Currently:
- Until the end of time >>
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Remember "GeT"? At the beginning of 2000 it was being touted as Tony Blair's big idea for e-commerce. As he put it on the scheme's (now defunct) website at get-time.org:
I am delighted to announce today that UK industry has taken the lead in building a key component of the emerging global electronic marketplace: Greenwich Electronic Time - the global time standard for e-commerce. The GeT website and software will turn GMT into a user friendly e-commerce tool. Because of the Greenwich connection, it will be clearly branded as a UK service to global business, underlining the leading role UK companies are playing in the online marketplace.
The pitch for new world-wide timezones goes like this: "Co-ordinating network-based events is hard. If an online discussion takes place between participants in different continents there's no concept of what would be considered 'local time', and it's really messy and difficult working out timezone offsets. What would really simplify things (wait for it...) is if we used a completely different clock."
At least that's the explanation given for schemes such as Swatch .beats (a novelty which may still live on in a few online gaming groups, but I've rarely seen in the wild) and the optimistic New Earth Time.
Of course, the usual response to this is "hold on, there are plenty of organisations that have been working with international timezones for a while now." The military, for example, have been using UTC, or "Zulu" as it's often known. I like Zulu as a term for UTC. Not only were those guys in the movie "Zulu" super-badasses, but it's always cool to drop military slang into everyday conversation. I've often thought that the metric system might stand a chance in the US if people habitually referred to distance in "klicks" (km).
So promoting UTC for wider internet and business use seemed like a sensible idea. And, in fact, that was at the core of "GeT". It's just that they couldn't call it UTC. You're not taking the lead if you're just promoting something that's already been in use for years. So UTC needed to be re-branded, maybe with one of those oh-so-trendy-in-the-mid-90s "e" prefixes...
GMT and UTC are usually be thought of as the same thing. Since the late 19C, Greenwich Mean Time was the universal world time base, and (as it hosted the meridian line) was also the local time zone for the UK. However since UTC is calculated using atomic clocks rather than GMT's solar method, their values actually differ slightly. However, the "GMT" that we use today, is actually UTC.
When naming a universal trans-geographic time reference standard should probably avoid having the name of a specific location. Something the namers of UTC specifically set out to do. But in the switch from GMT to the neutrally named UTC, it might have felt like Britain lost out. That one of its few victories in international standardisation had been devalued - the reminder that the prime meridian runs through London rather than Paris.
GeT was an unashamed attempt to internationally re-establish the Greenwich name as a UK promotional tool. They might as well have called it "CBT: Cool Britannia Time".
It wasn't about establishing a new legal time for the UK (such as removing BST) or even updating legislation, as attempted by the failed Co-ordinated Universal Time Bill which sought to change the legal time base from GMT. It was just about renaming UTC.
And so what was needed was the magic dotcom pixie dust, the other essential element of turn-of-the-century press release - "software". This, it would emerge, would consist of a website with a Java applet that would update the local clock against an acurate time-source. "Why not use NTP?" asked, well, almost everyone.
LINX managed to slightly spoil the GeT announcement by (coincidence? mis-communication?) issuing an earlier press release announcing Greenwich Network Time. This scheme seemed to consist of installing new Datum NTP servers at several London sites and (because "back-room" stuff always fails to excite journos) a Java-based web clock applet would be provided by Enron. Yes. A java-applet that would show you the correct time in a browser window. From Enron. In Java. Stop the press.
One month later, and GNP was a memory. LINX was on board the GeT bus.
Looking at the minutes of the GeT technical meetings it seems that, despite implying that this was some exciting new technology (and not mentioning NTP) that could overcome the existing software limitations holding back international e-commerce, the system was actually built on good-ol' NTP all along.
While NTP was well known on Unix systems at the time, I'm not sure if it was known in the Windows world. SNTP support was available in Windows 2000 (at least), but it wasn't signposted in the native "Date/Time Preferences" utility until XP. The one thing it doesn't offer (without a registry hack) is the ability to synchronise more than once a week (I imagine to protect those dial-on-demand users whose metered lines would be kept open. Ironic really, since the only time I've configured NTP under Windows was specifically to keep a network connection from closing.) Back in 1999, I believe the NetTime application was available, as well as several commercial and shareware alternatives. I wasn't using them, so I couldn't say if they were found lacking.
So perhaps there really was a need for a simple, Windows-based, desktop time sychronisation app.
But, given it was NTP based, a Java applet was a really bad choice. You'd be limited to only synchronising with an NTP server running on the same address as the webserver hosting the applet. And it turned out, that wasn't the biggest problem using Java under Internet Explorer - the security model wouldn't allow the applet to update the system clock.
All that remains of GeT today, appears to be an unmaintained DNS directory of public NTP servers. A TCP query of gb.public.ntp.get-time.net. (the root record of which apparently last edited almost a year ago) lists 23 NTP servers, of which 14 are still responding. This part of the scheme might actually have been useful had it been widely known about. (A couple of years later a similar round-robin DNS idea took off, now available via pool.ntp.org.)
We still have the UTC we had before, we've still got the NTP we had (although with wider client support). GeT is just another ghost-site in the web archive. A branding exercise, all style and little substance. Something that people might consider emblematic of the Blair government, of New Labour. But I think of it as the essence of what we used to consider the "new Net". The marketeers pimping the possibilities of the newer than new, but never around to see in that future themselves. While the old net seems to stumble on as before. A rate of progress that seems to illustrate one of Zeno's paradoxes.
On the internet, the most curmudgeonly survives. And apparently I've reached an age where that's reassuring rather than disappointing.
(posted 2004-06-22T19:01, link )
- Action Replay all over again >>
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I just noticed that Datel will soon be launching a new version of the Action Replay MAX cartridge for the PlayStation2.
As well as the other game hacking, DVD multi-region naughtiness of the previous version, this one has CD-R support for MP3 and DivX as well as a emulator for Sega Megadrive/Genesis ROMs and an online IM/chatroom/forum feature. The EVO edition also includes a PC compatible 16 meg USB flash drive.
Now, media players and emulators are unremarkable in the mod-chipped scenester world, but for a mass-market device to be sold in high street stores it's very interesting.
Datel are teh rox0r. They're old school. As far as I remember there's been an Action Replay cartridge available for every UK-launched console since the mid-80s. But it's the original I have fond memories of. The big red cartridge that my friend had plugged into the back of his C64.
Imagine, in the game world, you're in a tight spot. You've got enemies bearing down on you, and you're dangerously low on missiles. There are only two ways the story is going to play out: go down in a blaze of glory Butch n' Sundance style, or get saved by a Deus ex machina.
So you hit the freeze button on the Action Replay and asked it to keep a check on the status of memory registers (PEEKing) for changes. Then you unfroze the game and fired off one of your missiles. Hit the freeze button again, the AR debugger would highlight locations whose values had decremented. You could then try copying the original value back in (POKEing) and returning back to the game. If the spent missile was replaced, your missile crisis was over, and new supplies can be gained on a whim. Keep the register full, and you've got Infinite Ammo. And what works for missiles might work for other things. Your character is can be stronger, move faster, jump higher... sometimes fly.
Entropy is reversed. Every death can be turned into a fighting chance.
It might not be sporting, it may offend the gaming purists, but it was ideal for those who (in the words of "Kobayashi Maru" game-hacker Kirk) "don't believe in the no-win scenario".
(My own code-usage is restricted to extreme circumstances, I like to finish the game by myself. The Action Replay but for breathing life into older, completed games. I return to previously conquered worlds as an idle god.)
This was "hacking" as I first came to understand it. I already had some familiarity with programming, but this was compartively arcane. The realisation that behind the game there was a messy and intimidating world of code. And possibilities were available to those that could master this magic wand. Hack the game. Debug. Edit sprites. Fast Format. "Turbo Load". The possibility of a world without another kind of control existed back there, and its many transgressions.
Neo dies, is resurrected and is then able to see the Matrix for what it is - running code.
(The original C64 Action Replay lives on in the retro-enthusiast scene with a clone cartridge and C64 demo/copy party was held in Germany this last weekend.)
Action Replay later transplanted itself into the console culture (They were always called Action Replay cartridges in the UK, but until recently were rebranded under names such as "Game Shark" in the US) but over the years the features have moved away from the messy DIY raw code hacking of the 80s. These days the promethean data can be downloaded directly from a website or magazine cover-mount. The relevant menus pop-up automatically when a game disc is inserted.
The code has disappeared, and we are once again a slave to the interface. But the underground promise of empowerment and control still lingers. The seductive rebelliousness - ranging from the amusing hacks (for example, a Tomb Raider code which gives the protagonist gigantic perky breasts... more so) to these features that seem to have crossed over from "the scene", from dark side into Action Replay's grey area - retro emulation or media playback without enforcing the "protection" mechanisms that the console manufacturers are obliged to force upon their customers.
It's been over a decade since Nintendo lost its case against Galoob over the Game Genie cartridge. But those were the days before the DMCA. How long before the EU passes a law that takes away our Action Replay. Will Datel's skills in systems analysis and reverse engineering one day be outlawed?
If the Military-Entertainment Complex engineers IP martial law the first thing you'll see are crack enforcement-troops abseiling from helicopters through the windows of business park somewhere in middle-England. There won't even be a chance to hit "freeze".
There may be dark days ahead. So keep informed on the issues through EFF and others. You have nothing to loose but your infinite lives.
(Update: Apparently the new version no longer requires the memory-card "cartridge" element, since the codes can now be loaded from any memory card or USB flash drive.)
(posted 2004-06-01T12:27, link )
