Playing on the Go

You’re probably weirded out that a mobile gaming blog would be covering such an obscure topic. Well, at one point I believed that I could activate Traffic Preemption circuits simply by using the IR on my PSP. Sad but true. That thinking, however, wasn’t far from a real possibility. IR can be a medium of communication to trigger Traffic Preemption. It just seems absurd that a PSP could have such capabilities.

The Facts

• Traffic Preemption systems are activated by a 10-14hz flashing light
• Once the Preemption system is activated, it stops traffic in other directions safely and turns the user’s lights green
• Newer lights use a Encryption System so homebrewers can’t active Preemption
• This is illegal in most states and i do not condone its usage. I only know information

What is a hz?
1hz=60flashes per minute. Therefore, 1hz=1 flash per second. Theoretically, if you were to possess a strobe light, able to flash 10 times a second and bright enough to be detected, then the light should turn green.

Why 10-14hz?
The faster the flash, the higher the priority, the faster the light turns green. Police and EMS use different frequencies because they have different priorities.

Wouldn’t the encryption kinda kill the fun?
Yes it would. But, out of the hundreds of thousands of Traffic Signals in this country, only a very small hand-full use the encryption. Since the encryption is expensive, it’s doubtful that you’ll run into more than 1 in your preemption fantasies.

How can I get me one of those?
2 choices, either you
Buy One OR
Make One

Drawbacks of buying
Costs $300 dollars for a very simple rig.

In fact, behind the housing, This is all it is

Drawbacks of Building
Can you read schematics? I’m sort of in the dark about those things. The I-hacked page on how to build one is the closest thing you can get to building a pretty good one but it’s very difficult to follow. If you understand the bizarre nomenclature of electronics then be my guest, but i’d prefer something much more simple.

Vital Components
In the end, all you need is,
1) A power source
2) A controller device that can open and close a circuit 10-14 times in one second
3) An LED Array. The more LEDs the better!

Please Help ME!!
If you know of a controller device, something commonly found, please be so kind as to leave a comment I would greatly appreciate it!

Last week, Yahoo announced that it would release an update to its scarsly know mobile application GO! To put the new features quite bluntly, Yahoo is making yet another attempt for the user to become totally dependent upon them for News and Web Searches. GO 3.0 currently in beta and looks very web 2.0 (ie lots of pretty buttons). Hopefully it’s as productive as attractive.

This spontaneous development strikes me as a plee by Yahoo for preserving its sovereignty from Microsoft. In fact, Yahoo has fired 1000 of its employees, including the entire design team! Yahoo is going to shove every idea through development as fast as possible to shun Microsoft’s plans of take-over and to prove that it’s still alive. Ultimately, we as consumers have the most to profit because with such rivilaries, many creative and hopefully free products are created for our explicit use.

This past week, the Japanese companies: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched a new satellite into space. This satellite, however, will probably be the most beneficial to rural or mobile gamers on the ground. This because the new satellite boasts 1.2 gb/s internet!

Now you might be wondering, how fast is 1.2gb/s? Well, with that kind of speed, you could probably download files faster than a server can…..well, SERVE them! But keep in mind that this is no ordinary wired internet connection. Blazing fast speeds hundreds of miles from the source of the connection? I wish i could do that with my wireless router.

The coverage of this satellite is projected to reach Japan and Southeast Asia in June this year. It’s going to be hard to believe that it’ll be possible to play WOW in Vietnam Rice Paddies…assuming thats the kind of thing you like to do JUST because you CAN!

Bittorrent, the infamous sharing protocol is the world’s largest way of sharing music, video, games, applications and everything else has always come under harsh criticism for its, “questionable,” practices. Some embrace it and others scorn it but why is that so? Lets consider the facts…Shall we???

People who hate bittorrent and want to squash it

Government
The Pirate Bay was temporarily shutdown last week because the Swedish government finally decided to sensor Gottfrid Svartholm’s (owner of the pirate bay) ports. This action was in violation of EU law therefore winning Gottfrid’s “Largest Bittorrent Tracker,” back online. The Government wants to do something, but are poorly managed.

RIAA and MPAA
The two most militant groups in the battle against online piracy are the RIAA(Recording Industry Association of America) and the MPAA(Motion Picture Association of America). These two and constantly hammering trackers trying every way possible to shut them down. Even now, in some cubical in some office building, there is a task force of people dreaming up of a new way to kill the infamy. The RIAA and MPAA have righteous intentions of protecting the profits of Albums and Movies, however i believe that the internet is one frontier they can never fully conquer.

ISP
Your Internet Service Provider is probably the most powerful organization of counter-pirates. Some ISPs, like comcast, have a history of blocking seeder’s upload speeds, slowing bringing downloads to a halt. My ISP, cox, sends users letters to inform them that they’re downloading copy-written material and then threaten to temporarily shut down the user’s internet if they do not comply. These instances are rare but extremely effective, how the heck am i gonna check my email with interweb?

Why they’ll never succeed

Volume
There are MILLIONS of transfers in bittorrent every MONTH. Out of those prodigious numbers only a small handful are arrested a year. If the Government really wanted to get then we’d have in increase our penitentiary capacity.

Inability for laws to allow a Tracker to be shutdown
Gottfrid operated thepiratebay.org in the same building as Scandinavian IRAA. They couldn’t do anything about it because it was difficult to find a law that he was breaking. There is no cookie-cutter law that says that bittorrent trackers are in violation of anything.

Failure of DRM
DRM (Digital Rights Management) was originally intended to solve all the RIAA’s problems by equipping encryption onto song files making them only playable on certain machines. The supposed product was that only the buyer could hear the song he bought and no one else. Well, thats and fine and dandy but the RIAA never realized that people can still download MP3s (which have no encryption) and still listen to shared music with minimal loss of bit-rate.

Nature of the Internet
The movie, “Steal this movie,” alluded to this fact. The Internet was created for the spread of information and data without restrictions. It was built so that no one computer could be superior to any other. The Government’s idea of stopping this flow of information is simply not compatible with the protocol of the entire internet. It can never be controlled or stopped unless the masses of people do it willingly.

But how does this all apply to mobile gaming? The with all the piracy occurring on the internet some of it is bound to spill out onto mobile platforms. Mobile game makes might pursue a course of DRM to protect their games from freeloaders

Android, the brainchild of the Open Handset Alliance(OHA) has released their prototype low-end model running the most recent Andriod release. While it’s encouraging to see that OHA, after all their hype, has made something physical, it doesn’t strike me as overly awe-inspiring.

The Android SDK, along with its inept documentation, featured an Android emulator to debug the developers’ works. This emulator is a carbon copy of OHA’s phyical prototype, which was ported with apps and the background origionally on the emulator. The protoype utilizes an ARM9 mobile processor which means decent, but not ready to run any intensive programs.

The only improvement that I can see with this realease of a phyical phone is that……it’s finally physical! Google and OHA have achieved a marginal success, but I believe that it’s time to save the bottles of celebratory bubbly and work on getting Android into the hands of the consumer.