Hey readers, thanks for checking out Tekno-Logic for this week.
In last week's post we covered some of the latest news following the issue of electronic piracy in Sweden, which is quickly becoming a focal point for the future of peer-to-peer networking, intellectual property rights, and the entertainment industry's grip on its market share. I won't go into this issue much further in this post, but I'd really like to point out that I've been reading some awkward proposals from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in reforming some rules in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
A review of the exceptions to the DMCA may allow some legal DVD ripping in certain situations, such as school instructors or their students editing and playing video content to be included in their schoolwork. However, the MPAA believes there is another way, a “better” way for this to be done. They'd like to think that a more efficient and effective alternative would be videotaping the television screen or projector's display as the DVD plays. It's this kind of thinking that makes me go just a little bit mental, I mean how could this be any more difficult or ridiculous in contrast to the digital method? Essentially, the MPAA is saying that by “better” they mean archaic, shoddy, and second-handed.
I'd like to say that there is something here to defend this method, some argument in support of it, but logic fails me. Videotaping the screen of the movie or production you're playing is a waste of time and resources, because you will have spent time setting up a camera in front of a screen, preparing a DVD in your player to the scene you'd like to record, centering the television's display in your camera's viewfinder, checking to make sure all of the room's lights are dim enough or to turn them off, and then finally syncing both devices to play and record at the same time. And what of the recording you end up with? You'll most likely end up with sub-par video quality and even worse audio. I'd be less upset and have even more fun with this if it weren't so real, but sadly this is as real as homeless people and cancer. In reading multiple articles, Engadget writer Nilay Patel may have said it best with:

“Take a good look, kids. This is what an industry looks like right before it dies.“

And so the theme for Tekno-Logic this week fits in with the entertainment industry by Patel's commentary: death, and three cases of it. The death of an industry that is showing signs of fear in this internet age, the regretful death of an incompetent game developer, and your digital assets following your own death. Let's move on to the deserved but still depressing end to a classic game developer, 3D Realms.

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While at a younger age, during the early or mid-90's era of gaming, some titles like the infamous fighting game Mortal Kombat and 3D, satanic first-person-shooter (FPS) Doom sparked up the hot controversy of violence in video games, which still remains today with the release of sandbox games like the Grand Theft Auto series, for example. In spite of the controversial debate most of these games went on to become successful icons to usher more mature themes into the gaming industry. And one of those games just happened to star a loud-mouthed, raunchy, cigar-smokin', hulking, crazed mercenary that found his way into the hearts of FPS gamers everywhere. Of course, I'm talking about the classic Duke Nukem. Originally, the character appeared in games all the way back in 1991, but didn't receive much of any fame until Apogee's sub-division of 3D Realms took over the series and released Duke Nukem 3D in 1996. The character and his console and computer games have since become cult classics to gamers of all creeds, serving the same sense of nostalgia like grandma's home cooking or a faded cassette tape from your better years.
However, the development of the next great Duke Nukem title began in 1997, and... well. That's where it remains today. Yes, 12 years, and no completed release. Not even a public demo has ever been made available. Software and hardware that are just never finished by development companies have a label that describes their nature: vaporware. There is a decent list of vaporware titles maintained by Wikipedia, and the reasons for their non-existence can vary but mostly focus around issues like financial problems or public interest. In the case of Duke Nukem Forever, it seems like issues between 3D Realms and the game's publisher Take-Two were part of the cause, and money played a central role as well. Only a few trailer videos, in-game screenshots, and some press material has ever been released to the public, with a handful of people ever having the chance to play private demos of the game's progress. But in the end, 3D Realms never produced a finished product for release after twelve years of game development and they went under just recently, bellying up in the wake this economy's recession.
It is a just end, really, because nothing released after twelve years of work is embarrassing to say the least. But could it be that this game just had such an awesome scope that twelve years wasn't enough? These are the things that we may never know.
Regardless of what Duke Nukem Forever may have been, it feels like the Duke Nukem character we've all grown to love is now just an unemployed shadow in the modern game industry, and that's breaking the hearts of mature gamers everywhere. In a play off of one of his infamous quotes, “It's time to kick ass and chew bubblegum... and I'm all out of funding.”

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One of my favorite technology bloggers, Chris Pirillo, introduced readers to an unusually appropriate service this past week. It's an online service that protects your digital content, all of the videos, posts, or social network accounts that you've created through your lifetime, and reserves the account rights and information from all of your various online communities in the case of your non-foreseeable death or untimely end.
The service is called Legacy Locker, and it allows you to protect all of your digital content after you have died, and sends the information to friends or family that you have selected, along with any instructions or demands that you've prepared ahead of time. I'm excited that I can employ some of my dark humor by instructions close friends of mine to keep updating my Facebook status from beyond the grave with messages like “The church were wrong, Jesus is a total dick.” or “Like you're gonna bury a guy in a $6,000 suit, c'mon!?” Pirillo talks about the service in more detail here in his video blog:
<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/zOFBXmQHVlw"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/zOFBXmQHVlw" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object><br />Chris | Live Tech Support | Video Help | Add to iTunes

If anything like this catches your interest, check out Chris' post here for a coupon code to Legacy Locker.