heatbasketball.org

According to a story in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, EA has decided to shutter production of the new first-person shooter, citing quality issues.

For fans of the Electronic Arts franchise Command and Conquer looking forward to the spinoff game, Tiberium, I’m afraid I have some bad news.

And that’s because one of the reasons the company has seen quarterly losses piling up is a sense in the marketplace that its games have stagnated a bit. Of course, it has its regular stable of big hits like Madden football and FIFA soccer, and new games like Spore. But one big criticism of the company over the last few years is that it has relied too much on low-quality franchise games that have ceased to get the faithful worked up.

In a recent interview, EA Games label president Frank Gibeau told me that, “We (had) lost faith with our customers because we were churning out games that might have made sense from a financial standpoint, but frankly we had walked away from the art of making games and offering breakthrough creative experiences. There weren’t as many games in our lineup that I wanted to play anymore.”

Tiberium was “not on track to meet the high quality standards” EA sets for its games, a spokesperson told the Journal. “A lower quality game is not in the best interest of the consumers and would not succeed in this market.”

The Journal article calls the move a setback for EA, saying the company “has been working to turn itself around under (CEO) John Riccitiello (who) has made moves to help boost the game publisher’s growth and lower development costs that have contributed to six straight quarters of loss.”

Tiberium was a new game, but it was a spinoff of the Command and Conquer series, and so I suspect that the quality bar for it was very high. So I think it’s good to see EA realize that it’s better to lose a year’s worth of development time than to keep throwing good money after bad, especially on a game that was not an entirely new experience.

But to me, I think it’s a good move by EA to yank the cord on games it sees as sub-standard. To be sure, it would have been better for the company to have Tiberium be a big commercial hit; short of that, however, it shows a bit of maturity on the part of management to make the decision to cut short development of sub-standard games that would, in the end, water down its brand.

Hopefully, the design team behind the game can now put their energies and efforts to work on something new that will excite them, the company as a whole, and the market down the line.

• More Street View with more privacy: One year into Google’s launch of the Google Maps feature to show a driver’s-eye view of the world, Google added 37 new cities, including Atlanta, Buffalo, N.Y., Ann Arbor, Mich., Fresno, Calif., and Cincinnati. It effectively doubles the coverage of Street View, engineer Jiajun Zhu said in a Google LatLong blog posting.

Google Street View now blurs all over, not just in Manhattan.

(Credit:
Google)

• Updated Trends. Google added two new abilities to make its Google Trends service more useful as a tool to monitor what’s popular in searches and the chatter of news and blogs. First is a quantitative element that more precisely compares different search terms–for example Windows XP vs. Windows Vista; the chart is now calibrated so the relative popularity can be judged. Second is the ability to export Trends results as a data file.

• PDF support in Docs: The Google Operating System blog has uncovered some evidence that points to support of Portable Document Format within Google Docs, the online applications suite. That makes sense given how widely used it is and that it’s an openly documented and now standard format.

• Bypass Flash. On search results, Google now lets users bypass Web pages’ Flash introductions–the kind of whiz-bang animations that rarely are worth watching more than once. Google search results now can let users, in effect, click the “skip intro” button on such sites if they want, Google Blogoscoped reported.

• Members of Google’s mobile device team discuss how its Google Maps for Mobile service (think GPS Lite) works. The technology lets some phones figure out their rough location based on proximity to cell phone towers. It’s available through Gears for Windows Mobile, and Google is adding support for geolocation in general to the new 0.4 version of Gears under development now.

• Journalism on YouTube: The Google video-sharing site now is able to call specific attention to journalistic efforts by creating a new “reporter” channel, according to the YouTube blog.

It’s tough to stay on top of Google, but I thought I’d draw some attention to some developments involving the search powerhouse.

• WordPress snafu: Google blocked e-mail sent to Gmail from WordPress.com on Wednesday, including notifications that blogs at the site had been updated. “A handful of third-party sites had problems sending email to Gmail users. We resolved the issue within a half hour of discovering it,” Google said in a statement.

In addition, Street View face-blurring technology that first was tried with Manhattan imagery now is deployed all over, Google said.

(via PC Magazine)

The software relies on a technique called “virtual browsing” to protect your PC against unauthorized downloads, malware installations, phishers, keyloggers, and the like. It also promises total privacy by erasing the (virtual) browser’s cache, cookies, history, and passwords. According to Check Point, the program won’t interfere with any existing security software you might already have.

Note: The above promo video is fairly amusing, but it has segments that are NSFW.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

I haven’t tried ForceField yet, and I tend to think my browser (Firefox 3) already provides pretty solid protection from Web threats. But, hey, it’s a one-day-only freebie, and you know me: I’m all about the freebies.

ZoneAlarm ForceField is a new security utility that promises bulletproof protection against browser-related threats. It normally sells for $29.95, but Check Point Software is offering it absolutely free, today only, as part of a Patch Tuesday promotion.

Solar-powered case for iPhone 3G–Mobile Fun
Looks cool, but won’t it make the device really hot?
Clean tech: One sector is bucking global economic blues–WSJ.com
New numbers show big solar and second-generation biofuels still getting the most money. Dark clouds are the iffy IPO market and a potential drop in oil prices.
National labs help DOE strive for zero-net energy commercial buildings–GreenBiz.com
Putting more meat into the goal of having zero-net buildings by 2025.
The 10 wackiest Greentech ideas–Greentech Media
This is how you know we’re in a period of creative foment.
Hybrids gain a voice–Greentech Media
Lotus Engineering finds a way to make hybrids noisier, which may become a divisive issue.
Nissan’s Eco Pedal pushes for better mileage–Earth2Tech

In tandem with new car announcements, Nissan said it will have Eco Pedal feature in
cars in 2009, which shows drivers how to drive more fuel efficiently.
Paris Hilton responds to McCain ad–Funny or Die
Poolside Paris Hilton creates a hybrid of John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s energy policies.
Better batteries charge up–Technology Review
A reality check on EEStor, which claims a breakthrough in energy storage. It already has electric car maker Zenn and Lockheed-Martin as potential customers.

(Credit:
Mobile Fun)

The greenest laptop computers–MetaEfficient Reviews
It also listed the greenest desktop PCs this week.
Suniva and Solon announce supply contract worth more than $500 million–press release
Big endorsement of solar start-up Suniva, which was spun off from Georgia Tech earlier this year.

A sampling of
green-tech news with quick commentary.

Most of the software in the world is written by enterprises that never intend to sell it. They write it for internal use.

This is what open source should be about: not petty bickering, but rather solving big problems with a collaborative approach. Cohen recognized while heading up OSDL that collaboration needs a coordination point, which CSI is providing to Utah and to a growing number of other organizations (as yet unannounced, but I know from talking with him and from elsewhere that they’re in process).

Stuart Cohen at Grand Central Station in New York.

Think of how much money organizations could save by pooling resources, and how much better software would be.

At least, that’s the promise. It starts with one state. Where it goes next is what CSI (and open source) is all about. According to CSI’s statement:

The system and database are sitting on servers managed by Utah’s Department of Technology Services and are accessible to all of the state’s health departments.

More than 100 people are contributing to the project. The core team consists of 15 members, including doctors, nurses, epidemiologists, and IT managers in Utah. The open-source software being used to build it includes Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Server, PostgreSQL, Apache HTTP Server, Apache Tomcat, Java, and JRuby.

Think of all the good that would come by sharing that code between enterprises with similar needs. Think long enough and you’ll come up with Stuart Cohen’s Collaborative Software Initiative (CSI).

(Credit:
Matt Asay)

CSI hit the news this week for some intriguing work with the state of Utah, which promises to deliver the world’s first open-source infectious disease management system and break down the walls between enterprises to introduce a new era of sharing code.

commentary

The disease management system, which is being piloted in Utah this month, will be adaptable in all 50 states and available under an open-source license later this year. It is designed to support local health departments in the detection and investigation of individual cases and local clusters, while simultaneously meeting the state and federal needs of outbreak control, disease surveillance and epidemiologic research.

Now imagine reading “Moby Dick” in 140-character chunks while you are talking on the phone and glancing at YouTube videos.

The generation brought up on the Web communicates in short bursts, with instant messaging and SMS, continuously multitasks and consumes information in smaller chunks. The capability to read or write narratives longer than a typical e-mail message is diminishing. Information processing for humans is becoming more machine-like, processing massive amounts of loosely coupled data bits, as machines start to mimic some of the brain’s more sophisticated pattern recognition features.

And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

As Matyszczyk suggests, spending a day each week unhooked from the Web could be liberating.

Nick Carr has come up with good thought food in an Atlantic Monthly article titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” While the title is excessively tantalizing (Carr also penned the supercharged “IT Doesn’t Matter” for the Harvard Business Review in 2003), with “Google” and “stupid” separated by a few words, Carr explores how the flood of data flowing across the network is wreaking havoc with media consumption habits:

Google and other services excel in the machine processing of billions of bits of data at high speed. The human brain is a high-speed processing organ, and the intersection with the Net is altering neural patterns.

In his CNET blog “Technically Incorrect,” Chris Matyszczyk has some advice for Carr–a 10-step program to save Nick Carr’s brain that has five steps to help avoid becoming a “pancake person,” spread too wide and thin by the Internet firehose.

Then there was the related flap last fall about Fox News complaining about McCain using a video clip from a Fox News-sponsored debate.

John McCain’s presidential campaign is protesting YouTube’s video-removal policy, which has resulted in the deletion of some political advertisements the campaign believes are perfectly legal and protected by fair use.

The letter cited “numerous” examples, without listing them. One would likely be CBS News’ successful DMCA takedown request to YouTube over the McCain campaign’s lipstick-on-a-pig ad. It used a brief video clip featuring CBS News anchor Katie Couric to make a point about sexism. (Disclaimer: CNET is published by CBS Networks, home of CBS News.)

But more broadly, the campaign has a point; YouTube seems a bit too eager to remove political videos. The McCain camp’s solution is to ask for a “full legal review” of videos posted by political candidates and campaigns before they’re automatically removed. Another solution? If you don’t like the neighborhood, move. Nobody’s forcing them to stick with YouTube.

Legally speaking, McCain can’t force the Google-owned video site to host his videos; among other things, the terms of service says “YouTube reserves the right to discontinue any aspect of the YouTube Web site at any time.”

In a letter (PDF) sent to YouTube CEO Chad Hurley and company attorneys on Monday, the campaign charges that “our advertisements or Web videos have been the subject of DMCA takedown notices regarding uses that are clearly privileged under the fair use doctrine.” The DMCA is, of course, the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act that allows copyright holders to submit takedown notices.