Well, yesterday, I was informed by a knowledgeable friend that Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection has been leaked to download sites by pirates, and MK fans have already been spreading the word about it.

Thanks, assholes. Way to prove me right.

What I’m about to say is my own opinion, and not that of Mortal Kombat Online and (definitely) not NetherRealm Studios. The chances of Mortal Kombat coming to PC are non-existent, with the exception of Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection. Even then, the PC version of MKAK has been delayed by several months.

I’ve already seen some of the most common arguments regarding porting Mortal Kombat to PC. One of these arguments is that there’s an online petition with something like 13,000 signatures, showing demand for the game. The problem there is that when it comes to showing demand, online petitions don’t mean much. Anyone can put in a signature, but it doesn’t mean they actually intend to buy the game. A secondary problem is that 13,000 is in fact a pretty small number. By comparison, 732,000 copies of the game were sold in the first week for consoles (reference). I would hazard that if the online petition wanted to be taken seriously, they would need 50-100 times the signatures that they currently have.

Another argument I’ve heard used is the fact that Capcom has released Street Fighter 4 and Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition to PC, and that they’re planning on releasing Street Fighter X Tekken as well. They also claim that the popularity numbers are high for the game, indicating a lot of sales. Unfortunately, they don’t give figures as to the exact number of sales. In addition, it doesn’t take into account just how many sales there were compared to how much the game has been pirated. I’ve heard arguments that the SF4 games on PC have DRM to prevent piracy, but the problem there is that the pirates rather quickly defeated the DRM. I’ve heard stories about how tournaments would use pirated copies of SF4 for PC instead of licensed or console copies.

That said, people would still point to the PC sales and say, “They’re still making money!” The question becomes, “How much money?” If Netherrealm were to release a PC version of Mortal Kombat, they would have to use time and resources (in other words, money) towards porting the game over. If the game’s sales on PC do not cover the cost of porting, then it’s not worth it for them to go through the trouble. Unlike consoles, PC hardware runs the gamut of different manufacturers, drivers, and capabilities. They would have to take all of that into account.

So, one may ask, why was Capcom able to do it? The answer is simple: they already HAD a Windows version. Unlike Mortal Kombat, the Street Fighter 4 games were released for arcades, and the arcade hardware they used was a system called Taito Type X. Instead of using proprietary components, Taito Type X uses PC hardware and runs on Windows XP Embedded. In other words, a very good chunk of the porting had to be done anyway, so what extra they needed to do was covered by the PC sales.

That doesn’t change the fact that the Street Fighter 4 games are very heavily pirated. While it’s true that console games are pirated as well, the barrier for entry for pirating console games in much higher. While any PC can run a pirated PC game, game consoles have to be modified before they can run pirated console games. Modifying console hardware is a risky venture; not only can it ruin your console (rendering it a brick) should something go wrong, the security systems in the console itself will get you banned from online services if the modification is detected. While I’ve heard it said that only paying customers can play Street Fighter 4 online, I personally find that rather doubtful as I’ve not heard of how this is supposedly accomplished outside of a “Kombat Pass” system like Mortal Kombat uses. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve heard that claim and have the reality be that many online players of a game were pirates.

The sad thing is that none of this is really anything new. When I started at MK Online (then called MK5.ORG) back in 2002, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance was in development. We had gotten a lot of people asking if and when MK:DA would be released for PC. So, when I went to E3, I asked a couple of people in Midway’s marketing department if there was a PC version in development. They said that there wasn’t, simply because they had never made any money off of the PC versions. The fact that the game was very heavily pirated became apparent in that respect, because I knew a lot of people with MK games for PC, yet the game never made any money. In addition, at least one person who demanded a PC version in the site’s chat channel inadvertently admitted that the only reason he wanted it was so he could pirate it.

So, in essence, it really comes down to money. NetherRealm and Warner Bros. apparently do not feel that porting Mortal Kombat to PC would be worth the money. While the Street Fighter 4 games are out for PC, they were ported ahead of time for different reasons and as such the comparison is not valid. I’m sure Warner Bros. has already done the research and crunched the numbers, as if there were a true profit to be made we’d be seeing a port. Unfortunately, the petitions have too few signatures, the projected PC sales aren’t high enough, and the piracy would be rampant.

With all of the factors taken into account, there simply isn’t enough of a legal market for the port for the effort to be worth it.

Up until recently, though, I would be found in my office at least part of the evening, as I’d have an urge to browse the net. I would use my phone, but I like to keep it in the kitchen where it charges. I also have a work laptop, but it’s a little unweildy sitting in my lap while I’m in the living room. That was taken care of recently by my mother-in-law, who managed to get us an HP TouchPad. For $150, it was extremely inexpensive yet very functional. Both Jennifer and I use the tablet, and it now comes with us on trips instead of the work laptop.

Also, as Jennifer puts it, “I now see a lot more of Scott in the evening.”

However, while we’ve been very happy with the TouchPad, we have come to realize that there’s one major problem with it. The TouchPad runs webOS, which is HP’s own mobile operating system (which they got when they acquired Palm). While webOS is a nice operating system, with the discontinuation of the TouchPad it is becoming seen as a dead OS. The app support has been slight, and there have been no real additions to the lineup. What I needed most was a remote access app for work purposes, and ended up jury-rigging a proprietary solution.

Obviously we needed something better. Fortunately, a solution presented itself Thursday.

My friend Rigo Cortes posted on Twitter that a new release of CyanogenMod had been released for the TouchPad. Intrigued, I looked into it. CyanogenMod is a community-written third party distribution of Android. The installation process for CyanogenMod looked simple, and kept the original webOS install in place. I asked Rigo, and he assured me that while it was labeled as alpha software, it was still very stable.

So, last night I downloaded the needed software, and I installed it this morning.

How did it go? It turned out to be as easy as I had read. It’s also as stable as Rigo had said. I’ve gotten all sorts of software downloaded that I couldn’t get for webOS, like Fruit Ninja, Netflix, Trillian, and others. I even have remote access software installed. I’ve only used it today, but it’s working great.

So, now I’ve got a much more useful tablet. It’s too bad webOS had to be replaced, as we liked using it. However, app support is much better on Android, and app support is what’s most important. Jennifer gets her Fruit Ninja, and I get my other apps.

We’re both happy campers.

However, the studios have started offering this “new service” for the digital copies that is really annoying me.

I’ve noticed that several movies that featuring a digital copy have a label on the packaging advertising that it is an “Ultraviolet digital copy”. It’s a reference to Ultraviolet, a service by Flixster that sells access to streamed versions of movies, plus allows you to redeem codes for movies you’ve bought. You can watch the movies via the Flixster app on iOS and Android, and there’s also an app (based on Adobe AIR) for PCs as well. Sounds great, right?

In my case, it’s anything but.

The primary reason I have digital copies of movies is because I want to watch them while traveling. As I brought up earlier, I like watching Mortal Kombat when on trips for Mortal Kombat Online. Another example was when I was traveling from Dubai to Houston; I watched the entire The Lord of the Rings film trilogy on the flight. Also, on a drive from New Orleans to Houston, Jennifer and I once watched The Dark Knight. In other words, I mostly watch my digital copies on portable devices. PC playback support, while kind of nice, is less important to me.

There are really three problems here. The first problem is that I like to use iTunes to manage the media on my iPhone. It tells me how much space I have available on the device, so when I’m picking and choosing what movies I want on the phone, I can make accommodations for what I’m willing to remove to make space, like shrinking the music playlists and the like. Furthermore, with the movies on the hard drive, I can simply copy the movies over USB to the phone. With Ultraviolet, while I can copy the media to my devices, I can’t actually copy it to iTunes. I can copy it to my PC, but iTunes will not recognize it as a viewable movie. I can download it straight to my iPhone, but then I have to figure out ahead of time how much space I need to clear. Worse, according to Flixster’s website, I can’t delete the movie afterwards without deleting the entire app first.

The second problem is the one that REALLY irks me. There’s no support at all for the iPod Classic or the HP TouchPad. There isn’t a Flixster app for webOS (and I’m not holding out hope that one will come out), and the iPod Classic doesn’t have net access at all. The iPod Classic is what I bring with me on trips where I don’t know what I’ll want to watch beforehand, as my entire media library will fit on it (as it has a 160 GB hard drive). One might think it’s annoying watching a movie on a screen the size of the iPod Classic’s, but if I’m not sharing with another person, it’s not that bad.

The third problem is that all of this depends on the Flixster and Ultraviolet services being completely in sync. That doesn’t seem to be the case. During the setup process for my account (done while trying to redeem a digital copy of Green Lantern), it set up a Flixster account and asked me for an email address and password for the Ultraviolet account. However, I was never told what the sign in name was for Ultraviolet, and there isn’t a process by which to find out what it is on Ultraviolet’s website. I’ve got a support ticket in, and I hope they can tell me what it is. In addition, the Flixster app for iOS isn’t giving me access to the movies in Ultraviolet. The FAQ on Flixster’s site said that if the Flixster and Ultraviolet accounts are linked, I should have access to the movies. I guess the accounts weren’t linked after all (despite what the setup process said).

All in all, I’m pretty fed up. At least when the movies had iTunes support, all I needed to do was put the code in to iTunes and the movie would simply download to my PC, and work right off. All of these extra hoops I’m having to jump through with extra accounts, new players, and the like do nothing to make things easier for the consumer. It’s crap like this that helps increase piracy, as those people who “do the right thing” get the shaft, and the pirates can get their copies of the movie far more easily and without any of the hassle.

I guess I should just look at the bright side. The worst case scenario for me is that I can take the DVD and use HandBrake to create my own digital copies. Still, it’s frustrating, and I’m going to definitely think twice before buying any film that features an “Ultraviolet” digital copy.

A couple of days after we arrived in the Bahamas, I noticed that I wasn’t receiving email from my main server. A quick check showed that the web services weren’t responding and that the server itself wasn’t responding to pings. I wasn’t too worried; I just figured the system suffered a kernel panic (the Linux equivalent of a BSOD) and needed to be rebooted. I sent an email to the pet sitter asking him to hit the reset button on the server, and left it at that.

A day or so later, he emailed back saying he had done so. I checked, and it was still down. I still wasn’t too concerned, as I figured he probably hit the wrong button. I ended up asking Jennifer’s mom to power cycle the box. After the now-in-laws returned home, I got an email saying she had done so. I checked the server, and I still got nothing. Now I began to worry, thinking a hard drive might have failed.

When we got home, one of the first things I did was check on the server. It was worse than I thought: the system wouldn’t even bring up video. I sighed, and decided to check to see if I had a replacement motherboard. I did, but it was in an old case and wouldn’t come out.

I think it was about at that point that I decided “frak this” and started checking Newegg to see how much a new server would cost. To my surprise, there was an HP Proliant server that fit my needs that only cost $450. I talked to my dad, and he bought it for me with next day delivery (as I host his business email as well, and have done so for years).

We ended up learning a life lesson. When Newegg says “next day delivery”, they mean “delivery the day after the order is processed”. Until now, all of my orders had been processed within two hours. This time, it took two DAYS to process. The end result was that the box arrived on Wednesday instead of Monday. Dad was unhappy, even after Newegg graciously refunded the shipping costs.

As soon as the server arrived, I added a second hard drive (to hold backups), added the users and groups, installed the backup software, and copied the backup archives to the server. Thankfully, the backups restored with no problems. After that I got mail up and running (and was promptly buried under an avalanche of two weeks of undelivered email). Once email was up, I could get everything else up and running.

The new server is pretty nice, too. It’s a lot faster than the old box was (as the old one was using 10 year old hardware), has a smaller case, and it’s far more quiet. The only disadvantage is that I don’t have it set up for RAID, but I don’t need it just yet. Besides, the RAID on the old server caused me issues when I was trying to read the drives from my Windows PC for recovery purposes.

Ah, well. The server, barring some last minor problems, is completely up and running. I’m just thankful the restore (once started) went as quickly as it did, and that the friends who do secondary MX for me were so willing to accommodate having two weeks worth of queued mail on their servers.

For the past several years, I’ve been using GnuPG to cryptographically sign all of my outgoing email. The digital signature was attached to every outgoing message, as a way of verifying that I was the one who originally wrote the message. Adding GnuPG support to my emails wasn’t hard; mutt had GnuPG support built-in, while Mozilla Thunderbird could get support via the Enigmail extension. However, after using it for several years, I decided this weekend to stop automatically signing all outgoing email.

The first reason for doing so is the fact that for a couple of years now, I’ve been accessing my email via my iPhone. It doesn’t support GnuPG or any sort of PGP natively, so of course I wouldn’t be able to send out signed emails. The second – and more important – reason is the fact that really… outside of me, no one cares. Most people I know use either a webmail of some sorts or Outlook to access their email, so to them my digital signature looks like a weird text attachment. They pretty much figure the message must have come from me anyway, and aren’t concerned about it. Also, most (if not all) emails aren’t even important enough to worry about signing; I’d been signing my emails pretty much out of sheer habit. For the most part, there isn’t anything that would require me to later on prove that I actually sent it.

So, I’ve decided to stop digitally signing my emails, so those friends of mine I do send emails to won’t have to wonder about those weird text attachments on them. For the most part, I’m sure they won’t care, and I really am not going to lose any sleep over it.

Though, I will admit, it’ll be nice not having to type in the encryption passphrase with every email sent anymore.

My main server uses AMANDA to back up its data. When I first bought the machine that would become my main server, it had an HP DDS3 12/24 GB tape drive installed. I managed to acquire a set of DDS3 tapes, researched tape backup software (and eventually settled on AMANDA), and got a system up and running. It ran pretty well for several years, but a while ago, I came to a bit of a realization: I was storing the tapes right next to the server. If anything happened that would knock out the server, there’s also a chance the tapes would be affected. That wouldn’t be good. In addition, when I’m on vacation, I can’t ask people housesitting to change the tapes for me. In other words, there are going to be points where backups would not get done. That definitely needed to change.

Fortunately, I had been doing some research, and the latest versions of AMANDA supported using “virtual tapes” on a hard drive. A friend of mine had a spare hard disk he was no longer using and donated to the cause (thanks Mike!), so I installed it in the server, upgraded AMANDA, and set up the virtual tapes on the new hard drive. It took a couple of false starts, but eventually I got the backups working properly. That solved the problem of swapping tapes.

Of course, the fact that the hard drive with the backups is on the same server as the actual data doesn’t solve the backup location problem. Fortunately, a friend of mine out of state was willing to let me mirror the data on his own server. I just wrote a replication script, and once that was in place, the AMANDA data and virtual tapes got copied over to his server every morning. The only downfall I had there was that I had originally used rdist to handle replication, and rdist will not copy files larger than 2 GB. I ended up switching over to rsync for that.

Of course, the other system I need to back up regularly is my main desktop PC. Until sometime this year, I used Microsoft’s SyncToy to back up my most important data on it (namely, my media collection) to a network location. However, while at MicroCenter a few months back, I saw that they were selling docks for internal hard drives. The dock plugs into your PC via either USB or eSATA (SATA for external drives), and you take an internal SATA hard drive and plug it into the dock like a video game cartridge. I bought a dock and plugged it into my PC using eSATA. I then took a spare 320 GB hard drive I had laying about, and put it in the dock. From there, I set Windows Backup to backup my data to the drive. It was simple and effective, really.

However, once I got the server’s offsite backups done, I realized I pretty much should do the same with my main PC. I resolved then to just take the backup drive to work and leave it there during the work week. However, as I said before, I tend to be anal. In this case, I wouldn’t want the data on that drive to be accessible to people at the office. I’m not saying I don’t trust my coworkers, mind you. However, it’s my nature to make sure all avenues are closed. So, I decided to put a TrueCrypt file container on the drive big enough to take up all of the disk space, and put the backup in there.

However, I encountered two problems. The first was the fact that due to the nature of how Windows 7 does backups, if I moved the backup, all of the previous file versions would be lost. I really didn’t need the previous versions anyway, so I figured “what the hell” and blew away the backup to start fresh. The second problem was the one that really irked me: Windows Backup does not recognize TrueCrypt volumes mounted as drives as legitimate backup locations. After brainstorming for a bit, I finally decided to share the TrueCrypt volume over the network, and told Windows Backup to connect to it that way. Once I did that, backups were running fine…

… or they would have been, had I remembered that one of the directories being backed up had a 200 GB VHD file in it that I didn’t really need backing up. Oops.

Once that was taken care of, though, the backup worked perfectly. I’ll be taking the drive to the office with me tomorrow morning, and it’ll stay there until the next backup needs to be run.

All in all, though, I’m happy. My data is being backed up, and in both cases it’s being stored off-site where if anything happens to the original machines, the data itself will be safe elsewhere. I realize many will consider what I did going a little overboard, but then I’m an IT geek. That’s kind of what I do. It’s good practice, and I highly recommend everyone make sure they backup their data… even if it’s just to an external hard drive.

Last night, Jennifer and I went and met some of her coworkers for dinner. On the way back, she needed to stop for gas. While I waited by her car, she went in to pay. When she stepped out, she had an odd expression on her face. When I asked her what was wrong, she looked at me and told me that when she walked in and asked to put money on the pump, the cashier replied with, “You are very beautiful.” She was thrown and didn’t expect that, and asked him to repeat it as she wasn’t sure she heard him right. He repeated what he said, and asked, “When will we be having dinner?” Jennifer just looked at him, and said, “Well, I’m not sure that’ll be cool with my fiancé, who’s right outside…” He replied, “Tell him he is a very lucky man.”

If that wasn’t bad enough, after she had pumped her gas and we had left, she called me (we were in separate cars) and told me that as she was telling me the story, she looked into the store and the cashier was looking at her and making motions implying she should call him. What the hell?

Listen, folks. If someone says she’s unavailable, she’s unavailable. Don’t annoy them or their significant others.

How do you like your barbecue? TOASTY!

TeeFury’s shirt design for today (and only available today) is just awesome. I’m definitely planning on wearing it next time we have a cookout at the house. I’ll let the design speak for itself.

Broken phone? You have a cheap option.

I was talking to Scott Howell earlier, and he mentioned that he had broken the touch screen on his cell phone. Worse, he isn’t eligible for an upgrade until July. Fortunately, though, he uses AT&T, which is a GSM provider. I had originally planned on asking my dad to send a spare phone to him to tide him over, but my dad had a much better idea: buy a cheap prepaid phone and use that. Scott researched it, and ended up buying a cheap GoPhone at Walmart for $11. I guess the GoPhones are unlocked; he put his AT&T SIM card in it, and it worked fine. Now he has a phone to tide him over until July, when he can get a nice phone.

So, if you’re on a GSM provider (AT&T or T-Mobile, for example) and need a replacement cheap phone, just get yourself a GoPhone and you should be fine.

She’s been very supportive of the fact that I’m into gaming. She’s been willing to come out to Dave & Buster’s with me whenever I’ve had an itch to go, for example. Then again, it gives her an excuse to play some Time Crisis 4, which is her favorite arcade game. She also lets me know when she hears about arcade conventions coming into town, and comes out with me.

Yesterday was another example of that. She received an email alerting her that Stern was having a release party for their new The Rolling Stones pinball machine, and the Houston one would be at Joystix. Seeing as we had nothing else going last night, we decided to go out there. While on their normal “Pac-Man Fever Fridays” the whole showroom was available to play, only the middle showroom was available this time around. I entered the tournament they had for The Rolling Stones; the objective in the first round was to hit twelve million points in as few balls as possible, and you had three tries to do it in. On my first try I did it in four; it would have been three had my third ball not gone into the right drain almost immediately. Unfortunately, by the time I got to my second try, enough people had done it in three that I had to do it in three balls or I would be eliminated. I didn’t manage it. It was fine, though; considering the other people in the tourney played a lot and I don’t get to play pinball too often outside of emulators, I was happy I did as well as I did.

The thing is, for various reasons, I’ve been getting a nostalgia for old arcade games. My home office is an extension of my geekiness, so to speak, as I have framed posters and other memorabilia set up around it. For example, I have two Mortal Kombat II posters in my office. A couple of weeks ago, though, I was browsing around on the net and found a movie type poster for the game Dragon’s Lair (as seen on the right). I went ahead and picked one up, and this weekend I will be seeing if I can get a 27″x40″ frame for it. It’ll be replacing one of the two Mortal Kombat II posters.

However, what I would really like to have is an arcade machine or pinball machine in the house. I admit I’m a little jealous of my friend Eric, who not only has Ms. Pac-Man and Scramble machines, he has an old Pinball Wizard pinball machine. The problem, though, is that I almost literally have no place to put a machine. As it stands, about the only kind of machine I could reasonably put in the house is a cocktail table machine, as it could double as actual furniture. If it were available, too, I’d love to get one of the pseudo-arcade cabinets NetherRealm Studios made for the new Mortal Kombat game. Unfortunately, I don’t have the money available for it, and if I did I wouldn’t have a place to put it.

Ah, well. It’s a nice thought to have an arcade machine or a pinball machine (preferably Doctor Who or Bram Stoker’s Dracula), but we have more important expenses to worry about right now. For now, I’ll content myself with Pac-Man Fever Fridays, Dave & Busters, and the occasional Game Night at Eric’s house.

It’s happened. Former Microsoft exec and current Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has married his future and his past in the holy matrimony of a “strategic alliance.” Windows Phone is becoming Nokia’s “principal smartphone strategy,” but there’s a lot more to this hookup…

Well, I could say I was surprised, but I wouldn’t be telling the truth.

Something had been troubling me for a while now regarding Nokia, and it only just occurred to me what it was yesterday. Don’t get me wrong; I used to really like their phones. I’ve had a 5210, a 3390, and a 3650 in the past. However, for all of their domination in the “dumbphone” market in the United States and abroad, they never seem to go anywhere in the smartphone market. I’ve heard people on Slashdot and other tech sites talk about how much they loved their N900 phones, but when it came to people I knew in person who used smartphones, it was always Blackberry, iPhone, Android, or Windows Mobile. I never knew anyone who used Nokia phones. Then yesterday, in a Slashdot discussion about the merger, I saw a couple of people mention how much they liked Nokia’s E71.

It hit me then. Nokia’s smartphones are very geek-friendly, but ONLY geek friendly.

The reason the E71 made me realize it is more of a personal one. A year or two ago, in an effort to try and save money on smartphones at my old job (as we were handing them out more and more), I did a bit of research and found the most cost-effective one was the Nokia E71x. It had full Exchange support, which was our primary requirement. So, we started handing them out to users.

In the end, we stopped after a few months. Why, you may ask? It’s simple: the users HATED them.

The company I worked for was not a tech firm. It was a company that manufactured oilfield equipment, so the users were much more often than not non-tech savvy. The phone interface was confusing them, and as a result it was extremely difficult for them to get the phones to do what they wanted them to do. It was also extremely confusing for us to troubleshoot, as the menus didn’t make any sort of logical sense to us either, especially when previously dealing with phones like Windows Mobile or Blackberry. We got numerous complaints about the devices, and in the end they were phased out.

Around that same time, my parents went and got new phones, and without consulting me they got E71x devices as well. Mom is (and has been) ambivalent about them; she doesn’t care about the phone one way or another, and probably would like a better interface, but she likes that she can get photos off it via free software on her PC (unlike her old Motorola phone) and she likes the QWERTY keyboard for texting. Dad, on the other hand, LOATHED the phone, to the point where his brother did him a favor and sent him an unlocked RAZR to use instead. Dad can’t get pictures off it easily, but he considers it a small price to pay for not having to deal with the E71x anymore.

I know people around have been saying Symbian et al were very powerful phone OSes, but the problem is that Nokia wasn’t going anywhere in the US in the smartphone market. Everyone I know hated the interface, and while I know the plural of anecdote isn’t data, it would not surprise me if a lot of people across the board felt the same way. It doesn’t matter how powerful or versatile your phone OS is if it’s difficult to use. That’s why I can easily see Nokia having partnered with Microsoft in this venture: say what you want about Windows Phone/Mobile, but it has a much more logical and usable interface than Nokia did. If Nokia wants to be taken seriously in the business world, then they need a much more friendly OS for their phones.

After all, while geeks care about power and versatility, the lay users care more about whether it works easily and efficiently. In the end, it’s the lay users that end up driving the market.