re on the cutting edge and they refuse to acknowledge it. I’m slightly ashamed to say that I am reminded of the bar scene in Swingers where Jon Favreau is assured that he has claws and just doesn’t know what to do with them. What I’m seeing, though, is that maybe Microsoft is starting to get this. The projects above were major breaks from Microsoft’s staples, but are finally getting the juice they deserve. I feel like I’m at a “mandatory innovation seminar” saying this, but taking a few serious risks is the only way Microsoft will be able to stay competitive for the rest of its dwindling lifetime. If they can put their trust (and their war chest) into the hands of a few worthy idea wranglers, they’ve got a fair chance of turning Microsoft Research into Microsoft Pile Of Money. The bad news for Microsoft is that the only products anybody is excited about are the ones most unlike what they’ve been doing for 20 years. The good news for Microsoft is that they’re making products unlike what they’ve made for 20 years, and people are excited about them. It might just be too late and every project I mentioned will be torn to shreds by Apple, Google, and the other wolves pawing at Microsoft’s door. But I think that at the final accounting, people will be able to look back and say “Well, it didn’t save them, but towards the end there, they actually started to get it.” 
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| Posted: 06 Mar 2010 10:15 AM PST
Is FIFA the worst organization on the planet? I’d say so. World soccer bigwigs have concluded a meeting in Zurich, and they’ve decided against implementing goal line technology at this year’s World Cup. Yes, why would you want to introduce a legitimately helpful technology into a sport that so desperately needs it? Ridiculous. FIFA’s general secretary, regarding the use of goal line technology at the biggest sporting event in humanity, said, “The door is closed. The decision was not to use technology at all.” It’s not even about whether or not the technology works—two competing systems were vying for FIFA’s attention—but whether or not “the future of [soccer] involves technology or not.” Of course it does! What kind of organization says, “Technology? Who needs that? Now let’s all hop on our private jets, listen to our iPods, read our nooks, go home, then pretend that everything’s OK.”? FIFA does! As I understand it, the technology would have been minimally intrusive. One involves a sensor being placed on the ball, which, granted, may not have been practical given how exact the Jabulani was engineered. The other would have used Hawk Eye, which is used in tennis all the time. And if there’s a “stuffier” sport out there than soccer, it has to be tennis. The point is, you want to believe that the game you’re watching is accurately managed. Referees have a hard enough time keeping up with the likes of Messi and Ronaldo, so why not use a technology that can tell you, instantly and definitively, that a goal is a goal? Don’t give me that nonsense that, “Oh, soccer is a fluid game, you don’t want it interrupted to double-check whether a goal was a goal or not.” Tell that to the people of Ireland. It’s like, what if the IRS wrote you a letter that said, “Yeah, we’re not 100 percent sure you owe us $10,000 in back taxes, but we’re just going to assume you do. Please send a check within the next 30 days to…” !@$@#~! It’s at this point that I should explain why I’m freaking out. Goal line technology would tell match officials, instantly and definitively, whether or not the ball has fully crossed the goal line—whether or not the goal is valid or invalid. It’s not like in baseball where one umpire’s strike zone differs from the next ump’s. No, a goal is: did the ball fully cross the line or not? It’s a binary operation. Did it cross? Yes? Then it’s a goal. No it didn’t? Then it’s not a goal. Simple as. I can think of several scenarios where goal line technology would have been helpful. How about the 1966 World Cup final between England and West Germany—you mean to tell me that the ball fully crossed the line right here? You’re lying through your teeth if you say the ball, indeed, fully crossed the line. More recently, what about that Champions League game between Liverpool and Chelsea a few years ago? Does the ball cross the line here? We’ll never know because FIFA refuses to embrace the one bit of technology that would, overnight, bring more justice to the sport than any other singular change! I cannot wait until a “big” country gets screwed over by a goal/non-goal call during the World Cup. I can guarantee than if England gets knocked out of the tournament based on a dodgy goal, one that could have been correctly called using goal line technology, we will not hear an end to the complaining on Sky Sports, in The Daily Mail, in The Guardian, in The Times, in The Sun (oh, God, The Sun will probably explode if that happens) and in every single pub in the country. Only then will FIFA do something about this garbage.
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| EA hits the streets to show off Bad Company 2 Posted: 06 Mar 2010 10:11 AM PST Now this is how you advertise a game. Are you paying attention, Activition? EA Belgium took Bad Company 2 to the people of Brussels and in a real big way. Although, in all honesty, EA didn’t come up with this gorilla marketing scheme on their own. Epson did the same exact thing a few months back, complete with the soldier getup.
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| A call to arms: Reboot the public bathroom Posted: 06 Mar 2010 09:30 AM PST
The Situation Please bear in mind that I don’t spend much time in women’s restrooms, so my rage may be myopic. Ladies, if your toilet experience is superior to men’s, I beg your patience. I suspect, however, that everyone could benefit from a few simple modifications to the status quo of public toilets. As I observed in my 1999 complaint, public toilets are one of the most dehumanizing experiences of modern life, and yet we continue to make and use public toilets in the same way. Little privacy, poor sanitation, and a complete stripping away of personal dignity. In no other aspect of our lives do we put up with such a deprivation of basic civility. The building in which I spend most of my working day is only four years old, but already the bathrooms are filthy, and they only get worse as time progresses. I was depressed to see, during my trip to the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, that the gorgeous new multi-million dollar buildings were equipped with entirely ordinary public toilets. The school wasn’t even fully opened yet and already the restrooms were unpleasant to look at, let alone use. I have identified a few common problems with public toilets, and I beg your indulgence as I list what are probably your own top complaints. Faucets Automatic faucets are a great idea, but almost always fail in execution. The sensors are usually not sensitive enough, so users end up waving their hands around for some time under the faucet waiting for water to start flowing. Sometimes the neck of the faucet is too close to the basin, causing the user to touch the grimy basin itself. Or the neck is too high, causing water to splash unnecessarily out of the basin and onto the user’s pants. Surely there’s some elegant solution to the problem of hand washing in a public bathroom? There has to be some cost effective way to make an automatic faucet that allows one to clean their hands without making more of a mess. Soap Another problem with soap dispensers is their placement within the bathroom. Sometimes they’re over the sink, sometimes they’re off to the side. I can’t begin to count the number of automatic soap dispensers placed to the side of a sink that simply dispense their product all over the counter top, creating a huge goopy mess. As a clear cost-savings mechanism, there’s usually one soap dispenser placed between two sinks, causing users to wait their turn when the bathroom is busy. Hand Drying While I was in Japan, I marveled at the automatic hand dryers there. Each one had either a small shelf under it to collect waste water, or was a vertical clamshell design in which the user placed their whole hand, making the surrounding area much cleaner and drier. Of course, moving from the sink to the dryer still caused water to drip from one’s hands, so while the Japanese are on the right track, they still have considerable room for improvement. Personally, I prefer using a paper towel to dry my hands. I’m very conscious of the amount of towel I use, and try to maximize my drying with the minimum amount of towel. It pains me to see other people in the bathroom use huge reams of paper towels to dry their hands. They don’t even try to dry first, and then use more if they need it: they simply pull out fifteen paper towels and wad them up into a giant ball. But human behavior is not the point of this call to arms, so let’s side aside sloth and selfishness for a later discussion. Automatic paper towel dispensers hardly ever work. They’re too slow to respond when a user waves their hand past the sensor, assuming of course that the sensor can be found. With no clear standard design, and poor instructional markings, users are left to wave their hands over, under, and in front of dispensers until something happens. Obviously this results in water droplets splashing all around. The worst design I’ve seen — and I’ve seen it entirely too many times — is an automatic paper towel dispenser placed above or immediately adjacent to a sink. This seems at first blush like the right idea: minimize the amount of water that can be splashed around, make it easy for the user to wash and then dry their hands, and minimize the number of surfaces the user needs to touch. Unfortunately, this configuration almost always results in a never-ending stream of paper towels being dispensed directly into the sink, creating an even worse mess. Of course, the issue of paper waste also needs to be dealt with. Most trashcans in public restrooms are either too small for the volume of paper waste generated, or they’re not emptied often enough (or both!), resulting in lots of crumpled paper towels scattered on the floor around the trashcan. Flushing Automatic flushing, though, suffers from a number of design problems. The intent is well-meaning: a sensor behind the user detects when they move away and the flushing occurs automatically. In my experience, the sensor triggers as soon as I stand up, resulting in an inefficient and wasteful premature flush: I haven’t even wiped yet! When I’m done, I need to manually flush again by pressing a tiny little button embedded on a plate above the toilet. Why is the button behind me? Why do I need to turn around multiple times in the tiny stall? Wouldn’t it be better to have the flush button in front of me? And for that matter, why doesn’t the automatic flush mechanism trigger when the stall door is opened? This would, in my opinion, minimize a lot of wasteful flushing. Comfort I admit I have a shy bladder. I have a hard time urinating if I’m standing next to someone else. This is my own cross to bear, and I’m not asking for the world to change to accommodate me. But with just a little effort, we could all enjoy more privacy and comfort while attending to nature. Think about it: if you go camping, do you stand right next to your buddies while you all relieve yourselves? No, you spread out a bit to enjoy some privacy. Why then do we bunch men up in a row to take care of nature within the city limits? Utility The Future
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| Posted: 06 Mar 2010 09:00 AM PST
Final Fantasy XIII comes out on Tuesday, but Square Enix’s review embargo must have lifted yesterday, since pretty much ever Web site ever has published their review. Not us, of course. That’s fine. I’ll just buy the game and play it quietly by myself next week. Be that as it may, let’s see what people are saying about it. First thing’s first: if you have both a PS3 and Xbox 360, you really ought to get the PS3 version. Eurogamer goes into the technical details, but the gist of it is this: the Xbox 360 version runs at a rubbish resolution compared to the PS3. When you consider that Square Enix had to squeeze a filled-to-the-brim Blu-ray disc (50GB) into three Xbox 360s discs (each disc maxes out at 6.8GB), well, mazel tov, Squeenix programmers! It’s a technical achievement, yes, but the PS3 version is clearly the superior game. Go ahead, PS3 fans, hoot and holler till your throat is sore.
With that out of the way, the reviews. With the exception of one really high-profile negative score, all the gaming publications that I care about gave the game good marks. You all already know that I think review score numbers are dumb, but I’ve read most of the big reviews from start to finish (I should get a job at a publishing company!), so I have a basic idea of where they’re coming from. Eurogamer, always a fine site for reviews, did go out of its way to praise the game’s battle system, a modified version of the ATB system we’re all familiar with:
1UP, another site I usually read for my reviews (I’m an old EGM fan, you see), is no less positive:
But enough praise—what’s wrong with the game? IGN UK sums it up quite well:
Edge magazine, probably the closest thing video games journalism has to a paper of record, um, hated the game, giving it a 5/10.
Wow, you really don’t want to see any of your characters referred to as a deus ex machina, so that’s not good.
So I don’t know what to say. I do have the feeling that Final Fantasy XIII is a game that would have been bought sight-unseen by many, many gamers. I’m one of those gamers: even if every single publication under the sun absolutely hated the game, I’d still buy it and probably love. I’m a Square Enix apologist, and I don’t care what anybody thinks about that fact. You do get the sense that Square Enix was trying to appease people who’d have no interest in the series to begin with, and that makes no sense at all. Some people, myself included, do like an old school JRPG every now and then, so Square Enix would have done better to play to its true fans than trying to rope in the Modern Warfare 2 crowd, so to speak. There’s nothing wrong with a linear story—do we hate novels because they’re linear?—and I don’t mind level grinding every now and then. I never finished Dragon Quest VIII for the PS2, but I’d have no problem putting that up against Western classics like Mass Effect or Fallout 3 (with apologies to fans of the orignial Fallout games—No Mutants Allowed and all that!) But, like I said, I could sit here and write 30,000 words on the game, and it wouldn’t convince people one way or another about the game’s value. Final Fantasy is just one of those things.
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| Duckshead Revisited: Apple approves DuckPhone after minor changes Posted: 06 Mar 2010 07:04 AM PST
Remember that guy who made the DuckPhone iPhone app? And how his app was rejected due to “Minimum User Functionality?” Well, Apple just approved his app after he added some news streams and a twitter feed from the stars if Jersey Shore. It just goes to show that one man’s dumb garbage app is another man’s acceptable piece of useful software. Justice, friends, has been served.
I think the App Store fiasco, if it can even be called that, puts a human face on Apple. It shows that it is not a Borg-like hivemind full of men and women in dark, lint-free turtlenecks (but by God if that isn’t a great image) where judgement is passed using a rational flowchart based on app success and failure rates. Instead it is a place where flesh-and-blood, average Joes and Janes are given leave to pass judgement on the work of others and, depending on their sugar intake, sexual activity, and general mood, arbitrarily dismiss or accept that work on a whim. I’m not sure which vision Apple prefers. Image from Mercy for Animals
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