The Integrated

And then point at Steam.

[Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia] noted that GameStop’s management “has been monitoring and studying the capabilities of digital downloading and its potential adoption over the last several years” and they’ve recently “conducted the most thorough study to-date on its capability.” The study provided the following key takeaways (as outlined by Bhatia):

• An addressable market (due to technology rollout) will not exist until 2014 – at that time approximately 25% of population will have access to the technology required to download full games.
• Users would still face issues of price (could cost ~$100/month) and storage capacity.
• Consumers are willing to pay ~$39 for downloadable game so publishers will be less incentivized than some in the industry think.

Source: “GameStop Says Addressable Market for Digital Distribution Won’t Exist Until 2014″, IndustryGamers, 6/19/2009

How could the “most thorough study to-date” on digital distribution of games conclude that there’s no market for it until 2014? There’s a market for it now. I don’t know a single PC gamer who hasn’t bought a game on Steam. Not a single one. Digital distribution is here already. Sure, the consoles are lagging behind as usual, with plenty of smaller, arcade-style titles available for download but very few AAA titles yet. To think that a majority of 360/PS3 games going digital distro is five years off, however, is just crazy. In five years, the market will cannibalize retail. If GameStop treats this change like they’re safe for the next five years, they’re toast. They’re probably toast anyway, but they’re hastening their own demise.

Only 25% of the population will have the tech required for digital distribution, in 2014, because it’s being rolled out? Broadband penetration in the U.S. is 60% today. Guess what? If you’ve got a broadband connection, you can download a full game. It’ll take a few hours, maybe, depending on the game, but you can do it, and many PC gamers do on a regular basis without finding it too much of an inconvenience. Faster connections will only make it easier and explode the market. Again, if you’re a brick-and-mortar outfit and you’re waiting for that point before you start changing your strategy, you’ve already lost.

Finally, storage capacity is definitely a concern with one console—the Xbox 360—but the PS3 is designed with a user-replaceable, standard laptop hard drive, and obviously a PC user can upgrade their hardware anytime they want. You can get a 500GB laptop hard drive for about $100, and a terabyte desktop hard drive for the same price. Storage capacity is hardly a significant roadblock.

Digital distribution is already making waves on the PC. The PSP is set to go all-download this fall. The PS3 will likely follow suit before 2014. And GameStop is going to be in serious trouble. Good riddance to them. Who ever liked going in there and getting hassled by the employees about reserving games or upselling crap like strategy guides and magazine subscriptons anyway?

• ASUS’ upcoming Maximus Formula III motherboard looks slick as hell. And I dig the RoG Connect.
• If I’d been in the military 50 years ago, I might’ve worked on this beast of a system.
• Obama’s plan for gay rights.
• Here’s a hilariously truth-free promotional page for Internet Explorer. Oh, Microsoft, you never fail to fail to create believable hype. Or fail to maintain IE’s status as the shittiest modern browser. Free advice for you: I wouldn’t boast about web standards when your product scores 20/100 on Acid3 and your competitors score 94, 100, 100, and 100 (FF 3.5, Chrome 2, Opera 10, and Safari 4 respectively). Also: The reason you can claim that IE is compatible with the most sites on the internet is because you single-handedly held the development of the Web back by a decade with IE 6.
• Slightly old, but: This is a good article about a master of compromising physical security devices.

I installed a new WordPress theme, and I’m still tweaking it and getting things set up. So it may be slightly unpolished for the next couple of days.

Following up on my last post, I want to note that there is some merit to the classical argument against writing your password down. If Alice’s password is posted under her keyboard, you have an auditing problem, because you can’t be sure that Bob—who works in the office and is also a legitimate authorized user with his own network account—hasn’t logged on to Alice’s account and done things in her name. If Alice writes her password down and puts it in her wallet rather than under the keyboard, though, there’s nothing wrong with that, which is what I was getting at.

Think fast: How many passwords do you have?

A lot? Surely you have many systems that you log in to, but perhaps you’ve taken to using a particular password on multiple sites, to avoid confusion and the hassles that go with forgetting a password.

Maybe you even use the same password to log into your computer, to log into YouTube, and to log into your online banking site. It’s just easier that way—I hear that sentiment loud and clear.

How strong is that password? Realize that if an attacker somewhere on the internet cracks your YouTube password, even though you may not care about YouTube they have now also gained access to your finances if you use the same password for your bank!

Unfortunately, we’re stuck with an online world in which a variety of destinations, tools, and services use only username/password authentication. As we rely more and more on these services and the risk as well as the potential damage of identity theft rise, it becomes ever more critical to have strong, unique passwords and protect them carefully. What I’d like to do here is explain my approach to password management and how you can have a set of exceptionally strong and unique passwords for everything you log into, without ever worrying about forgetting them.

Step-by-step guide after the jump!

Read the rest of this entry »

…is, according to Thermaltake, to bring world-class industrial designers in to do it for you. Behold the Level 10, designed by BMW. Yes, the auto manufacturer.

I’m not sure if I like it or not, but it’s certainly unlike anything else on the market, and the hot-swappable hard drive trays are a convenient feature. See more pictures here.

Update, 7/1/2009: Switched code sections from manual coloring to an automatic syntax formatting plugin.

NOTE (6/20/2009): I didn’t intend to close comments on this post. The setting is on “enabled” and I’ve tried disabling and re-enabling them to no avail. Some glitch either with the WordPress 2.8 update or installing the new theme has screwed it up. If you have something to say about this post, drop me a line. My Gmail username is the same as everywhere else.

I haven’t been posting much lately; I have, however, been thinking about my future in some area of computer science, software development, and/or web development. And I’ve been tinkering more with JavaScript since my last post. One thing I’ve discovered how to do is baking event handling into your custom objects. This isn’t really innovative—all the major frameworks out there include it—but I had fun figuring it out on my own. Here’s the solution I arrived at.

I decided that the best way to store and fire event listeners was in an associative array, where the keys are the event names and the values are associative arrays linking IDs to functions. So, for example, a set of registered event listeners for an object representing a door might look like this:

Door.Event
   "Open"   => "a"  => function
   "Close"  => "b1" => function
               "c"  => function
   "Lock"   => (empty)
   "Unlock" => "b2" => function
               "d"  => function

The IDs here are just quick meaningless samples; the idea is that they come from and uniquely identify the object that registered their respective event listeners. They will be used by their originating object to unregister its own event listeners and not any other object’s event listeners if need be, since you may have multiple objects registering listeners for the same event, possibly even the same function registered as a listener by multiple objects. As an example of this, consider a card game. If there are two cards on the board that say, “Whenever a player discards a card, that player takes 5 damage,” you will have two instances of the triggered function (dealing 5 damage to the player) registered on an array of global events for “Discard”, and when that event is fired, both will go off and the function will be executed twice. Yet, if one of those cards is destroyed, it should remove its own specific instance of event listener registration—perhaps the other has had a spell cast on it modifying its effect, so it could matter which one gets deregistered.

Using this system, implementing event listener registration is simple.

Read the rest of this entry »