With some laggin’ behind I realized that Quake Live advanced to open beta. As it is a great idea to play Quake online in a browser (or at least I hope so) I did my best to get into it as soon as possible. However, it looks like I’ll not be able to have fun with quake today: I’m on position 21,912 in queue to join a server 
Links:
Savvas published his presentation on the Selection of the proper compact composite descriptor for improving content based image retrieval at the The Seventh IASTED International Conference on Signal Processing, Pattern Recognition and Applications in Innsbruck, AT. As soon as the paper is published online, I’ll post a link to it.
Links
Today the trial against three administrators of the world’s most popular bittorrent portal started. While it’s perfectly normal for some parts of the world to sue people for less than those three guys did, it’s an interesting attempt to do this in Europe, especially Sweden. In my opinion bittorrent sharing and pirate bay are a logical results of current industry practice in our global world. Digital media and software get released in different versions at different times at different places. Take for instance a brand new TV series. While it’s aired in the US and Canada at first, for instance European consumers often cannot watch it until most part of a year passed by. So industry should ask themselves the question: What service do they offer (besides free content 
) that let’s them get so successful?
Thumbs up for the pirates!
While I’m rather fond of my Playstation 3 I’m currently really pissed off by (i) the Playstation support and (ii) Capcom support. In November I bought Age of Booty, which is a multiplayer strategy game having earned a lot of good reviews. The SCEE (Sony Computer Entertainment Europe) release of the game can be described as buggy at its best. It crashed on a regular basis and online games were simply not possible. After some inquiries with Capcom support I noted that the problem was actually there, but only for European users. Capcom managed to let the users wait 6 weeks to present a patch, which led to the utmost bug: The users weren’t allowed to start the game any more, we simply didn’t have the rights
As it is with purchases around here: If something doesn’t work, bring it back and get the money. That was the start for my discussion with the support. To end the story in a fast and efficient way I just give you the results of 5 phone calls and around 10 emails.
On the other hand I tried to get my money back for a non working game
My conclusion is that they made sheer impossible to get the money back in time as within a month the second patch brought back the game (still buggy of course).
While I know that it is a common thing in consumer electronics to trick the customer (like not taking back opened CDs and DVDs, which is totally illegal around here), I’m still surpised how Sony behaves in this case.
Another thing I really hate about game industry is that you cannot buy a new game, not even for a next gen console. Many many games actually need at least one patch to work as intended.
Why did I blog this? Sony did not respond to my mails and the guys could not do a thing. So I assume that my complaints remain unheard. So I make them public and hope that – within my limited abilities and reach – they get read 
… and of course I’m feeling better now.
The CfP for the 6th Intl. Workshop on Text Information Retrieval is out. This renowned workshop is organized by Benno Stein and is a great opportunity to meet experts from the area of information retrieval and to dfiscuss new idea. Find the CfP at: http://www.webis.de/tir-09
People might be wondering why I added adsense to my feed … well let me first state that I don’t make any extra money with the ads, I just pay the website bill However in the last year more and more people moved over to just read my feed instead of visiting my site. That’s perfectly ok, but the adsense income dropped from 100$ a year to 50$ a year With this action I hope to be back to a 100 bucks a year, which is actually the price for the domains(s) and the web space.