The Pocket Moleskine

Nintendo understands that its basic problem was with its software. It didn’t manage to keep a solid, high-quality feed of top titles pouring into the market over the first half of this year, leaving the Wii to rest on the laurels of Wii Sports and Wii Fit when what the market really needed were new things to reignite interest. A huge number of the Wii’s owners are downstream consumers, uncommitted newcomers to the gaming market, and after an immensely promising start, Nintendo failed to deliver the kind of software that encourages those people to swim upstream and get more deeply involved in gaming.

It’s not, by any means, too late. Those people aren’t going anywhere. Their Wii consoles may continue to gather dust and they may continue to buy only a minimal amount of software, if any at all, but it’s highly unlikely that they will migrate to the offerings of any of Nintendo’s rivals or dispose of the consoles entirely. Nintendo still has a window of opportunity to engage those consumers by offering them software and experiences which appeal to them and encourage them back into the market.

A COMPLETE index to all the Calvin and Hobbes strips. No actual comics, but this is a great searchable archive.

Put simply, the goal here is to clean install Windows 7 on a virgin, unused PC. You can boot and run Setup with the Upgrade media for Windows 7, but when you go to activate, it won’t work.

Thanks to Kevin Fisher and a bit of testing, I have a simple workaround that does work.

After performing the clean install, ensure that there are no Windows Updates pending that would require a system reboot. (You’ll see an orange shield icon next to Shutdown in the Start Menu if this is the case).

Then, open regedit.exe with Start Menu Search and navigate to:

HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup/OOBE/

Change MediaBootInstall from “1” to “0”.

Open the Start Menu again and type cmd to display a shortcut to the Command Line utility. Right-click this shortcut and choose “Run as administrator.” Handle the UAC prompt.

In the command line window, type: slmgr /rearm

Then tap ENTER, close the command line window and reboot. When Windows 7 reboots, run the Activate Windows utility, type in your product key and activate windows.

Voila!

A couple of notes here.

Others have reported that simply installing Windows 7 using Upgrade Media and then activating just works. It certainly doesn’t hurt to try this, but my guess is that there was a version of Windows on the hard drive that Setup detected, thus making the install and activation work properly.

I have not tested this yet, but I assume if you launch Setup from within your previous version of Windows, choose Custom, reboot, and then wipe out the previous Windows version during Setup, that that will work as well.

And I’m just about positive that the old “install twice” hack from Vista will work too.

A list of settings that can be applied to the Perl script Perltidy

Despite attempts to balance difficulty for a wide range of people, the players will still experience failure. More importantly, many of these folks will stop playing because of these failures. It’s rare for people to leave a restaurant because they don’t like the food, and it’s not too common for people to walk out of a movie because it’s bad — but game players do put down the controller and leave the game all the time. What’s worse, when game players have a negative experience, they are likely to tell their friends, family, and community.

When someone quits a game prematurely, we haven’t just lost a player; we’ve created a detractor.

The Sonar Power Manager uses a new user presence detection technique to shut off the computer display when you are not present. It was developed by myself and other researchers at Northwestern and UMichigan. The goal is to shut off the screen immediately after you leave, even if you just moved the mouse 10 seconds ago.

It uses a very simple type of sonar system to accomplish this:

The Sonar Power Manger uses ultrasonics (sound above 20kHz in frequency and which humans cannot hear) on your computer’s regular sound system. Surprisingly, we have found that many laptops can use ultrasonics. However, many laptops cannot. For these unlucky users, the Sonar Power Manager will not properly detect user presence. Other unlucky users will find that their speakers produce annoying lower-frequency harmonics or noise while the sonar is operating.

Putting well established franchises such as Madden on the iPod Touch for USD 10 cheapens their value, he explained. “Whether it’s the same experience or not, and it’s not, why would I ever spend USD 60 for Madden if I can get it for USD 10 on my iPod Touch?”

“All the 20 year old kids playing games now started paying on the GBA and you work your way up. And if you start with an iPod Touch I’m not sure they do work their way up. I think Apple intends to capture that audience and keep them,” he said.

It looked as if Riggio lacked confidence in the company’s stock, “unless he desperately needs USD 60 million. He’s got a lot bigger stake in Barnes & Noble. Clearly he thinks selling GameStop is better than selling Barnes & Noble.”

“We like to say the environment where PlayStation wins is best for this industry, because we have a brand that can play on a worldwide basis - young and old, male and female - where our competition tends to be relegated to either select regions or select consumer audiences.”

Microsoft has time to be patient in the long-term with its videogame business, said Tretton, in part due to the amount of money it can afford to pump into the console market.

“I love their money. I mean, they’ve got more money than God,” he said.

“They can afford to be more patient. We’re very profit-driven. We’re interested in a return on investment in a fairly short period of time. I think Microsoft’s will to go at it from a much more steep curve in terms of profitability.”

The managing director of the UK’s largest independent games chain, Chips, has told GamesIndustry.biz he expects the PSPgo to “fail miserably”.

Revealing his views on the newly released digital handheld, Don McCabe said: “My own personal opinion is that it’s a no-go. I’ve been to a number of presentations to see if there’s anything there and I don’t feel it’ll go anywhere to be honest.

“I’m 99.9 per cent sure it’s going to fail miserably, in which case it’s going to put back other potential people coming into that digital space.”

“Some carriers are demanding a revenue share of up to 80% on content transactions, which is placing a ridiculous and unprecedented amount of pressure on the mobile games community. Until this changes, operators are effectively squeezing the life out of the value chain.

“In the West, the [Apple] App Store has forced carriers to revise this stake in the revenue pie to around 30% — giving the majority of revenues to the developer. This has to happen in India for the content market, and games in particular, to really boom, but this is unlikely to happen before 2013,” he says.

Lane goes on to explain the dichotomy in India between urban and rural areas and how he expects the mobile games market to bifurcate.

“Such is the divide between the urban and rural population that there will be different demands coming from each socioeconomic sector. The urban market is more likely to adopt high-end smartphones and access high-end gaming, whereas the rural market will be dominated by low- to mid-range devices.

“This means functionality of the games will be limited to cater for the lower processors in these devices. We predict a split in the mobile games market, which will also be reflected in a two-tier pricing model for smartphones and basic devices,” he says.