Category: reviews

Microsoft pulls a XBox One-80

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Yesterday, Microsoft backed away from its earlier announcements regarding their XBox One policies.

It’s good that companies listen to customers and respond to their concerns, but it doesn’t quite make up for thinking the right way from the beginning. I don’t know that Microsoft has seen the light, and doubt very much that they have. More likely they are stepping back and re-thinking how their strategy failed, and plotting a new, less direct course to get where they wanted to take the market.

But at least they seem to have listened this time. For now.

XBox One: Why REAL ownership matters, and will always matter.

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On ArsTechnica, today, I read the following in defense of XBox One:

“This is a big change, consumers don’t always love change, and there’s a lot of education we have to provide to make sure that people understand.”

…a lot of the way people have responded to Microsoft’s moves was “kind of as we expected.” But the implication … was that this temporary confusion and discomfort among the audience would be worth it as gamers and consumers adjust to a console world without game discs.

“We’re trying to do something pretty big in terms of moving the industry forward for console gaming into the digital world. We believe the digital world is the future, and we believe digital is better.”

[Microsoft] made a comparison to the world of home movie viewing, where inconvenient trips to Blockbuster Video have been replaced with Netflix streaming on practically any device instantly. On Xbox One, having all games exist as cloud-connected downloads enables new features like being able to access your entire library at a friend’s house with a single login, or loaning games to up to ten “family members” digitally and remotely.

Immediately, I want to point out that Netflix (and Hulu) didn’t replace owning a copy — my copy — of a movie. They replaced movie rental and scheduled broadcast television — with something better and that eliminated inconveniences.

With Netflix and Hulu, you don’t have to program a DVR, or go to a store, or deal with rental returns and late fees. And assuming you only want to watch a thing once or twice, and don’t care to own a copy of it for all time, it’s great.

But online streaming on-demand services cannot replace certain aspects of owning a copy. And those things are very important. Users of these services know already that what is available today may not be available tomorrow. If the copyright owner decides to stop licensing the programming through the service, it will not be available any longer on the service. But a physical copy that you own can always be played, whenever you want to, as long as you own it. So if you want to guarantee availability of something forever, you can only do so if you own your copy.

And the copy you own will remain the edition you bought forever — no 1984-style “memory hole” for the old edition when the producers decide to release a new cut as the canonical version. No forced upgrades pushed over the network, eliminating or changing some scene that some group found objectionable for some reason, and managed to successfully pressure the studio into changing.

Video productions are re-cut and re-edited all the time, and for the most part people don’t notice it, or care. But sometimes the changes can drastically change the meaning. In the 1990’s, singer Sinead O’Connor once made an appearance on Saturday Night Live,  during which she unleashed a storm of controversy by tearing up a photo of Pope John Paul II on live television. NBC and SNL immediately distanced themselves from the incident and claimed to have had nothing to do with it, apologized for the offense it may have caused Catholic viewers, and claimed that it was something that O’Connor did on her own without informing the producers of her plans. This act of protest was never rebroadcast, and to my knowledge cannot be seen in any format today. Today, apart from viewers memories of the incident, it may as well not have happened. Unless someone with a VCR happened to tape that episode and kept it, as I’m sure many may have done, it would be lost forever, imprisoned in NBC’s video archive, if it exists at all. O’Connor’s act was an act of political speech, and whether you agree with her message or not, she had a right to say what she wanted, in the way she wanted. Of course, NBC and SNL own the rights to the video of the event, and have the right to not to make it available if they want, or edit it in whatever way they choose. But it was also broadcast to millions of homes over the public airwaves, and those who witnessed it own their memories of the event. And, for those who have have their own copy, and because you can own and control your own copy, NBC is not able to suppress it completely, or to compel holders of copies to surrender or destroy them. If need be, it could be proved that the incident happened, and, although they haven’t gone so far as to deny that the incident never took place, they certainly don’t like to bring it up, and if NBC wanted to pretend that it never happened, people can contradict the official histories, not just with memories and eyewitness testimony, but with evidence. Owning your own copy can help save The Truth from the memory hole. It gives you the power to own a little bit of the The Truth, outside of your own skull.

If you’re not a political person, you’re probably thinking “Whoa, you’ve gone off the deep end. This is just entertainment we’re talking about. Movies, TV, and videogames. We’re not talking about the news, or matters of public record. Surely this isn’t important stuff, get a grip.” But games do get censored, or pulled from the marketplace, and this can effect people who already own them, if they give up control of the copy that they purchased to DRM. Moreover, wherever DRM technologies make inroads, it tends to result in their becoming more accepted and likely to be used elsewhere. If we accept DRM for television, movies, and games, the technologies are then already in place, and may be used by hard news and official government content providers. Even if they were only used for entertainment, this is our culture — do we really want it to be completely controlled by corporate copyright holders?

Microsoft’s XBox One distribution offers to replace ownership of a physical copy with something worse. It might beat rentals, but it sucks compared to buying. It’s not the digital distribution and decoupling from physical media, it’s the DRM and the licensing vs. owning a copy.

There are pros and cons to decoupling software from physical media, but on the whole I am fine with owning my copy of a computer file, vs. owning a disc or ROM cartridge that came in a box. But de-coupling need not be accompanied by artificial limitations of use imposed by DRM and the need to authenticate a license to a copyrighted work. A license-to-access model is inferior to a model of owning a copy.

Learning from history

I have, in my personal game collection, consoles from Atari, Mattel, Coleco, Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and Microsoft. The oldest of these systems were built in the 1970’s. They are still fully playable, barring hardware failure.

Even back then, there were very early attempts at online play and distribution of games. They were ahead of their time, but from the earliest days the game industry tried to figure out ways to get people to subscribe to a service that would allow them to sell games directly to customers, replacing traditional retail distribution with digital download over a modem connection.

These services are long gone. Any games that were distributed exclusively via these means are exceedingly rare. If they exist at all, it’s only because someone who downloaded the game never erased it from their media (typically an audio cassette tape, or possibly a floppy disk), and because the game didn’t depend on the online service in order to run. This last bit is absolutely crucial. If these games could not be played if they depended on the continued existence of servers which were closed down by the vendor when they were no longer profitable, these games could not be played today.

“Well, who cares? Who cares about these old games?”

It turns out, a lot of people. Everyone who owns them, and would like to continue to be able to enjoy them. Anyone who wants to introduce their favorite games from their childhood to youngsters today. Collectors. Historians. Game designers.

“But popular games get re-packaged and re-sold with each generation!”

I suppose they do. Nothing wrong with that. It’s a good thing.

But what if your favorite game isn’t one of the few lucky popular games that gets chosen to live on? What if you want to play the games on the original hardware? What if you don’t want to have to re-buy games that you already own in order to play them again on your current-generation console?

“But you can’t go out to a retail outlet and buy a traditionally distributed game that isn’t being made anymore. So why should it matter that you can’t buy a digitally distributed game anymore?”

Because, the games that were sold while it was available are still available. They are tangible, transferrable, resellable goods, and as long as they remain physically intact, and someone in the world wants to enjoy them, there is a market for them. It might be garage sales and flea markets and eBay, but it’s possible to find and buy a videogame that was made in 1977. It might not be easy in some cases, but it’s possible, and it’s no more complicated than finding the game, plugging it in, and playing it.

I guess it may be starting to become more difficult now that old-fashioned NTSC CRT TVs are disappearing, along with their antequated analog signal input jacks, but the point is that there’s no need to negotiate the right to play the game with the copyright holder. If you have it, you can play it.

Digitally downloaded games could be just as transferrable — far more transferrable, in fact. Files are easy to share and copy. Compared to making a copy of a printed circuit board and ROM chip, it’s dead simple. The future should be making it easier to do things, not harder.

But if games have dependencies on network-based resources that the player does not control in order to function, this all changes. It seems likely that game companies will sell the client, but not the server. But when the company no longer sees value in maintaining the servers, and decides to take them down rather than sell them to someone who’d become a competitor, or release the source code so that the player community can host their own servers, that will be the end of that game.

The level of dependency may vary considerably, from simple license/subscription validation, to enabling multiplayer features, updates, and downloadable content, to online leaderboard and achievement data. From the gamer’s perspective, the possibilities are rich, but they all disappear when the servers go offline. Nothing can compel a company to release the server software as a product or as a freebie once they decide to end-of-life an obsolete title, but without the server side, the clients are potentially useless, and at the very least are diminished.

Furthermore, servers can be used to killswitch the client, or to force unwanted upgrades. What if you liked the 1.0 version of your favorite game, but hated what they did with 1.1? If you can’t roll back, if you can’t decline an upgrade, there’s not much you can do. Game companies that serve the player’s interests well should design their upgrade systems to allow the player to play the game in an earlier version mode if they desire. And server code should be made available (whether for free or as a product) once the parent company decides it’s time to shut things down, so that players can continue to have full access to the complete experience indefinitely, as long as there’s a community who wants it. Of course, security concerns will mean that any code running on a network node will need to be patched, so it would be best if the source code is available to enable patches to be made.

Obviously, many of those requirements for libre software are too much for most game companies in their current thinking. “Allow our obsolete products to continue to be sold so that we have to continue to compete with ourselves? Release our server source code, are they mad?” While it’s difficult to imagine many companies doing anything like this in today’s market, these are the sort of things that gamers need as consumers, and the culture needs from the vantage point of the historian. Some companies, notably Id Software, have opensourced their older game engines, so it’s not unthinkable that the same could also happen with server technologies, though there are certainly many obstacles, such as software patents, and the fact that many game design studios license third party engines.

Still, even if it’s a highly unlikely ideal, it’s important as a point of comparison, to know just how much you “own” the things that you “buy”, and a target for the consumer to strive to push the market toward. Consumers do have power when they act collectively. It is only for us to realize this, and seize the power that is within our grasp.

XBOX One: No thanks

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Microsoft’s recent announcement of their next-generation console, the XBOX One, has raised a lot of ire in the gamer community.

The two major issues are “digital rights management” and privacy.

Privacy

The Kinect is a motion sensing control interface that was introduced late in the life cycle of the XBox 360 product line, and has been generally accepted by users as a novel method of control by motion, similar in certain respects to the Nintendo Wii’s Wiimote. With XBox One, the Kinect interface is mandatory, and always on. The Kinect isn’t just a motion sensor. Unlike the Wiimote, it uses a camera and microphone to, essentially, bug your living room. This allows the XBox One to respond to voice commands, like the USS Enterprise‘s shipboard computer on Star Trek, and do other things that are pretty neat. But it also allows Microsoft to watch you live at all hours and in all states of undress, all day every day, like the two-way televisions of George Orwell’s 1984. It turns the home into a zone of no expectation of privacy.

Microsoft’s response to these concerns has been weak. They claim that you can control what the XBox is allowed to do, but can you really? It’s always on, always connected to the internet, and running Microsoft’s operating system — how hard is it for someone to gain unauthorized access to the XBox and use it to spy on you? How easy is it to imagine Microsoft rolling over for government requests to use this technology to monitor citizens suspected of “un-American” activities? How often in the past have we seen large technology companies like Yahoo! and Facebook decide to re-set user-configured preferences to defaults that they prefer, and quietly allow the savvy user who pays attention to re-opt out, again and again, until they wear down and accept the service provider’s preferences? It’s a virtual certainty that Microsoft’s click-through EULA and ToS will grant them the ability to do whatever they want with the information they gather through the device, and hold them not harmless and not liable for any damages caused or enabled by the device. And they’ll turn around and claim that they do nothing with the information that you do not authorize, as though you have control. In reality, the only control that you have at all is whether to buy the device or not.

We are already living in an age where the general public has more or less accepted a total erosion of the expectation of privacy. Is this a step too far? For anyone who thinks about it even for a moment, it would seem to be. Yet, almost no one seems to behave as though they think about it at all. We use the services of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and so on, sharing very personal information about ourselves, often in full public view, and certainly in full view of the service provider, their partners, and anyone who eventually buys them out. We willingly pay Verizon, AT&T, and others hundreds of dollars a year for the convenience of carrying tracking devices that monitor our locations, what we read, who we know, what we buy. We send emails un-encrypted, containing sensitive personal information that is easily intercepted and re-transmitted to anyone in the world. The NSA sucks all of it up into giant datacenters, and apart from a few headlines, barely any notice is paid. And for the most part, nothing happens, and we don’t seem to care.

DRM

In a nutshell, DRM, as implemented for XBox One, means that you do not own the game you thought you bought. You don’t even own the copy — the physical media you own, but all the physical media is a transport vessel. The data on the media is intellectual property, owned by the copyright holder, who controls how it can be used. You own the “license” to play the publisher’s intellectual property — under their terms, which they can change at any time, for as long as they continue to exist, or decide to continue allowing their intellectual property to be made available.

You do not retain the ability to transfer your “rights” to someone else, either as a gift, loan, or re-sale — unless the publisher decides to allow it, and then only through some approved process wholly controlled by them.

It is an extremely raw deal for the consumer, and something which no one should allow to stand.

Of course, ridiculous, draconian licensing terms are nothing new to commercial software. It’s been around for decades, from the earliest days of Microsoft and the personal computer. It’s just that, for most of this time, it hasn’t mattered to consumers, because there was no way to enforce many of the terms stipulated in EULAs, and circumvention was trivial.

It’s been all over the internet by now, with virtually every source that I’ve been able to find coming out against Microsoft’s policies. Here are just a few links:

  1. http://news.xbox.com/2013/06/main
  2. http://www.polygon.com/2013/6/7/4406170/xbox-one-internet-trade-policy
  3. http://www.nowgamer.com/features/1955108/xbox_one_its_for_publishers_not_for_you.html
  4. http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/major-publishers-silent-on-xbox-one-used-game-poli/1100-4659/
  5. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22812743
  6. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9APmJHu8DNs
  7. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1StPJgWkN-U
  8. http://techland.time.com/2013/06/07/microsofts-xbox-one-used-games-policies-are-clear-as-mud/
  9. https://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2013/06/07/microsofts-xbox-one-how-things-have-changed/
  10. http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=580169

Final Thoughts

All of this comes at a time when the game industry is struggling to figure out a business model that works. The internet, digital distribution, piracy, in-game purchase, free-to-play, freemium, lowered barriers to entry enabling indie developers and hobbyist developers, and other rapid changes have made it very difficult for many companies to remain profitable. This response by Microsoft is the most heavy-handed, top-down approach that we’ve seen so far, and cannot be the future of videogaming entertainment.

It is a future with no history — when the publishers DRM servers are shut off, an entire generation of gaming will be lost forever, never to be seen again. And so it must be a future with no future, as well. An informed consumer who understands the issues at play and what’s at stake, could only reject a product offered on these terms. It is up to gamers to educate the general public to stand firm against this.

There are alternatives. The upstart Ouya console is perhaps the best of them in the current generation.

Latest GameMaker Studio update improves GML arrays implementation

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I’m quite happy about this. I’d like even more improvements to the array and string functions to come in time, but this is long overdue. Arrays in GameMaker have been clunky but serviceable forever, and this just made them a good bit easier and more useful.

From the GM:Studio 1.1.1008 release notes:

  • Arrays can now be passed/returned from scripts.
    • NOT pass by reference
    • If array values are set, then the array is copied
  • Arrays are now native on HTML5, making them significantly quicker.
  • Arrays can now be freed!
    • To free an array, simply set the variable to 0 (if MyVar was an array, MyVar=0 would free it)
  • 3 new array functions added
    • is_array()
    • array_length_1d() gives the size of the 1st dimension
    • array_length_2d() gives the size of the 2nd dimension. Arrays are ragged, not grids. so the each element of the 2nd dimension varys in size

GameMaker Studio marks 1st anniversary

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YoYoGames is celebrating the release of GameMaker Studio, one year ago today. With all the updates and improvements that have been made to the product since the 1.0 release, it’s surprising that it’s only been a year since it came out of beta.

I myself have not been a GameMaker user for very long, either. I began using it in September 2010, with version 8.0. In that time, I have found it to be the easiest to learn development tools that I have ever used. It has enabled me to make playable games with features that I would not have thought myself capable of building, and then rewarded me as I gained confidence that I could become a better programmer than I had previously dared to dream. And this has allowed me to pursue a long-dormant dream that I’ve had since I was six years old and experienced my first videogame: to design and build fun, playable games. As a result, life is better than ever. For this I have been very grateful.

Happy birthday, GameMaker Studio!

HTML5 Game Development With GameMaker published

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Today Packt Publishing announced the publication of HTML5 Game Development with GameMaker by Jason Lee Elliott. I was involved with the creation of this book as a technical reviewer, and as such I’m intimately familiar with its contents.

While the book title refers to HTML5 games specifically, most of the content is applicable to any development in GameMaker Studio, regardless of your intended build target.

Some of the highlights include:

  • Numerous examples of the “Finite State Machine” pattern implemented as a system of related Objects
  • Building a Box2D physics-based game
  • Creating a particle system
  • Facebook integration
  • Flurry Analytics integration
  • How to publish your game on the web.

If you purchase through the link below, Amazon will compensate me for the referral.

The Space Invaders: In Search of Lost Time

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I just watched The Space Invaders: In Search of Lost Time, a documentary about the golden age of video games, and the stories of a few collectors of arcade games who are keeping them alive in basements and garages and museums around the country.

A heavily nostalgic look at the games, people telling their stories and what the games and the arcade experience meant to them. It wasn’t as heavy on history, research, and data as I would have liked, and being an enthusiast who lived through this period I didn’t feel like I really learned anything, but I feel qualified to say that the film is accurate in its treament of what it covers, and it is quite enjoyable to watch if you love the the golden age of arcade videogaming, or if you want to learn about that period.

The film did focus mainly on gamers who grew up in the late 70’s/early 80’s, and did not seem to include any interviews with people from the industry — designers, programmers, company presidents, or anything (although, a number of the collectors they interviewed do work in the computer technology field in some capacity). So it’s very much a gamer/fan oriented story, and not an insider story. But you’ll come away from it with a good feel for what the games meant to the generation who came of age during their heyday, and a lot of cabinet envy, if nothing else, and perhaps a desire for more wall outlets in your basement.

Strangely, the actual game Space Invaders seems to have been largely ignored by the collectors who shared their stories. For serving as the inspiration for the film’s title, it’s a bit odd that they didn’t spend a little more time talking about the game somewhere in there.

It’s available as an Amazon Instant Video, and if you watch it through the link below, I’ll get a little compensation through their affiliate program.

The Space Invaders: In Search of Lost Time

Influential Games: Mountain King

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One of the more memorable and innovative titles on consoles and home computers in the early 80’s was Mountain King by CBS Electronics. I knew it on the Atari 2600, but it existed on other platforms also, including Atari 5200, Commodore 64, Vic20, and Colecovision. It was atmospheric and spooky and mysterious and inspiring, and one of my favorite games of all time.

Mountain King (Atari 2600)

There were a number of things that made Mountain King special, and examining them in detail is worthwhile.

Non-violent, Yet Scary As Hell

There was very little death or injury in Mountain King. It had a theme of exploring, not violence. The biggest threat in the game was the clock running out. Things that would hurt or kill you in another game imposed a time penalty on you in Mountain King. Fall too far, and rather than die or take damage, you’re stunned for a length of time proportionate to the height of your fall, and slo-o-o-o-wly get back on your feet. The wait could be agonizing, making seconds seem like hours. On certain difficulty levels, there are time limits for accomplishing certain objectives, and in any case your remaining time rolls over and is added to bonus time which dwindles with each re-claiming of the crown, so you are always under significant time pressure and there’s a feeling of speedrunning when you’re playing for a high score.

Mountain King spider

There is one deadly threat in the game, a giant man-eating spider that inhabits the lowest levels of the mountain. You can’t fight it, only run from it, but it is not normally necessary to descend to this level, so it is mainly in the game to provide a sense of fear of the depths. If you accidentally fell to the spider level, the scuttling sound of the approaching spider would fill you with panic and dread, and make you scramble toward safety with new urgency.

Audio Innovator

Most home videogames of the day did not feature music at all, or if they did, it was little beyond an introduction jingle that lasted a few bars, or a repetitive loop that quickly became annoying. Mountain King not only used music, but integrated it into the game in a novel way. A special theme plays when it is time to find the Flame Spirit, and the music gets louder as you come nearer to its location. A mostly-invisible entity which blinks sporadically, can can only be seen in full in the beam of your flashlight, using the music volume to triangulate and home in on the location of the Flame Spirit was one of the more novel mechanics in a videogame, and holds up well to this day.

Upon taking the Crown, a well-done TIA chip rendition of Grieg’s In The Hall Of The Mountain King plays, signaling your time-limited escape run to reach the Perpetual Flame at the top of the highest mountain peak in order to advance to the next level. The music created a sense of frenetic pace and urgency as you raced to the mountaintop. During the ascent, bats appear, which (similar to the Bat in Adventure) would rob you of the Crown. To avoid them, you sometimes had to hurry, and sometimes it was better to wait. This heightened the tension and anxiety you felt as you tried to make it out without losing the Crown, a setback which normally left you with insufficient time for a re-attempt, and meant an inevitable game over. More than any other feature, possibly rivaled only by the scare factor of the Spider, this made the game memorable.

Mountain King used silence to great effect, as well, for most of the time you are exploring the depths of the diamond mine in pitch dark and in complete silence, apart from the sound effects of picking up diamonds and the squeaking of bats. And if you fell, the sound effect — a simple descending tone — effectively conveyed not just that you had fallen, but how far. When you fell so long that part of the drop was in silence, you just knew you were going to be in for a long recovery time.

Each of these audio elements combined superbly to create a great mood, one of the best on the Atari 2600.

Mystery

Mountain King’s themes of mystery and exploration are enhanced in a number of ways. First, the instructions don’t tell you exactly what you need to do — rather, they hint and allow you to figure things out for yourself. Enough information is there to figure the game out, but enough is left out that it leaves the player with a sense of mystery and discovery. The Flame Spirit and the Skull Guardian and who placed the Crown in the mountain are never explained, leaving the player to wonder and speculate.

The game reinforces the mystery and discovery directly in game play, by making a number of things invisible — black sprites on black background, discoverable only by shining your flashlight everywhere. Treasure Chests, which are worth a lot of diamonds, are not essential to find, but are common enough that you are likely to encounter a few of them as you collect diamonds. The Flame Spirit is unique and critical to the game, and normally invisible, but the combination of the musical theme and its occasional flickering into visibility make it findable even without the flashlight, but by learning to use the flashlight to find Treasure Chests to boost your diamond score enough to find the Flame Spirit sooner, the game leads you to use it in discovering the Flame Spirit as well.

Glitch World

These mysteries are fine enough, yet pale in comparison to the Glitch World that hangs high above the mountain itself. It seems that not much is known for certain about the Glitch World, whether it is truly a bug in the game, or whether it might have been placed there by the programmers deliberately for unknown reasons. But there are platforms high above the mountain which are just barely reachable if you make a super jump from a specific place on the mountain.

I discovered this all on my own quite accidentally by jumping around aimlessly, and it was one of the most exciting things I had run into in a game before. In an era that predated the internet, there was little chance of learning anything about this but by discovering it yourself, and the excitement of this, and the intimacy of learning a secret that, for all you could know, was known only to you and (maybe) the programmers of the game, was very special.

In the early pre-Nintendo 80’s, kids would talk at school about accomplishments and discoveries they had made in video games, often times to incredulous schoolmates who would demand proof, or claim to have seen the same thing on their Atari. There were a few books and magazines out there, even then, but we didn’t have access to information the way we do today, and it gave us the opportunity to discover things ourselves. There were of course some kids who became notorious for lying and making up something in an effort to seem cool and special, as well, but the fact that you couldn’t 100% disprove a claim, and everyone would insist that they were not making stuff up. The only way one could verify extraordinary claims (in a still mostly pre-VCR-era) was if you witnessed it firsthand, so this made the rumors and secrets surrounding videogames something extra special, and if you were a witness, it made you special. I fear that era is gone forever, changed irrevocably by the Internet Age.

And for me, Mountain King might have been the most mysterious. Warren Robinett’s Adventure Eater Egg might have been cooler, but because it gave you a message, it seemed to have a purpose, and however cool it was, it just didn’t have the same mystery that the Glitch World in Mountain King had. We never found anything up there, no matter how high we climbed, but we never doubted that if we could only find some way past the impossible point, and get just a little bit higher, some great secret would be waiting for us, and all would be revealed.

DNS Registration

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Back when I registered this domain in 2010, I used GoDaddy, mainly on the strength of them having a special deal where I could register a domain for very cheap. I’d been wanting for a while to get my own domain and web host so I could play around a bit, and saw a deal advertised on slickdeals.net for $1 domains, so that was my excuse to finally do it.

I had heard the GoDaddy name quite a bit, thanks to their marketing, and they seemed reliable. And, from a technical standpoint, I never did have any problems with my domain name resolving, or getting hijacked, or anything like that. So for that much, they were fine.

There were several thngs I didn’t care for about GoDaddy: their sexist TV advertising, the fact that at one time, prior to the public uproar over it, they had backed SOPA and PIPA, and then they had a high profile security breach a few months ago, which didn’t seem to affect me one way or another, but made me lose confidence in them.

They also had some other issues, for example, they would email me an awful lot, to the point where it was really spamming me. And the experience of actually registering my domain with them involved a great deal of very aggressive “upsell” and e-checkout spam that made the entire process annoying, about as annoying as trying to order anything from Dell, and it was unclear what many of the additional products they sold even were, let alone what they did, and whether they were something I needed for my purposes, or a good idea, and so on.

So my registration finally came up for renewal, and I opted to transfer DNS to 1and1. I didn’t do a whole lot of comparison shopping, just asked around and people who’s opinions I regarded highly said they were OK. A few people said DNSimple was good, too.

Transferring this domain to the new registrar was not entirely easy, but I managed to go through all the hoops and set things up. The name finally transferred over today, and for some reason at first 1and1 seemed at first to be using my hosts’ name servers, which was good, but then a little bit later, this updated and they were using their own nameservers, which caused my site to go down for a few hours. I had to log in to my account and reset them back, but it still took about two hours to resume resolving properly :-( I’m not sure whether this was my own mistake, or theirs, but it’s resolved now.

Hopefully this will be the only problem that I have.

New Page: Recommendations

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As an experiment, I’ve created a new page for the site, Recommendations.

Here, I provide a list of recommended books, in no particular order, that you should read, and will probably broaden this in time to include movies and games that I think are good, too.

I’m using Amazon’s Associate program for the links, so if you click them it’ll get me a little money, which is always a good thing.

Accordingly this also marks my first step toward monetizing the content on the site. I don’t really expect this to be a big money maker or anything, but we’ll see how it does. Mainly, I’m just interested in getting people to read stuff that I found useful or insightful, and sharing a bit of opinion about it.