At the end of my last post I was waiting to be contacted by a woman from billing about the problems with my service. She did eventually call me, and I did receive a credit on my account to offset the issues I had been having. They never got my service working properly however.

The local Comcast manager ended up contacting me. It was pretty funny because as I started explaining my issues and mentioned that he was calling me because a blog post I had written got read by some Comcast VP he told me “I know about the post, I have it up on my computer right here.” In case you haven’t read the previous post, it is a bit of a sarcastic rant on Comcast. You know, the kind of rant that you’d rather not have a Comcast employee read while they are talking to you.

He ended up trying to do some tests and was convinced I must have a signal problem. A technician came out to check things out and lo-and-behold my signal was fine. I can’t remember all of the different tests that were run, but eventually I just gave up because I was leaving in two weeks. When this all started I had three months left until I was moving out of Indiana. Apparently that wasn’t enough time for Comcast to deliver the service I paid for.

After my own experiences I can’t say I was surprised at all to see more news coming out about Comcast’s atrocious customer service. I know that fixing my problems had to be a pretty high priority considering that I had a VP at Comcast emailing me about it. That is what makes it so bad, it was a high priority and they couldn’t even fix it. They couldn’t even figure out what the problem was actually. You know that those cheeky DirecTV commercials are aimed right at Comcast.

Money and Self-Preservation

Of course the reason Mozilla doesn’t make you choose a search engine (like Internet Explorer does) is because if they did, they’d lose almost all of their revenues. Mozilla’s number one (and nearly only) source of revenue is an advertising revenue sharing program it has with Google. Of course Internet Explorer used to default to MSN Search, but they were forced to ask users after companies like Google started suing them over it.

Corporations are just like people; they are extremely interested in their own self-preservation (read: money, for corporations). It is easy for Google and Mozilla to talk about building an “open web platform” when that is in their best interests. You can see that they aren’t always for openness and choice, though.

Case in point, Google sued Microsoft because Windows Vista’s search can only use Microsoft’s own built-in search (Service Pack 1 changed that because of the lawsuit), but does Gmail let you use a different search? Nope. Does Google Talk natively support any other IM networks? Nope. Does Google Earth allow third-party search results? Nope. But I thought they were all about choice and openness?

Mozilla doesn’t even list Live Search (which I recently switched to and actually prefer now) as an option. If they were truly for openness then surely the number three web search would be included above “Creative Commons” (who knows why that is there) right? Firefox also makes itself the default web browser when you install it; again Internet Explorer makes you choose.

I’m not saying Google and Mozilla are the devil, just that their motives are the same as Microsoft. In truth, it could be argued that Microsoft’s products are now more open to choice than either of these other companies. Google is at the stage where they are following all of the big bad anti-competitive things (exclusive OEM deals, suing companies to damage their products, etc) that Microsoft used to do.

When companies are still new and small(ish) it is easy to say you are truly for openness and the consumer. But as soon as they are established at all, the game changes. Firefox came out nearly four years ago, and no matter how plucky Mozilla tries to act, there are a lot of people who only truly care about protecting their jobs and the core product of the company they work for. If that means ensuring a Google (their #1 customer) search engine monopoly, then so be it.

Honestly, I wish everyone would stop suing and just compete on the quality of their software. One of the main weaknesses of Vista versus Mac OS X is that it would be illegal for Vista to have that level of integration. Everywhere you turn in Vista it has to ask you which search engine you’d like to use, what music store, or if you want Windows Media Player to be your default music program. Do you ever see that in OS X? Nope.

I know this will seem like another “me too” post after the well publicized Comcast story at TechCrunch, but I actually wrote about 95% of this a couple of weeks ago, mostly while I was on hold with “tech” “support.” I was going to wait until the issue was resolved, but I’ve decided to post it now. This is my story of how Comcast took over the cable services of my lowly regional cable provider, and how bad things can get worse. Read the rest after the jump.

I am currently attending grad school at Purdue University, which is located in the relatively small town/city of West Lafayette, Indiana. When I first moved here the cable provider was Insight, and I thought they were terrible (relative to my last cable company Cox). Latency (ping times) were high, channel selection and quality of service (bad picture, dropped sound, extra-crappy DVR) were a joke, and the prices weren’t great. I did however get close (~95%) to the advertised throughput of the Internet package (10Mbit/1Mbit) I paid for.

That changed when Insight sold the Indiana area to Comcast. Initially I was looking forward to a bit larger company hoping the selection and quality of service would improve; it didn’t. Literally the day Comcast took over the network (as shown by the IP address range and DNS servers I was pulling down) my max download speed dropped to 4,250 kbit/sec (less than half the speed of what I was paying for).

I could test at a variety of sites (Chicago, New York, Dallas, etc.) over different networks (Sprint, Speakeasy, etc.), and they would always max out at 4,250kbit/sec usually within a 6kbit/sec variance. Look like my connection is being capped? Yeah, that’s my hypothesis. Oh, and FYI, I don’t use any P2P; I actually buy my music (shock!).

When I first noticed the problem, I tried calling Comcast. Their system would try to transfer me to a customer service representative (CSR) for about 30 seconds and then just tell me that they were all busy, try again later, click. I couldn’t believe it would just hang up on me. So I tried it a few more times and it happened every time, even if I requested cable TV support instead, even the next day.

It was after this that I went to Comcast’s website and filed a complaint. It is worth noting that their feedback form says it sends an e-mail to “Rick Germano – SVP Customer Operations, Comcast.” I left a brief complaint basically stating what had happened and that I’m not happy with it.

After a day or two, I got a phone call from a “local” (they left the local number, but it just went to the same system as the 800 number) Comcast employee. She sounded like her short-term job security depended on taking care of my issue. Unfortunately she called in the middle of the day, so obviously I wasn’t home. When I would get home, however, their call center would already be closed. They called two other times (yeah, still in the middle of the day) and left messages.

Finally, they sent me a letter saying that if I didn’t call within the next two or three days that they were going to consider the matter rectified. I don’t know how they really thought anything could be rectified, as I still hadn’t been able to talk to a single Comcast employee.

The next day I made a point of getting home early to call Comcast so that my issue wouldn’t get swept under the rug. What happened next really surprised me. I encountered the two least qualified IT people I have ever dealt with, literally. As a very competent network guy, I’m used to knowing more about the problem than the first line support, but this was a new low.

The first “tech” would interrupt me every time I said something because she heard a slight echo. The first time was fine, after the twentieth time I was losing my patience. She would not check anything out on my connection unless I first:

1. Plugged straight into my cable modem
2. Turn off my firewall
3. Clear my browser cookies (yeah…seriously…those cookies can drop your speed by 60% or more…)

She said that I wouldn’t get my rated speed if I had a firewall on. You know, because modern dual-core CPUs can’t handle a 10Mbit/sec connection through a firewall, right?

To top it off, as I use VoIP for my “home” phone service (which I was using for the tech support call), I would have to use my cell phone. Problem is, they can’t call out, so I had to call back in and wait on hold to get another technician.

Before I ended the call she asked me if it was raining, because that could affect the speeds. I told her it was perfect blue skies outside. Then she asked if it had rained at all lately to which I replied that it is Indiana, it rains at least once a week. So she said that was probably the problem. <sarcasm>That explains why the Internet is always so slow in Seattle.</sarcasm>

So I called back in, and the second “tech” asked me which site I had performed my speed tests on (dslreports.com, flash and java versions). He then went to the site to run a speed test. He didn’t want his speed though, he was trying to check my connection’s speed through dslreports. He was completely puzzled that it kept returning the speed of his connection.

He actually couldn’t run any tests basically. He could see it was connected and that was about it. He told me that a technician would need to come out to check the wiring outside, and that the soonest they could schedule me for was in a week-and-a-half.

I’m moving in about 6 weeks, and I’m about 95% sure it isn’t the wiring outside, so it would just be a week-and-a-half delay to finding the real solution. I told him to forget it, I would just downgrade my service so that I at least wasn’t paying extra anymore.

These two people were by far the least qualified “tech” “support” people I have ever encountered (even worse that my worst Dell experience). And before you jump on the “India Tech Support” crap, realize that these people were all American.

I want to make it really clear that both reps acted like they really wanted to help me, but they were completely incompetent. It really was a lot like when a two-year-old wants to help you cook in the kitchen. I don’t blame them for their failings however, I blame whoever hired them. My mom could give me equally good bad good bad good (read: bad) tech support tips, no joke.

After waiting for about ten minutes, I finally got transferred to someone in billing who could downgrade my service. When I explained why I was downgrading (incompetent techs can’t fix my connection) and explained some of the “techs” actions, she was completely dumb-founded. She said she doesn’t know anything about computers, but even she knew you can’t do a speed test of someone else’s computer via a website like dslreports.com.

Turns out there is a 6Mbit/sec down 1-2Mbit/sec up package that would cost me $15 less per month. As the uplink is still good (my uplink gets maxed out a lot between online gaming, VoIP, Orb, Foldershare, FTP, XMPP, and Mozy), I decided I would switch. She told me it would probably take 15 minutes to become active and after that I would need to power-cycle my cable modem.

She called me back (apparently billing can call out?) about an hour later to inform me that she looked into things further, and my issue had to be escalated. There was some problem with “the codes” for my account or something. It sounded like my account never got provisioned for the right service level (which is what I suspected all along). She said she would call me back in a week to see how things were (which didn’t happen). With the exception of her not following up a week later, she was the only helpful and qualified person I dealt with.

I mentioned my issues in the post about Comcast rewarding you if you publicly complain and two Comcast employees made comments and one has contacted me via e-mail. I’ll do a follow-up post on the outcome.

UPDATE: Here is my follow-up post.

For all the Vista users out there, I recently stumbled across an awesome program for the Vista Sidebar. It is called Amnesty Generator, and basically it will take the code for any web widget (think Google Gadgets, ESPN, etc) and turn it into a Vista Sidebar compatible gadget. It is a simple program, but works great; I use it to display the NBA.com live sports scores on my desktop. Check it out. There is also a Mac OS X version, but I have not used it.

Next up on the block is Nintendo’s forthcoming Mario Kart release for the Wii. Forget Zelda or Metroid, Mario Kart may be the most important franchise Nintendo has made in the last decade or two. All three people Everyone who had a N64 or Gamecube had Mario Kart; it is probably the only game I really played on Gamecube. It single handedly kept Nintendo in the console business, IMHO.

The formula is simple, easy and fun racing antics for you and your friends. Really it is about playing with others and yelling at them when they use a power-up on you. “Damn you Carl! That was the luckiest turtle shell ever!” The problem is that Mario Kart for Wii will not have voice support for online play (of course you can still taunt in person :)).

Maybe it is just me, but I don’t get it. Why doesn’t Nintendo come out with a headset for the Wii (it uses Bluetooth after all)? They made a steering wheel for Mario Kart, and I would think that another accessory to buy would fit perfect with Nintendo’s current accessory fetish strategy.

Mario Kart online won’t be half of the fun it could be with voice support. I understand that they may be concerned about the unwanted jagged words you often hear on Xbox Live, but limiting voice chat to friends-only by default would take care of that. When I read posts like this of people using Xbox 360s to do voice chat while they play Wii games, you know something is wrong.

Lastly, and certainly not least, why do people care what Kevin Rose says or does? (This is a real question, feel free to comment). I know he runs a website that is almost as popular as TechConsumer (ha!), but really, why do people care? It was the Kevin Rose 3G iPhone rumors post about back-to-back webcams that really pushed me over the edge. It got coverage on AppleInsider, Gizmodo, Techmeme, and of course Digg.

Kevin Rose has had one good idea in his life so far (which appears to be easy to copy and make better), and that’s it. Digg initially thrived under the so-called “wisdom of crowds” but it is now languishing under “mob rule.” Interestingly enough, the mob has a fancy for Paris Hilton, all products from Apple, and stupid ugly cats (and squirrels). More people on Digg read what Kevin Rose says than what Ben Bernanke says (even with this “recession”). Rose’s predictions were way off on the iPhone 1.0, so why would I listen to him now? He doesn’t work with or for Apple (actually his business relationship is closer with Microsoft).

So again I ask, why does anyone listen to Kevin Rose? If you can actually give me a good reason why, I’ll be surprised.

I am going on record that, unless Mozilla changes the direction they are heading, Internet Explorer will push Firefox back to single digit market share within three years. I’m sure a lot of people will flame me that Microsoft could never pull that off, but try telling that to Netscape. Each incarnation of Firefox since at least version 1.5 has not been a significant improvement on the previous version. Yeah, they claim all sorts of new features, but really, what is going on with Firefox 3?

Sure it is supposed to use lower memory, but the user interface is seriously going downhill. They seem so insanely focused on the underlying technologies (which isn’t necessarily bad) that they don’t spend any time on the UI. Look at the new download manager; functionally it actually works a lot better, but I’ll be damned if my parents (or any other average user) would ever figure out how to use the new features it has.

Then there are the areas where they have changed the underlying system dramatically (database driven history and bookmarks) that really don’t work any better than the old way. I ran FF3 Beta 3 for about a month, honestly the new bookmarking/history features adds about 5% benefit (it does the search in the location bar instead of in the history sidebar) but at a cost that every extension written for bookmarks or the history don’t work. That is a major deal breaker for me. Maybe Firefox 3.5 will actually expose more useful functionality for this feature, but it isn’t that great right now.

My real problem is the direction that Mozilla is taking Firefox. Their handling of adding features and juggling extensions is a joke. They consistently seem scared of adding a new feature that would be genuinely useful to the average user. I have seen this first hand on Bugzilla with a feature request for save to PDF support. Firefox 3 has the built-in underlying technology (through Cairo) to save web pages to PDF, but they don’t want to add it as a feature. They just say that it should be delivered through an extension (which exists). The code is all there except for a user interface to expose the functionality to the user!

Every user has to go out and find the extensions though. Why can’t Firefox have official/recommended extensions (maybe weather, gmail, etc) that can optionally be installed with Firefox? Or why aren’t there different versions of Firefox? Just think, they could make a Firefox Developer Edition that would come with many common web developer extensions like Firebug, Web Developer, or HTML Validator.

The biggest problem with extensions is that they never work from version to version. Firefox is a terrible platform in this regard. It is ridiculous that by far most extensions won’t support FF3 it before it launches. But the Mozilla folks seem to believe that that doesn’t matter. Why is it that extensions constantly have to be redone for new versions of Firefox? Hell, even Firefox 1.0 extensions didn’t work on 1.5 but “add-ons” for Internet Explorer 6 still work on version 8!

This finally gets me to Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1. The bottom line? I kind of like it. They are actually going in a direction that I’m interested in with features like Webslices and Activities. Basically, Webslices allow you to subscribe to a portion of web page; similar to how you sign up for an RSS feed. It fits a very different usage scenario than RSS feeds though. A Webslice could be a eBay auction you are following, the status of a friend on a social network, or the latest news headlines. Here is a link to Microsoft’s page and a video on Webslices.

Internet Explorer Activities allow you to select text (anchors can be embedded in the page too) and get context sensitive options. The most obvious example is selecting an address to get a map. The cool part is that the activity can show information (like a map) without leaving the page (see image below). Any website can create activities for IE8 as well; it isn’t locked down to just Microsoft services.

The best thing about Activities and Webslices? They just come built-in to IE8. They aren’t some “great” extension that only one in twenty users of a browser with 15% market share have. So with Firefox the feature will be so uncommon (3% of web users) that no web developer can really target it. Within a year of IE8 coming out it will have more than 50% of the market. Consequently, websites will actually implement Activities and Webslices.

Another illustration of where IE8 is going is that it includes a Firebug-esque development tool built-in. The Mozilla people need to come to grips with the fact that a huge amount of the “value” of Firefox to users is found in the extensions. They try to position Firefox as an extensible base platform with a rich ecosystem of add-ons, but the add-ons break between every single version. That is, if the average user has even found or realized that they can add those add-ons.

Bottom line: I haven’t switched to Internet Explorer yet, but if Microsoft and Mozilla keep the trajectories they are on I can’t rule it out in the future.

*Disclaimer: I have been using a Mozilla browser as my primary browser for six years. First Mozilla (aka Seamonkey) v0.95, and then Firefox when it was known as Phoenix 0.6. I have been exposed to some of the development activities on Mozilla’s Bugzilla too. So I don’t want to hear that I’m just some Microsoft fanboy.

It’s always nice to find products that are marked down off the list price, but most products online are already discounted. How do you know if it is an especially good deal? The idea is for this price drop listing to inform you of products that were recently selling online for a significantly higher price. The top price drops are in the sidebar on the right. Also, you can view the full list by clicking on this link or the “More Price Drops” link at the bottom of the sidebar widget.

For now I’ve limited the price drop listing to certain categories that seem most relevant to readers of PseudoSavant (i.e., consumer electronics and computers). But that could change if I hear of any interest for this kind of service for other types of products. Let me know what you think in the comments.

AppleTV is first up on the chopping block. Personally I love how Steve Jobs said at Macworld 2008 that AppleTV 1.0 was more about sharing music and pictures. If that was really the case then why was it called AppleTV? It is funny that a device with TV in the name has hardly any TV content. Especially since the departure of NBC from iTunes. AppleTV “Take Two” is about movies; it won’t be until AppleTV “Third Time’s the Charm” that you’ll get the TV part. Yet another reason why people should hold off on the AppleTV.

It is apparent that Apple is deliberately trying to avoid any sort DVR functionality too. I think Apple does not want to have to compete head-to-head with Microsoft’s Media Center offering. If you haven’t seen what Vista Media Center is like (which is included with Vista Home Premium and Ultimate) you owe it to yourself to check it out; especially if you have an Xbox 360 and could leverage the extender functionality. I think it is the best DVR UI I have ever used (better than Tivo even).

It would probably be easier for Apple to get more TV content if Steve didn’t develop such a bad rap with what he did to the companies in the music cartel industry. Everyone else saw that you need to be careful when you partner with Apple. Steve seems fairly Machiavellian in is his business relationships. I wouldn’t want my company to partner with Apple. It is like partnering with Walmart; a very one-way relationship.

One more thing that just kills me. What is with Apple and blaming GAAP and SarbOx for charging customers for new features? In case you haven’t heard about this, I’ll give you the gist of it. Apple has started charging users for various updates that would usually be free, but they have officially stated that it is because of accounting regulations. If they add significant new features without charging for them they’d be breaking the law, and/or they would have to restate earnings for previous years.

First it started with nickel-and-diming selling MacBook Pro users an updated driver (a new driver!) to enable the Wireless-N functionality that was already built into the laptop they had purchased. Yeah, they were charging people for software to use hardware they already paid for! Then they started charging $20 to iPod Touch users for software that is included with the iPhone. Now, accounting is the “reason” for why movie rentals won’t come to pre-generation six iPods. It isn’t that they just want you to upgrade to a new iPod, they swear. No seriously. Honestly. They would if they could, but they can’t. No other company could concoct a story like that for their customers and get away with it.

The Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 have both had significant new features added. Microsoft made the Zune 1.0 upgradable to the Zune 2.0 firmware. My Treo cellphone has had a number of updates that added significant features (instant messaging, SDHC memory card support, push-to-talk support, MP3 ringtones). Or how about my Linksys WRT54G that I’ve been running forever, I don’t even know how few features the 1.0 firmware had compared to what comes on it now. Basically anything with firmware can get significant new features. So apparently every other tech company on the planet just figured out how to screw over the U.S. government whereas poor old Apple suspiciously has to appeal to the good nature of its core consumers?

Although even the iPhone and AppleTV have had significant new features added which Apple didn’t charge for. Apple, if you want to gouge charge your customers, get a spine and just say you are going to charge them for new features. Don’t hide behind what looks like an outright lie that you can’t make the features available for free. Between my undergrad and graduate accounting courses I know enough to know that isn’t true.

Note: I promise I won’t even mention Apple in my next soapbox. :)

The Good

Lean: Overall Firefox seems so much leaner this time around. Even after hours of browsing with dozens of tabs open Firefox 3 is using about one-third less RAM than I typically see Firefox 2 use. The RAM savings didn’t come at the sacrifice of performance though, everything is notably quicker. Going back to previous pages, opening new ones, even the auto-completion when I typed in a URL seemed quicker. Even Google Maps seemed more responsive.

Features: While there is an entire list of changes in Firefox 3, Mozilla has added a notable one. The history and bookmarks have been combined into one database driven section called Places. Don’t be worried that the the UI has changed too much, on the surface most users won’t really notice the difference; it is more of a back end thing. They did add a new “Places” folder on the bookmark toolbar which can show recently viewed pages, tags, or starred pages. In addition, there is a completely revamped bookmarks organizer that will allow you to search your current bookmarks or history as well.

Some of the changes are much more subtle. The search box has been changed so that you can now resize it to any arbitrary size you want. When you scroll through tabs when there are more than can fit on the screen, they have added some animation to make it more clear what is happening.

If you zoom in or out on a webpage (ctrl-plus or ctrl-minus) you will notice that the whole page zooms now instead of just the text. While it is a nice feature in practice, the images look horrible when scaled up. I am still waiting for a browser that will do a smooth (read: bicubic/bilinear, not nearest neighbor) resize of a scale image. If the images looked good, this could be a major feature for those with old eyes that would just like everything to be bigger on the high DPI screens being sold today. It should be noted that version 3 also remembers your page-zoom settings on a site-by-site basis now too.

The Bad

Extensions: It can be summed up in one word, Extensions. While the extensibility of Firefox is a major feature (I probably like my set of extensions more than I like Firefox really), they are a huge problem when it comes to upgrades. Out of the eleven extensions I use, only one works with Firefox 3. That means, no weather, Gmail, Google Toolbar or Bookmark Sync, Image Zoom, Firebug, etc. Now I know some of these will probably be compatible by the time version three dot zero is released, but I’ll bet most of them still won’t. And until 95% of them work, I won’t be upgrading to Firefox 3.

The Verdict: Firefox 3 is a solid, but progressive upgrade. I won’t be adopting it though until at least six months after its release. I don’t know what the technical solution is for the Extensions, but Mozilla needs to figure out something with this. It is unacceptable that one of the biggest features of their product is incompatible from version to version. It happened when 1.5 came out, 2.0, and now 3.0. This is an area where Microsoft has typically excelled.

* Disclaimer: If you plan on checking out Firefox 3 for yourself, make sure you backup your Firefox user profile first.

For those not familiar with Watch Now, I’ll fill you in. Watch Now is included free with every Netflix membership. Every member gets one hour per dollar of their membership every month to watch instant streamed video. With a decent internet connection the video quality is nearly as good as a DVD; but maybe more importantly, it’s better than CinemaNow or Vongo. It runs inside your browser (only Internet Explorer still…..) as a plug-in, and I have never run into any sort of DRM issues like I have at other online video sites. That said, as all of the video is streamed, you have to have an active internet connection to watch; you can’t download anything to keep.

With my school schedule this past year I have been on the lowest tier Netflix plan: $5/month. That gets me two discs per month one-at-a-time plus five hours of online viewing. Until recently, five hours of online viewing was more than I did in any month, but then I discovered Heroes. Which if you haven’t seen yet, you owe it to yourself to check it out. It may be better than 24 for me.

I actually watched the first episode on my Xbox 360 because of a promotion where I could download the first episode of the first season for free. Then I found out that Netflix had the whole first season AND every episode that had aired in the second season so far. Typically the video available online on Netflix is content that came from a DVD (often slightly older films). Heroes episodes come out on Wednesdays mornings, a little more than 24 hours after they air on NBC.

Initially (first day or two) my wife and I just watched our five hours that comes in our monthly plan; we got hooked though. When we started watching Heroes there had been 28 episodes, and now we wanted to watch them all. At Apple’s iTunes or Amazon’s Unbox, each episode would have cost us $2, or $56 total to own lease the video. With episodes only being 43 minutes though, it only costs $0.72/episode on Netflix. So we just upgraded our plan by $12, and got caught up to the current episode in about a week (yeah, we didn’t do much else that week).

In addition to getting all those episodes, I am also in the three discs at a time unlimited plan for this month as well; I have gotten nine DVD rentals. This is what is great about Netflix, you can change your plan at any time with no contract of any sort. If you increase your plan you can choose to pro-rate it for the remainder of your cycle or you can have it start at the beginning of the next cycle. Downgrades go into effect at the beginning of the next cycle. So I upgraded, and then downgraded my account just for this one month.

So this is just another way that Netflix is delivering the most entertainment for the dollar out there. If you haven’t tried it yet, I highly recommend it.

Out of interest for full disclosure, we do occasionally run an ad for Netflix, but it is a service that we all believe in here. Actually, quite a few of us here are Netflix and Mozy (another TechConsumer sponsor) customers, myself included.

Something has surprised me more than the twists and turns of the plot though, and that is Bungie’s Halo 3 website. It is a whole new level of game and interweb integration. Dare I say it, it is almost a social network.

The Old

Halo 2 already had quite a bit of interesting integration into the web. You could check your all-time stats, look at where each of your deaths took place, and even check out where the person was standing who killed you. But that was pretty much where it stopped.

The New

Stats: Halo 3 ups the ante on the stats, offering far more comprehensive stats. I especially like that they have added emphasis to the kill to death ratio for those players who make you lose the game by 3 kills when they get 25 kills, 35 deaths, and still feel they had a good game. You can look at your stats for each map, for each game type, and for each weapon you use even. So far my weapon of choice (in one multiplayer game) is the Heavy Machine Gun (turret).

Forge: There are two new modes in Halo 3 that are quite unique: Forge and Theater. The Forge allows you to customize all of the multi-player maps. Weapons, spawn points, vehicles, teleports, and more can all be altered. It will be incredibly interesting to see what the Halo community comes up with in the Forge.

Theater: The Theater lets you watch recent games from anywhere in the game, Forge, Multiplayer, or even Campaign; and when I say recent, that is a relative term. The Theater will keep the most recent “25 films, or about 400MB worth, whichever comes first.” My 360 still has every minute of my entire campaign. You can also save films to your library if you don’t want them deleted. Obviously you probably wouldn’t want to relive an entire campaign (unless that is your thing) so the Theater is about more than just replaying games. You can make brief clips or take screenshots (the picture above is actually one of mine, click on it for full screen) of any of your video.

Sharing is Caring: What good would all these custom maps and screenshots of major pwnage be without a way to share them with the world? That’s where the Halo 3 file sharing comes into play. It isn’t the illegal P2P type of file sharing most people associate with that name. It is the place you can put up any content, maps, videos, screenshots, gametypes, etc, you create in Halo 3 for anyone to download. Friends can find content through the game, but you can even download stuff via your web browser onto your Xbox 360. Just find the content you want on the site, click download, and next time you play the game… Violá, it downloads it.

The Social Network: As you may have noticed above, I was initially going to say it was almost a social network, but looking into it further I realized it is really a full-blown social network…for a game. Think about it, you have your profile, a message center, a friends list, a people finder (to find other friends on Halo 3), a forum, and even groups (formerly Clans). That sounded like a social network to me, but it was when I saw what clans had become that it pushed me over the top.

Groups: Clans (now called groups) have moved far beyond just a bunch of people to game with. Each group now has its own homepage (see below), forum, articles and FAQ sections, news, announcements, links, and of course an RSS feed. This is going to build a whole new level of community in many groups, particularly competitive ones. It will be really interesting to see if Bungie expands the feature list to allow group file share. I can envision groups just for machinima with episodes on their homepage.

Finding new groups has been expanded too. It used to be that if you played with someone on Xbox Live and had a good time, you might ask them for an invite into their clan, or maybe you had some friends at school that had a clan. Now you can search for groups based on location, the founder, or even just the name of the clan. I have already found one in my zip code and one dedicated to my university.

The Finale: So needless to say, I’m feeling pretty good about the return on my gaming dollar for Halo 3. I think Bungie has created something that will be mimicked by a lot of other studios, and that it has the potential to revolutionize the community aspect of gaming. If you have an Xbox, you owe it to yourself to get this game. With the solid campaign and multi-player, along with innovative features like the Forge and Theater, I’m giving this game a 10/10. Ask anyone who knows me, I don’t give out tens easily; I can nitpick with the best of ’em.

In addition to the comments below, if you are on Xbox Live, drop me a message or game invite. My gamertag is peskyNOSPAMpescado. Just take the nospam out. Don’t ask about the name, it is a long story.

More Screenshots (courtesy of me, click for full screen):

*Those are real in-game graphics.

• Cinevision RV4000
• Go Video VR3930
• Harman Kardon DVD 25
• JVC DR-MV5
• JVC DR-MV7
• Koss KS4100
• LG LDA-511
• LG LRY-517
• Memorex MVD2042
• Mitsubishi DD-6030
• Philips DVDR-3400/37
• Pioneer DVR 810H
• RCA DRC 6300 N
• RCA DRC350
• Samsung DVD-V3500
• Sony DVP CX777ES
  
• Sony DVP-CX995V
  
• Sony DVP-NS9100ES
  
• Sony PS2 Slim
• Toshiba SD-3750
• Toshiba SD-3800
• Toshiba SD-H400

Does anyone else notice that there are four Sony brand DVD players on that list? These are customers who paid good money for Sony movies and a Sony DVD player. Does Sony really think that it is acceptable to produce DVDs that don’t even play in your own company’s players, nevermind players by top manufacturers such as JVC, Mitsubishi, Pioneer, RCA, Samsung, or Toshiba? The Netflix list seems far from comprehensive however, as the Wikipedia entry on ARccoS lists additional movies that use ARccOS and players that aren’t compatible with it.

I don’t know why Sony has this infatuation with controlling media formats (Betamax, Minidisc, Blu-Ray, or DVDs with ARccOS), but their perpetual insistence to exercise great control over their customers makes me incredibly worried to buy a Blu-ray player and is one of the reasons I am rooting for HD-DVD.

Sam’s Club, Costco, and Family Video all have the standard version for $50. Family Video even has a $5 off coupon code (NEWPGMEM) and $.99 shipping. The rest of the versions are between $10-$15 off the normal price.

BTW, if you really have to have a life-sized Master Chief helmet the Legendary version, it looks like you should order your copy ASAP.

Fact 1: There are 50% more Xbox 360s than Wiis in North America

Fact 2: If you add the Playstation 3 and Wii install bases together you’d still be about 300,000 units short of the Xbox 360.

I know some people care about the Japanese gaming market, like oh, the Japanese, and there are some people (a seemingly vocal minority) who enjoy Japanese games, but really how much does that matter most consumers outside of Asia? Obviously Microsoft would like to gain some ground in Japan, but I don’t see any games in my collection that I would consider to be Japanese titles.

If video games are actually breaking out as the next major mainstream media format, why is it so important to get Japan? Have you ever heard of a movie getting canceled because the producers thought nobody would watch it in Japan? How about a book, or a CD? Me neither. I guess my point is, there is some room in our global economy for some regional preferences.

Part One: the CinemaNow Service

So I looked at my Netflix Queue and picked out “Man of the Year” (which was better than I was expecting BTW) for the low low discount price of $2 from CinemaNow’s “Last Chance” section. Soon as I found the movie on CinemaNow’s site I noticed that they only support using their site with Internet Explorer.

CinemaNow with Firefox

CinemaNow with Internet Explorer

What makes this annoying is that their service requires installing the “CinemaNow Movie Manager.” It is the application that actually downloads the movies. I don’t know why they don’t make the software just register its own URI like cinemanow:// in Windows that would make it work in more than one browser. I’d rather not have to install any additional software though; the files use Windows Media DRM, and could be played in Windows Media Player. Basically, it seemed like the movie manager software was worthless and unnecessary.

After I went into Internet Explorer to purchase the rental, the movie manager software launched and the movie started downloading. In the hour it took to download the 1.2GB file I could have gone to Blockbuster to pick up a movie. You can’t start playing a video while it is still downloading either; which you can do on XLM. After completing the download, I tried to play the movie and was informed that I was not authorized to play this file on “this device.” I looked into the support on their site, and ended up having to e-mail them.

They did respond within about half an hour, but I was already done messing with this for the night, and was not at my computer. They gave me a coupon code to purchase the movie again, which would issue a new license to view the file. It worked without requiring downloading the file again.

The first thing I noticed as I played the file is that the resolution is terrible. After looking at the properties I saw that the resolution is only 512×222! That is only one-third the resolution of standard definition television or DVDs at 720×480, or even most P2P video files. Needless to say, it looked even worse scaled up to 57″ on my HDTV. In addition there was a lot of intermittent stuttering in the video (in Windows Vista and XP and on my Xbox 360, all from local storage or over a wired LAN).

The file properties show that they are encoding their “1500k” files at about 1600kbit/sec actually—much higher than you normally see on P2P files. Of that 1600kbit/sec, only 96kbits are dedicated to a stereo (no surround sound) audio stream. The stereo sound is okay at 96kbit/sec as they use Windows Media Audio and not MP3, but it is a far cry from the 5.1 surround sound I’m used to enjoying on DVDs and video from the XLM.

In short, the video quality was sub-par, and the audio was only passable. Both shortcomings would be much less noticeable on a standard definition television using the built-in speakers, however.

Part 2: Xbox 360 Playback

Now for the part that enticed me to try out this service in the first place, the Xbox 360 playback. As soon as I turned on my 360 the CinemaNow Movie Manager software alerted me to the fact that I had an Xbox 360 on the network. (Duh!) When I clicked on the notification it opened a web page with instructions on how to setup your computer to stream the file to the Xbox 360. Basically, if you follow the instructions exactly it will work, but it isn’t even close to being easy enough for my Dad to do. Frankly, I don’t know why the media manager software doesn’t just take care of the dozen or so steps to setup your computer for streaming; that is how it should be.

I later discovered that you do not have to stream the file to the Xbox 360 via Windows Media Player Sharing. Any UPnP software that can stream video to the Xbox 360 should work; I used Orb and it worked great, and I bet TVersity would work fine too. Just make sure the UPnP software is sharing the folder that CinemaNow saves your movies in and that you can play the file on the computer you downloaded it to.

*Side note for Windows Vista users: as TVersity doesn’t seem to work on Windows Vista yet (at least not for me and I’ve tried) check out Orb. It can transcode any format of video or audio to what your UPnP device can handle (Ogg Vorbis into WAV for my 360), works perfect in Windows Vista, and can do a lot of other cool things, such as online radio DVR, Slingbox, etc.

The Bottom Line

CinemaNow’s service is not as good as the Xbox Live Marketplace. Video quality is below standard definition, the audio isn’t in surround sound, you can’t play the file on the 360 while it finishes downloading on your computer, it takes a lot more effort, and it doesn’t work in Firefox. Honestly, I don’t think I will ever use CinemaNow again. The one area where I would maybe recommend doing so is to grab a few movies to watch on a laptop on a plane for those who don’t know about DVD rippers. It is unacceptable for watching on the TV though.