bln
a natural blog
posted in gaming, sep 1, 2010used games
i recently read some thoughts about buying used games on penny arcade, so i figured i’d write up my own. some game developers would have you think that buying a game used is stealing, because they don’t get your money. i doubt anyone actually thinks buying a used game is stealing, but i can see where a game developer might prefer that every player pays them. of course copyright law still allows the right of first sale, which means a player who buys a game new, plays it a while, and then no longer wants it can sell it to someone else.
i think one viewpoint that gets neglected in this conversation is that of the player who bought the game new, but has finished with it. reasons for being finished could be not liking the game after all, having played through to the end, or anything really. i personally play games that are largely an interactive story to me (for example, the assassin’s creed, zelda, or grand theft auto series). once i’ve reached the ending i know i’m not going to touch it again, so my options are to put it on a shelf or in a box in the basement and just let it sit, throw it away (even though it still works just fine), or give / sell it to somebody else who will use it. all but the last seem wasteful to me, even if recycling is an option. in order to sell it though, someone has to be willing to buy it used.
this also factors into my decision whether to buy a game. it may cost $60 now, but i’ll probably be done with it in a month and could get $20 - $40 back selling it on half.com, which is $20 - $40 for a month of entertainment. of course some methods of drm make it difficult to sell a game when i’m done with it. for example, if i were to sell my copy of assassin’s creed ii, the buyer would not be able to play it since the disc key is registered to my ubisoft account. hopefully there’s a way for me to unregister it so i can sell it, but i haven’t looked into that. so ubisoft may be successfully forcing everyone who wants to play that game to buy it new, which players have a right to get angry about since we’re supposed to have the right of first sale. of course that’s straying into a drm discussion, which i don’t mean to do just now. the point here is that if i can’t sell a game once i no longer want to play it, it’s worth less to me than it would have been otherwise.
when looking to obtain a game, a potential player has these options: buy it new, buy it used from a store that deals in used games, buy it used from another player either directly or through a service like ebay / half.com, or download an unauthorized copy for free. the only illegal option is the last one, so i definitely don’t recommend going that route. buying a game new has advantages in that you can be pretty sure the discs and manuals will be in good condition, and new copies are available sooner than used. also your money counts toward the numbers making the game look well-received. the downside is you pay more for it. buying used from a place like gamestop is the next most expensive, but you give up everything good other than it still being legal. personally i don’t want my money going to gamestop since they’re going to slap a price tag on it that’s at least twice as much as they paid for it and then just toss it in a jumbled bin with all the other used games. some used game stores do better than that of course. it’s more convenient for the player who’s done with a game though because the store buys it right away and hangs onto it until someone else wants to buy it from them.
next is my favorite way to buy games: used through a site like half.com or ebay. you can find older, less popular games on half for dirt cheap so it’s a great way to save money. it’s legal, it keeps games out of the landfill, and you can usually find what you’re looking for. the major downside is you’re not going to find used copies of a game on its release date, so you have to be willing to wait to play it. the longer you wait, the lower the price tends to go. you also have to wait a few days while it ships to you. if a game came out a couple years ago, this is often the most reliable way to find a legal copy. buying directly from another player means from friends or at garage sales, which is the same except much harder to find what you want.
the other option is downloading an illegal copy of the game for free. this is obviously the best price you can get (unless you have generous friends or find games in the free box at a garage sale), but the obvious downside is it’s illegal. not only that, but the penalties for copyright infringement (often called piracy by those who want to make it sound more harmful) are disproportionately harsh. you also have a chance of downloading a virus someone labeled as a popular game, or a version of the game with the copy protection removed in a way that makes the game unstable. if you’re lucky though, you might get a version of the game with the copy protection removed in a way that actually makes it more stable, which is disappointing for people who buy the game new.
the way i tend to buy games is to get them new near the release date if i want to start playing right away. if i can wait, or i’m looking for a classic title, i usually hit up half.com. once i’ve played all the way through a game and know i won’t touch it again, i put it up for sale on half.com. if i bought it new on the release date and finished it quickly, i can often get back a good portion of what i paid. if i got a good enough deal i might even make a little extra money — a benefit of being able to play through a game in 5 nights.
posted in words, aug 17, 2010honorary nerd
most days i read the headlines (and occasionally an article) on slashdot. the always have a poll up, which is often something i’m not interested in. today though was one of the days i did vote in the poll, and i was pleased to see that my answer was the second least popular, with the first least popular being the joke answer. after noticing that looking at the poll results i thought to myself, “haha nerds, i’m not one of you!” (by the way, slashdot calls itself news for nerds.)
you see, i like to think of myself as not actually a nerd but knowing enough that i could be a nerd and can understand the plight of a nerd. as if the actual nerds might name me an honorary nerd and accept me as one of their own despite that i am not in fact one of them, much in the way that a university could award an honorary degree to someone who didn’t actually attend classes there but did something awesome that they wish had been done by one of their graduates. i’m not sure if that happens in real life, but i’ve seen it on tv a time or two.
so now i have numerical proof that i am not a nerd: in a poll that is actually a factual question (often they’re opinion questions) i chose the option least popular among people who are probably nerds. this is of course ignoring the joke option. in a way, every time i disagree with nerds is a victory for not thinking of myself as a nerd. so this morning when picking the least-nerdy option in a poll on the internet i was feeling victorious . . . and then i remembered i was wearing my glow-in-the-dark tron sweatshirt.
posted in internet, webdev, jun 3, 2009rating systems
i recently started looking at my rating system used in some places on track7 with the intent of making it more of a module that i could use from whatever section i wanted to allow ratings on. i currently allow visitors and registered users to vote on how they like some parts of the site. choices are from -3 (really bad) to +3 (really good), including a 0 option for people with no opinion who for some reason want to vote anyway. currently the process is rather bulky — you have to click a link saying that you want to rate something, then you get the form that lets you set your rating. if you’ve already rated it then your previous rating is replaced with the new one, but the only indication that you’ve voted already is the default rating when the rating form comes up. if your vote was zero you get no indication.
the main issue i’d like to improve with my rating system is that hardly anyone uses it. so i thought of how to make it easier and possibly more fun to use. i will probably still have the problem that most hits to track7 come from bots and not actual people (and i don’t actually want the bots to vote!), but for the people who come around it would be nice if more of them would vote. i came up with the following points which i think are likely to turn people away from voting:
- each vote requires multiple clicks and two full page loads
- no immediate indication whether you’ve already rated that item
- ratings are shown as numbers (as in “rating: 2.5”), and most people don’t like seeing numbers
- the descriptions for what the rating numbers should mean are boring
another issue that keeps people from voting is that i’ve been individually coding support for voting into each section that supports voting, so some areas where i want to allow votes don’t allow it at all. i suspect people can’t tell the difference between me not wanting to allow votes and me not having added support for it yet, but it’s still a factor i would like to improve.
i’ve started on a new rating module that uses the exact same data structures (a votes table and a ratings table) as the current system. the interface looks like 3 thumbs-down hands, a square, and 3 thumbs-up hands, in that order horizontally. the graphics are outlines, which will be partially filled to indicate overall rating, and have darker outlines to show your rating if you’ve already rated it. clicking on the outermost thumbs would add / change your vote of either plus or minus 3 (depending on if it was thumbs-up or thumbs-down), while the innermost thumbs are plus or minus 1. clicking on the square registers a zero vote. votes will be registered using javascript (ajax) if available, so there are no page loads involved. hovering over one of the thumbs will highlight the number of thumbs you would vote for if clicking there, while hovering over the square highlights just the square. each thumb and the square also have tooltips to describe what that particular rating should mean, such as “3 thumbs down — impossibly horrible” — i may attempt to come up with better descriptions, but that may wait until i have this working. this system should address all the points i brought up earlier.
more recently i was comparing rating systems which allow users to choose various values (like mine with -3 through +3, or youtube / netflix with 1 through 5 stars) and average the results versus systems that allow people to say they like it (or sometimes dislike as well) and count up the number of likes minus the number of dislikes. i call these the average system and the total system. i realized that the total system favors older items since they’ve normally been seen by more people and have had more opportunity to be rated. the limit to the rating is set by the number of people who happen to see it, which increases with time. the average system ends up favoring newer items for a time since an older item is likely to have had at least one less than perfect rating, so a new item with one perfect rating immediately shoots to the top until someone else comes along and rates it less than perfect. the highest a rating can ever be is the maximum single rating value, and once it’s been rated less than the max it will never actually reach the max (though with a significantly high number of max ratings it can look that way after rounding).
looking at how to give old and new items a more “fair” way to calculate overall rating, the average system can count a zero vote (equivalent to a 3-star vote in the 1 through 5 stars system) in with the averages. this actually cuts the minimum and maximum in half, since the average of 3 and 0 is 1.5. i am considering this for my rating system. there could also be a threshold after an item has a certain number of votes it stops counting the extra zero vote. the trick is figuring out where to set that threshold. also if the threshold ever changes then all of the overall ratings need to be recalculated.
the total system needs to assign less value to older ratings than it does to newer ratings. this actually means the overall rating needs to be almost constantly recalculated. for example, if each day a vote counts 10% less than it did the previous day, overall rating would need to be recalculated daily. also there is the question of how to determine the parameters for a old rating and how exactly it should be worth less than a new rating. maybe losing 10% every day doesn’t make sense for a certain setup and it’s better to just delete votes that are over 30 days old. then you have the question of whether people whose votes have expired are allowed to vote again. it made me glad i went with the average system, which i think also has the benefit of being more useful when only one or two people are going to vote anyway.
posted in cars, scams, nov 18, 2008green tire valve caps
some days when i get to work i end up parking next to a car that has green caps on the tire valves. i probably wouldn’t have thought much of it, but my mom told me how she has her tires filled with nitrogen instead of air. nitrogen and the color green don’t necessarily go together, but it turns out green caps on tire valves indicates that the tires are filled with nitrogen. they do this to help make sure somebody doesn’t refill your tires with air when you’ve paid extra for nitrogen.
when my mom first told me she did this, i thought it was a little silly since as far as i could remember, air contains more nitrogen than any other gas. i was pretty sure air vs. nitrogen came down to less than 100% nitrogen (i thought around 40%) vs. 100% nitrogen. could the other gasses in air really make it noticeably worse than 100% nitrogen would be?
so why would my mom (and some unknown person i work with) want to do this? like i said, i heard about filling tires with 100% nitrogen from my mom. she had been told nitrogen leaks out of tires slower than air and also expands and contracts less with temperature change. so with 100% nitrogen, your tires are supposedly at the ideal pressure for longer which means better gas mileage and slower tread wear as well as less frequent need to refill the tires.
to make sure my memory of high-school chemistry wasn’t failing me, i ran a search or two on the internet. the first thing i noticed was i was wrong about air being 40% nitrogen — it’s actually nearly 80% nitrogen! so putting nitrogen in your tires instead of air is 100% nitrogen instead of 80% nitrogen. just from that i can’t see how you’d get any noticeable benefit. turns out anybody who’s compared gas mileage and / or tread wear for air vs. nitrogen did not find any statistically significant difference. i guess the biggest difference is not needing to have your tires refilled as frequently, but since i get that done free whenever i get my oil changed i don’t really consider that an advantage. so you’re paying extra money for essentially no reason (unless you really wanted new valve caps).
filling tires with nitrogen has actually been used as a bit of a scam, and probably still is. what people are getting scammed on is being convinced it’s worth paying extra for nitrogen. my mom and probably the person whose car i sometimes park next to at work were convinced of that. sometimes the cost to get air-filled tires emptied and refilled with nitrogen is over $100 per tire, and then there’s a cost to get them topped off again later since nitrogen still leaks out of your tires, even if it is slower. thankfully my mom didn’t pay nearly that much, and was promised free nitrogen refills any time she needs it, as long as she goes to the place she paid to switch her tires to nitrogen in the first place.
i’m getting new wheels and tires for my car soon, and while i considered going with nitrogen for a little while, it didn’t take me long to decide it’s not worth any extra money to me at all.
posted in windows, oct 15, 2008windows vista vs. xp
general consensus seems to be that vista is a worse version of windows than xp, but that’s not been my experience at all. so i have to wonder what is different about what i’m doing in vista compared to what most people are doing that makes it the best choice of windows for me but not for anybody else. here are my best guesses about what might set me apart:
i build my own systems. this means i “install” vista myself and don’t add crappy extra software that comes with pre-built systems with windows preinstalled. that’s also true with xp though so doesn’t explain why that would make more of a difference with vista than it does with xp. so if this factor actually does make a difference, it would mean that vista isn’t as good at dealing with the problems that come from having crappy extra software as xp was. i’m not sure how relevant such a problem actually should be, but the fact remains that people who aren’t comfortable building their own systems have little choice but to buy a system bloated with crappy extra software.
i also turn of user account control (uac) — that annoying vista popup that comes up all to often to ask you to confirm that you wanted to do that thing you just tried to do. maybe microsoft testers found it just as annoying as i do and turned it off, which makes it hard for them to find any bugs in it if they have it turned off. or maybe there’s nothing about it making vista less stable and it just makes people like vista less because it feels annoying and useless. i’ve never heard of it popping up for anything other than what the user was actually trying to do, which i assume is the point: to let the user cancel the actions of programs that are trying to damage their system.
i don’t use windows media player, windows mail, windows messenger, windows calendar, etc. if i knew nothing about microsoft i wouldn’t expect that programs included with windows could actually cause problems for windows itself, but from using microsoft office it appears that the people who work on that don’t talk to the people who work on windows itself very much. again these programs are included with vista so i could see that if people don’t like something about these programs they would say they don’t like vista. of course if you compare to xp, there was media player, mail (called outlook express), and messenger back then too, so this seems unlikely to make much difference.
my hardware is pretty decent. i score 5.3 on the new windows experience index, which is brought down by my hard drive as everything else is 5.8 or 5.9. that would make me think windows vista should be expected to work reasonably well on my hardware. it doesn’t explain what’s considered a good score — all i could find that referenced this number was in the new games explorer, some games list a required and recommended score. every new version of windows has required more powerful hardware than the previous version, so this isn’t really anything new if a machine that is nearly as old as xp isn’t very good at running vista.
all my hardware has vista drivers. i remember when i went from 98 to xp i had an off brand scanner that worked fine in 98 but didn’t work in xp, so i was dual-booting 98 and xp until i got a new scanner that had xp drivers. i realize most people don’t know how to and wouldn’t be interested in setting up dual boot with xp and vista, and would prefer to just stick with xp if that’s where a certain piece of hardware works.
the last two points are both problems that seem to come up with every major release of windows. i think the gap between xp and vista release dates was the longest so far, so maybe people forgot about or never experienced those things from when xp came out. that hardly seems to warrant the amount of hatred vista seems to have generated though, so maybe there’s something else. i don’t see what exactly it is people have against vista — it almost seems that people think that by badmouthing vista they will appear smarter or cooler and they have nothing against vista from their personal experience but are just saying it’s awful because it seems like the thing to do.
i don’t mean to say that vista is by any means the perfect operating system, just that compared to other versions of windows it does just as well for me in most areas and better in some areas. there are still plenty of things i don’t like about windows in general, and if people were saying vista was awful and instead running linux, bsd, or osx they’d certainly have a point. most of what i hear about though is people saying vista is awful and instead running xp, which still has the problem that it’s windows.
so is vista really a worse release of windows than xp? if you think it is and have a specific experience that makes you feel that way i’d like to hear it — please post a comment here.
posted in internet, rants, aug 8, 2008ebay is not a game
to everyone looking at the auctions i’m looking at, i hereby remind you that ebay is not a game. some of you seem to feel the need to “win” by beating my bid for whatever’s up for auction, even if you’re entering your SEVENTH bid on the same auction.
ebay certainly encourages this behavior, which makes sense because if ebay gets a percentage of the amount an auction closes at, they make the most money if the auction ends up as high as possible.
so if you’ve put in a bid on an auction, and somebody else puts in a higher bid, ebay e-mails you to try to get you to bid again: “holy crap the world is going to end if you don’t come bid again right away! joe_user_52 has outbid you on item #127612439 rooster toaster cover and there are only 3 days, 5 hours, and 57 minutes left! joe_user_52 may have the auction now, but you can still bid higher to defeat joe_user_52 and WIN if you hurry!” i made up the specifics of that one, but it’s essentially a paraphrased version of the outbid notice e-mail.
another factor that makes people bid again is the idea that “if joe_user_52 thinks the rooster toaster cover is worth $20 then maybe it might just be worth $25 to me,” despite that with ignoring joe_user_52’s bid it only seemed worth $10. maybe it’s some sort of validation — “i was right to want this item. joe_user_52’s bid proves it! now it’s fine for me to want it more, so i’ll bid higher.”
and one other thing that probably contributes more than i’d like to admit is that people don’t understand the concept of entering your highest bid. if you see something you want, and it’s worth as much as $10 to you, then you put in $10 as your maximum bid. if only one other person wanted it, and they bid before you with $5 as their maximum, your bid will go just above $5 so you win by as little as possible. bidding $10 on an item does not mean you will have to pay that much if you win — it just means you won’t have to pay more than that.
if all bidders were smart and knew what they were doing, no one person would bid more than once. the bid you put in would be the most you’d be willing to pay for that item, so if somebody outbid you then you’re done — you’re not willing to pay as much as they are. unfortunately for bidders who realize this (i.e. me), there are plenty of bidders who don’t.
ideally i should throw in my maximum bid as soon as i find something i like, then just leave it alone to see if i end up wanting it most. in reality if i do that i’m going to end up paying more or even having the auction go higher than my maximum than if i were to hold out and bid just before auction close. i often find if someone else has bid (and it wasn’t some really low bid right away), they will bid again as many as 5 times in a row after they see i’ve outbid them because they don’t want to lose. if you ever bid a second time on an ebay auction (even moreso if it’s the sixth time), chances are you just lost right then.
posted in xml, apr 28, 2008schema validation turns xml into ml
i’ve come to the conclusion that xml schema validation is bad. this is the kind of bad in the way that javascript is bad: it’s often misused and / or used for evil. specifically, validating xml against a schema essentially removes the x in xml (which stands for extensible) because it doesn’t allow new tags to be added. thus, by always validating xml against a schema, it becomes simply ml.
i propose that schema validation should not fail when additional tags or attributes are present in the xml but not defined in the schema.
a schema essentially defines what tags are allowed in an xml document, which tags can contain which other tags, and how many times tags can appear. it does the same for attributes.
it may seem that an xml file that contains tags or attributes which are not in the schema should fail validation, when in fact it is normally better if it does not. the simplest reason is that when accepting input, it’s best to handle the widest possible variety of formats. an xml file is a form of input, and it’s certainly possible to accept xml that contains additional information beyond what’s expected to be there according to the schema.
i see schemas most useful when used as an interface in object-oriented programming: an xml file must provide the information the schema says is required, but it is free to also provide additional information for other purposes. of course whatever is going to read the file using the schema would ignore that additional information. given the functions that exist to read xml files, it’s easy to simply skip over any information that isn’t expected to be there.
the reason this came up is that i was working on a c# .net project, and needed to add a setting to the application configuration file (which is an xml file with a schema). this setting needs to be able to be present any number of times (including zero) and as it would probably be present somewhere in the 20-50 times range i didn’t think putting in <add key="setting" value="value1"/> that many times was best. so i made up my own tags and tucked them out of the way near the bottom of the xml file. it was still valid xml, but now .net throws an exception when i try to create an AppSettingsReader object to read the non-custom parts of the configuration file. how annoying — now i have to change existing code to not use AppSettingsReader simply because i added other settings. thankfully since AppSettingsReader requires a lot of repetitive work to handle potential errors i already had a function that everything was using instead of reading directly from the AppSettingsReader. of course i had stopped using the whole application configuration thing on new projects a while before this, but this was a project started before that.
posted in internet, html, unicode, php, apr 24, 2008html entities with utf-8
a while ago i started switching my php code from using htmlspecialchars() to htmlentities(), which as i understand converts a much larger group of characters into html entity form (for example, “—” becomes “—”). i decided to go with that partially because there’s an html_entity_decode() and partially because i was thinking that it’s better to have “—” in my html than “—.” i also started using smart quotes in my pages where i actually enter the html as “ ” ‘ and ’.
more recently i got to thinking about the fact that i serve my html with the utf-8 character set, and converting everything that’s not part of ascii (character codes 32 through 126) into html entities, which themselves are composed of ascii characters. so why bother even specifying a character set if i’m not using it? i’m also making my html harder for me to read because it looks like i’m instead of i’m, for example.
looking at utf-8, the right single quote character (0x2019 in unicode) gets encoded using 3 bytes. the html entity is all ascii which is one byte per character, for a total of 7 bytes. so if i instead actually put the character into a utf-8 html document, i save 4 bytes on that one character in this example. all html entities start with an ampersand and end with a semicolon, so with at least one character in between (though i don’t think there are any entities with only one-character names), that’s 3 bytes already. the most bytes any single character can take up in utf-8 is 4 bytes, which is still less than any html entity i know of.
so with that, i’ll be switching back to htmlspecialchars() but decoding with html_entity_decode(), and using the actual characters in my files. i don’t forsee any problems with this unless someone visits my site with a browser that can’t handle utf-8.
posted in bathrooms, mar 8, 2008kindergartener height
whenever a public men’s room has the type of urinal where it’s not down into the floor, there’s always at least one at what i always think of as “kindergartener height.”
if you haven’t had much men’s room experience, what i mean by this is the urinal is installed lower on the wall such that if you’re taller than a kindergartener you should probably be a little careful not to accidentally pee on top of it instead of in it. i’m not the kind of guy most people would consider tall and i do worry about exactly that whenever the kindergartener-height urinal is the only one available. i can only imagine what it would be like for a basketball player, but then again i also worry that i’m going to hit my head on the supports on wooden roller coasters.
what i don’t appreciate is that even in places where it’s unreasonable to expect a kindergartener to be on a regular basis, there’s still that at least one kindergartener-height urinal that nobody wants to have to use.
posted in words, feb 11, 2008we are all terrists
i suspect that anyone who knows who george w bush is also knows that he’s not especially skilled when it comes to pronouncing words. one of his mispronunciations i find entertaining is “terrists” which appears to be short for “terrorists.”
pretend with me for a moment that “terrists” is an actual word. the fist part, terr-, often means ground or the earth. the second part, -ist, means a person. putting those parts together then makes a “terrist” a person who lives on the ground / on the earth. this is of course everybody.
so when bush says he wants to stop the terrists he’s actually saying he wants to stop all of us. hopefully that’s not what he actually means...
