sony - tough times?

Time ares looking tough for Sony right now - I am sure most of you have seen stories about the DRM rootkit issues they have had with their copy protected cds (they have now stopped production and had it classed as malware by Microsoft and anti-virus vendors). Now there is another issue on the horizon. The BBC are reporting that Sony is involved in price fixing. Not directly to us consumers but instead to the retailers who sell the products to us. If you are a high street retailer you will pay less for a product than an internet retailer. Not sure how they can do that - they claim it is legal - but it does not sound right to me.

Supposedly Sony instigated this practice and others have followed their path - I wonder if there are enough manufacturers not doing this for online retailers to fight back in their online stores? The manufacturers have been reported to the Office of Fair Trading here in the UK so hopefully they will rule in the consumer’s favour. How long has htis been going on?!

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I have been complaining constantly about the lack of quality in the market for decent analytics packages for blogs. There has not actually been that much out there for SMEs either - I have of course been spoilt by seeing what the high end analytics packages can do but still..  hopefully this will kickstart the other lower end providers to offer better value Microsoft do not seem to be anywhere near this yet, though maybe they will extend it out of their AdWords equivalent. It will be interesting to see how the higher end players react to this.

Anyhow, there is some hope. Google has launched a free online version of their analytics package which they obtained when they bought Urchin Software. Unsurprisingly they have called it Google Analytics. For me this says a lot about my standpoint on Google - as soon as I saw it I thought “now we might be getting somewhere” - a sure sign that Google is doing something right. I do have one obvious misgiving with Google - how long will it be before I start questioning what they do with all the data on me? the analytics service is only going to add to this data.

The system integrates with Adwords of course and everything seems to be well laid out. This will only come out over the next few weeks as I use the system. There is some interesting things they seem to be tracking - your visitor’s connection speed for example - having implemented this in other packages, it usually means an extra download before the page loads. I wonder if this is how they are doing it or if they have come up with a better way. I shall have to monitor the load time of my pages. Usually this is also an issue for the analytics provider who can have issues coping with the amount of bandwidth required. For some reason the Google Analytics site is very slow today - I guess a lot of people are using it!

One interesting thing is there is no “BETA” sign anywhere! Of course this used to be a paid for service that is now free (It used to be a few hundred dollars). Lets hope they have added extra servers to cope with the huge uptake that is likely to happen at least short term.

The service is not built specifically for blogs - there are no plug-ins per se for blogs such as Wordpress and Typepad etc but I doubt it will be too long before someone comes out with them. For now I will see if my integration works ok..

by the way - do a search on Google Images for google analytics and you get images of urchin logos and urchin screenshots - nothing on Google Analytics yet. I guess there is still a delay for searching on Google

[update] looks like Google is having a problem with load? It keeps coming up and then going down (for maintenance). Not sure on what the problem is but there definitely is one!

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So the last time I posted was 2 weeks ago - what happened? Well on November 4th Civilization IV came out - somehow (come on we both know how..) my free time has been spent trying to lead my chosen civilization to victory It’s the most different Civilization I have seen since Call to Power came out - and even better it all works just great.

The major change is religions - all are treated equally in the game though they do have to be "discovered" at different times so making Islam a major religion is more difficult - but achievable It works well and adds an entirely new way to play the game Another major change is the introduction of civics - no more one type of government and thats it - you can pick from 5 (?) different areas to define how your civ works - for example you can define the financial side, the religious side etc etc - both of these also have an effect on diplomacy which is now much more realistic in that you the ai players really do act as either friends or enemies - its all more predictable There are lots of other things as well that just make everything more coherent. For example you used to spend a huge number of turns building wonder X only for a competing civ to build it first. You could then convert it to another wonder and immediately take advantage of the turns spent already building the previous wonder. Not very realistic. It also led to a domino effect where when one wonder was completed,  there would be a flurry of other wonders built by civs that had just missed out on the previous built wonder. Now you just get money

OK so I could go on but there are plenty of reviews elsewhere on the web and you can guess where I am going with it you should just buy it Just be prepared for the amount of free time you will lose! 

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