Posted by lorentey on 2010-03-01
Get your heads wrapped around this: the Sony PlayStation 3 seems to have a teeny-tiny firmware problem that disables everything that you’ve ever purchased for it on 1st of March 2010, with the following cute error message:
The copyright protection information is invalid.
(80029513)
The bug also happens to reset the system clock to 2000-01-01. Do you smell someone getting fired for writing buggy leap year code?
I got hit by this when I turned on my PS3 for a quick round of Critter Crunch before going to sleep. I was ready to start finding out which circle of hell Sony’s support was like in this country when suddenly Twitter and Google blew up with a torrent of complaining users. (By the way, this was the first time Twitter has actually been useful for anything practical for me.)
I wonder what it’d be like to be working for Sony Support this morning. This kind of PR disaster can ruin all that goodwill they worked so hard to gain this past year.
Seriously, what the f$%*& is wrong with console makers?
Update: This is so fucked up. It may take a day or two to fix the issue: Sony’s programmers will probably find & fix the bug immediately, but they’ll have to carefully test the new firmware image which takes some time even in this kind of extreme emergency. Meanwhile, some 20 million PS3 Phats remain essentially bricked. There will be riots!
Update: The issue has resolved itself after one day. It also turns out that Sony employs a number of support people in Hungary, and not only do they actually know what a PlayStation is, but they even try to be reasonably helpful — I fired off an email about the problem, and they answered with a link to the EU PlayStation blog within 30 hours.
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Posted by lorentey on 2010-01-31
My stupid little six years old idea is now a Logitech product on the iPhone.
My original implementation on ancient Palm PDAs/smartphones emulated a standard Bluetooth peripheral and it did not need special software running on the computer — similar apps on the iPhone work over WiFi and require starting up special server programs. This is to be expected, since Palm supported third-party applications accessing the Bluetooth radio (they even provided a reasonably convenient & full-featured API for it), while Apple does not. This is, at the end, a good thing: there is a limit to what an Apple-blessed app can do to an iPhone. Buggy Palm applications could and did frequently crash the device. There was a proliferation of third-party hacks that hooked into system internals and changed essential system behaviour, invariably destabilizing it. The Treo was a great toy, but a horrible phone — I had to reset it multiple times per day and learned not to rely on it for anything important. I can’t even remember when I last rebooted my iPhone.
The royalty checks I received for BlueRemote over all these years have paid back the price of the development kit (i.e., my Tungsten T2 and Treo 650), with perhaps just a little extra. I believe this was considered a success back then, considering that I did not do any marketing whatsoever. BlueRemote’s price was $14, with (AFAICR) 60% going to Motricity’s pockets. For contrast, the going price for similar software in the App Store is 1$, with 70% going to the developer. (The Logitech app is for promoting their hardware, so it’s free.) The fact that it still seems worthwhile for one-man teams to produce software for 0.7$ a pop is a testament to the App Store’s success.
Once in a while, I still get an email complaining that BlueRemote does not work on the lastest generation of Palm OS devices, with their fancy new Bluetooth chips. It would be mildly amusing to fix this at some point and release an update.
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Posted by lorentey on 2010-01-30
FYI, a last.fm szerint ezeket az előadókat hallgattam 2009-ben:
Ugyanez hónapokra lebontva:
Végezetül itt egy montázs a legtöbbet hallgatott előadóimmal 2004 és 2010 között: (eredetileg ez egy szép, klikkelhető image map volt, de a szuper-duper wordpress.com-nak kiütése lesz az ilyen modern HTML fogásoktól.)
Hát nem lebilincselő diagramok? Jól látható, hogy szeretem, ha őszülő, hosszú hajú férfiak duruzsolnak a fülembe! (Mellesleg fogalmam sem volt, hogy olyan sok Stephen Lynchet hallgatok, hogy már a top 20-be is bekerült — megyek, le is törlöm a telefonomról.)
A lejátszások számára alapuló statisztikák egyébként egy kicsit félrevezetőek, mert már évek óta sokkal több időt töltök podcastek hallgatásával, mint zenével.
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Posted by lorentey on 2010-01-29
A legutóbbi bnapló-bejegyzésemben megfogalmazott problémámat Miklósi Gábor bőbeszédűbben is megírta az Indexen. Minden szava arany, bár aránytalanul sokat foglalkozik egy „SZDSZ” nevű párttal, ami csak valami szarkasztikus indexes poén lehet.
Egyik magyar pártra sem lehet jó szívvel szavazni. Nincs legkisebb rossz. És az a leginkább borzasztó, hogy a kampány csak most kezdődik: ennél már csak lejjebb süllyedhetnek.
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Posted by lorentey on 2010-01-27
Posted in garancialevél | 6 Comments »
