It has been over 15 years since I last owned a videogame console. In fact, it is almost the case that it has been over 15 years since I last touched a videogame console. It was around 1992 when I bought the Sega Mega Drive, and that was the first console I own. In its lifetime, I only bought for it three game cartridges; for just like I bought the console, I had to import every game cartridge, which at that time was neither easy nor cheap.
A year later I played the Super Nintendo in a visit to my cousin’s friend, and I did not get to play it again. I never laid my eyes on a Nintendo 64, never touched a PlayStation, or any of the fifth generation videogame consoles for that matter. I didn’t see a Gamecube, never played a PlayStation 2, and only played the XBox once - four years after its release and in a country other than mine.
A videogame console in a developing country is like a Ferrari in a developed one, where people know of the Ferrari, but most cannot afford owning one. Their eyes almost pop while looking at a one as it drives by them in the streets from time to time, and some models are even so rare that they only get to see them in magazines and newspapers.
The analogy might seem extreme, but is sadly true. When you live in a gracious land like Egypt, there are not only your personal financial boundaries up high against your desire to adopt new technology, but also the country’s own misfortunate economic boundaries that prevent any such adoption practical. To this date, there has not been one single official videogame console launch in the history of Egypt. Thirty five years, seven generations, and dozens of consoles, and not a single one of them was officially launched.
This does not mean that videogame consoles are non-existent in Egypt. No, they do exist, but they only start appearing as the console approaches the end of its lifetime. First, you would have to give the console a year or two after its release for people to start hearing about it over here. Then, give it a year or so for pirating its games and modchipping it become easy enough to do. Finally, give it a year or so for the console’s price itself to become affordable. Only then you could start seeing the pirated games being sold in some shops, and only then you could start seeing the consoles being sold in even less shops. Up to this day, there is only one store in this 70-million-citizen country that sells genuine videogames.
Unfortunately, by the time this happens, the consoles become no longer attractive for avid gamers, and when compared to PCs, could prove to be too much of a waste of money to average gamers.
However, most in these land do not know what they are missing; and to that I envy them. It is so depressing that you get to follow the happenings in the world around you and not share in them. To follow the Xbox 360 as an example, from when the rumors were still were about what its name would be, what the launch titles are, the release parties and from then to following the complaints, the lawsuits, the criticism and then of course the bashing. Following all this and knowing that one would not get to play it is quite depressing. To read about everyone’s achievements in Geometry Wars while I was just… well, reading, is undermining to say the least.
I must say I never was that big of a gamer. The PC was my only platform, and I was and am definitely far from being the addict many people are; as I only like to play either new genres, experiences, or simple games that could burn a short time while being light on one’s nerves.
I found the keys in Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Half-Life and Tomb Raider, and that was enough keys for me to find. I shot the ball in Fifa ‘96, ‘97 and ‘98, and it was the same rounded ball in ‘99, so I did not care to kick it. I fragged in Unreal Tournament and never understood how more fragging in even more games would lead me to a better place. I sneaked in Commandos but did not care for more sneaking in later sequels. And just like everyone else, I enjoyed the sceneries of Far Cry while blood was splattering all over the screen.
My issue with videogames is that first, I do not like repeated experiences, and second, I do not want to have to learn to play. I prefer to keep learning and gaming two separate conceptions. To me, to get sucked into a World of WarCraft or a Second Life is too much. I have a first life that I am trying to put together. That first life has too many opinions, criticisms and personalities I have to interact with that having to deal and learn about virtual, artificial characters is to me a out of the question. I prefer to try mining gold in my first life than spending time mining it in a videogame. The Sims? Playing it for two hours, I noticed that I am basically trying to get that tiny kid to the toilet while my own bladders had almost exploded. What can I say, I am selfish: To me my own bladders are more important than those of any virtual bladders in the world!
The best games I liked have always been the simpler ones. The ones that do not suck you into some universe to the point where you would rather spend time there than in your life. Not that I like my life a lot, but I still prefer to try making something out of it; paving my own path in it than going through the same doors as everyone in a scripted videogame. This is why I was extremely intrigued with Nintendo’s plans to make a console that promotes “fun”, and moves away from complexity - a console that was then aptly codenamed a “Revolution”, and later named the “Wii”.
Even though I would love to take an Xbox 360 and a PlayStation 3 for a ride, at least only for a couple of hours, I am not sure if I would actually be playing them one month after buying either. Gears of War is for sure amazing, and Metal Gear Solid 4 will for sure kick ass, but what if I want to play neither? If so, then buying a Geforce 8800 may be a better investment. Even though I am a fanboy for pretty graphics, and the Wii’s graphics are obviously so 90’s, the promise of a better, more immerssive gameplay experience was enough to excite me about it - excite me enough to decide to go through the trouble of getting it.
Buying the Wii while the US, European and Japanese markets were in short supply of it was definitely difficult. I only managed to grab it two weeks after its release in Europe, from Germany’s Amazon store at retail price, had it sent to a friend in Munich, and then spent a month to arrange for someone to bring it along with him. It was a long journey from the day of release, December 8th 2006, till the day it came through my door, but it was an effort I then saw would be worthy.
Although I am so far very impressed with what I have seen from the Wii, I still cannot ink a review; I am yet to see how long it would keep me interested. After all, I have only played Wii Sports and Wii Play. Games will be obviously an issue; priced at around $70 in Europe, getting them over here would cost no less than $100, which would make a serious dent in my ailing finances.
Posted February 5th, 2007. Filed under: Posts.
Living in a developing country, in a time when you can almost exactly know how each and everyday element in your life differs from other, more developed countries, can be sometimes frustrating. Missing something is one thing, but knowing that you are missing it is daunting. Watching how the technology is evolving in the rest of the world, but never actually participating in this, or touching that, never stops to be crippling and underwhelming. However, sometimes things happen out of the ordinary that give you hope that everything else will follow.
Egypt has for the past few years heavily developed its telecommunications infrastructure to quite an impressive level. Although consumers (or businesses) still cannot get Internet speeds higher than 2 Mbps, it is my belief that the government is actively trying to push the Internet and communications technology as much as it can. Of course, the fact that millions of people do not still have electricity or water in their homes, the fact that most citizens can hardly eat or pay for their medicine, or the fact that there is a probability that I could get arrested for writing this innocent post, still makes it feel like living in a developing country. But today is not a whining day, today is the day where I will try to look into the ups, and shed the downs from my eyes.
TEData, one of the few Internet carriers in Egypt, recently launched the first IPtv service in Egypt in cooperation with ART, the Arab Radio and Television Network. ART produces more than a dozen satellite channels, with programming that ranges from movies, television series, sports to education. Additionally, ART partners with Asia’s STAR to air some of their programming, like the Star Movies and Star World channels.
The basic ART satellite package runs at 30 L.E. (around $5) per month, which includes the 7 channels produced by ART. Their “Super” packages includes 36 channels and would set you back 120 L.E. per month.
TEData, partenering with ART, started offering an IPtv service, called TEvu, that goes along with TEData’s ADSL Internet service. TEvu costs 30 L.E. per month for the basic package, which includes 7 channels: ART Aflam (an Arabic movie channel), ART Movie World (an English movie channel), ART Hekayat (an Arabic tv series channel), Iqraa (a religion-specific channel), CNN International, and finally, ART Sports 1 and ART Sports 2. Another package adds to the previous channels ART Sports 3 and ART Sports 4, and costs 60 L.E. per month.
Subscribers of TEvu can also buy Video on Demand (VoD) credit at units of 30, 60, and 90 L.E., which they can redeem towards watching VoD movies at 5 or 10 L.E. a piece. You can only watch a movie once though!!
Since I already had a 512Kbps ADSL subscription with TEData, I thought I would give it a try! Not that I need it, and not that most in this country actually need it, but just to try and see how they would put a service like this together! The thing is, citizens of this holy land have in a few years meshed an (illegal) network of cables interconnecting almost every home to provide them with (again, illegal) access to both public satellite channels and private satellite networks. Just pay the cable-guy down the street 20 or 30 L.E. per month, and you get dozens of the crème de la crème of satellite channels, all piped through ugly cables flying over the rooftops of the city.
But then again, I wanted to try it out; see what they offer and how they would pull it off. The first that concerned me was how they would fit a streaming video of a decent quality into bandwidth as little as mine. Luckily, they do not. During the 1-week it took them to activate my service (which they said it would be only 48 hours when I signed up), they changed the speed of the link from my home to the central office to 6Mbps, rather than 512Kbps, while keeping my link to the rest of the world throttled at 512Kbps as it was. Of those 6Mbps, 1.5 Mbps would be used for pushing the streaming video from the central office to my sweet home. The beauty of this is that it does not clog my 512Kbps connection, so I can browse the Internet and download files while still watching IPtv channels.
After the one week it took them to activate the service, I was sent an SMS message containing a username and password and was asked to use them to log into the TEvu website. Here is where the fun started. I went to the site, but in no way found anywhere to login, and when I tried to play the streams on the website, I did not get the License.
Acquisition window as usually happens with DRM’ed Windows Media content. I called them, and they had no idea what the heck was going on. It only took me more than a dozen calls to their technical support over a total of one week so that they finally figure out the issue and properly configure my service at the central office!! Frustrating? Hell yeah!!
Yeah, just as you read it, the service is powered by Microsoft’s IPtv platfrom, with all content delivered through Windows Media 9 servers with enough DRM to suffocate all your rights. Furthermore, you will need a router that allows setting multiple Permanent Virtual Circuits (PVC), a feature not wildly available in consumer routers. In addition to the PVC normally used to connect to the Internet, you need to add two additional PVC bridges to the central office. Their technical support can guide you through the phone on how to configure the router, but they only support 3Com’s OfficeConnect, which I had to rent from them for 30 L.E. per month. Damn more expenses.
To my misfortune, I wanted to try the service on Windows Vista, in hopes of running it on Vista’s Media Center. Sadly, the License Acquisition did not work on Windows Media Player (WMP) 11, although their technical support representative reiterated for me on phone that it should work on “WMP 10 or higher”. And since TEData allows for only one license to be acquired (to prevent several computers from running the service simultaneously), I knew I had to ask them to revoke my license so I can acquire a new one. “Not a biggie,” I told him, and asked him to reset my license so that I could run the service on an XP machine with WMP 10. To my surprise, he exclaimed, “reset the license?”, and told me that such “resetting” cannot be done!!
All that they knew was that I could “Backup” my licenses from WMP and “Restore” them on the machine I would like to run the service on. However, what they did not know is that in WMP 11, Microsoft removed the feature to backup and restore licenses, leaving this in the hands of the service provider! The service provider, which in this case is supposed to be them. But what the heck, who keeps track of responsibilities!?
Again, I asked him to reset my license, but he insisted that “this cannot be done.” Without much ranting, let me just say that it only took them 4 days to figure out how to reset my license. Frustrating? Hell yeah!!
Finally, and after close to three weeks from signing up, I got the service up and running. Ironically, I was configuring it on my Dell laptop, in which I usually watch 1080p (1920×1080) and 720p (1280×720) videos on its 17″ widescreen. At a bitrate of “1510 Kb/s”, I was expecting kick-ass DVD-quality video at a 640×480 resolution or so, since I knew ART broadcasted in DVB. But rather, I was treated with a low quality 384×288 stream that brought back the memories of watching CAM movies in the late 90’s! But then at least I witnessed no frame drops or compression artifacts.
In general, I was utterly frustrated with every bit of the experience of trying to use, and using, TEvu. The activation process took much longer than promised, their technical support is technically impaired, and the selection of channels is very weak. But Perhaps the latter was the most annoying aspect, and is the reason why I would not renew the IPtv subscription for the next month.
Although I cannot recommend TEvu to anyone, and despite all the inconveniences I faced in the way, I am still looking forward to what possibilities this could lead to. The fact that TEData was ready to embark in such endeavor, and the fact they managed to convince a large media company to join, is alone worthy of appreciation.
Practically speaking, I do not think that this is the time for mass IPtv adoption just yet, and I believe that both TEData and ART very well realize that. I suspect this may only be a technical experiment - they just wanted to see how things would work out. To gain momentum, and to appeal to consumers, the service would have to compete with an illegitimate infrastructure that delivers all the channels everyone would ever need at a very steep price!
I give them a perfect score for trying, but past that, they fail in most.
Posted December 18th, 2006. Filed under: Posts.
Over the years, it did occur, several times, that I lose valuable data due to a hard drive going astray. In the past few years, I reached the point were I have made peace with myself that any data on a hard drive is susceptible to loss or corruption at any point in time. I reached the point were I came to believe that any data for which I have only one copy of, is data that I am ready to lose.
Burning to CDs, DVDs and DVD-RAMs did not work for me. It usually ended with me delaying backups to a day long after the day when I need them. I tried RAID, but it did not scale very well with me. The problem is, I have more than one computer and putting RAID in all of them would be too costly.
The ideal solution for storage would be to make a centralized storage on my home network that would be on RAID-1, daily backed up to a third drive, and an encrypted backup syncrhonized to one or more remote storage services. As of today, the problem with backup to a remote service would be my bandwidth, which will practically prevent me for sync’ing anything but small files.
Western Digital and almost every other company nowadays seem to be pushing to the market Network Attached Storage (NAS on the cheap for home users. Most of these devices are more or less black boxes that you can only manage or tweak for as far as they let you. All but Linksys’s NSLU2, which since it runs a Linux, Linksys was required to release its source code to abide to the GPL.
Hence I was intrigued with Linksys’s NSLU2, a NAS that can connect to USB disk drives, and best of all, it runs Linux. I was intrigued with the idea of having centralized storage on my home network that I can access from any PC, or even remotely if I needed such feature. I grabbed one, installed OpenSLUG and plugged a 512MB flash memory disk to use for installing applications that would run on the NSLU2.
Next I attached two 250GB Western Digital MyBooks through a hub and to the NSLU2. I specifically selected the MyBook for its automatic spindown feature, something I wouldn’t have been able to achieve if I were to use a 3.5″ inch drive in a USB enclosure (at least, not in a cheap one).
Initially, I was considering putting the two drives on RAID, but I quickly dropped this idea. Since I am paranoid to drive failure, I would like to minimize the possibility of both drives going to the dark lands of no return together, and thus, would prefer to prolong the lifetime of at least one of them. I went with daily backup, using a cronjob with rsync for incremental backup of one disk to the other at midnight of every day. The rest of the day, that backup drive should rest spinning down. Surely, the backed files would always be older than the original with up to one day, but if this could work, it will be enough for me.
Because I have a Windows machine, I wanted to have Samba installed on the NSLU2. Since I would have to install Samba anyway, I opted away from installing NFS. Samba would do just fine. I configured Samba to export shares from the first MyBook, and in the Linux machines used autofs for automatic mounting and unmounting.
I am now considering using Amazon S3 for backing up very sensetive, small-size data - like documents, and maybe AOL’s xstorage, once they release an API to it. Furthermore, a Bittorrent client (ctorrent and dtach, or TorrentFlux if memory wouldn’t be an issue) and a Subversion repository are in my mind to install.
Posted November 17th, 2006. Filed under: Posts.
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