I’m getting awfully darn tired of having to pay for what I already own.

What do I mean?

Sony just announced that the PlayStation Portable titles you already own may be usable on your PlayStation Vita after all … for a price.

Plenty of people have already noted that the PS Vita doesn’t come with the UMD drive from the PS Portable. Backward compatibility is being ditched more and more these days. If Ninty can do it, so can Sony. Especially on portable gaming, where once it was a veritable guarantee that you could take your old game and plug it into your new Nintendo Gameboy handheld, the last few generations have been shooting that down quite rapidly. And Sony is doing the same.

Except where with Ninty you can pay to download the game you already own on a cartridge, with Sony you … wait … can pay to download the game you already own on disc. Err… So it’s basically exactly the same.

Through a device called the UMD Passport you basically get to re-pay for the PS Portable game that you already own so that you can play it on your PS Vita as well. Prices are reported to be in the range of ¥100 ($1.30) and ¥2,400 ($31.16). So yes, you could be paying over thirty bucks to continue playing a game that you already paid for.

That is, assuming that Sony even brings the UMD Passport to the US. So far they’ve only announced it for Japan.

Is it really too much to ask that we go back to the good old days of backward compatibility? I mean I was playing my old GameBoy carts on my GameBoy Advance, and loving it. Zelda brought back to life. Metroid 2 was still fun. Only since then I haven’t touched a Nintendo handheld because I want my GameBoy to be able to play all of my games, dammit! Nintendo has lost a lot of sales opportunity there from me.

And now Sony is taking the same route?

Nuh uh!

Looks like Sony is going to lose a lot of sales opportunity from me too then. Should have seen it coming though when Sony screwed over their emulation on the PS3.

It’d be pretty sad if I only bought PC games in the future. But then again, what with UMPCs and old games being released for free or even open-sourced, maybe it won’t be so sad after all. For me. For Nintendo and Sony however … too bad. So sad. No more hard-earned money from me.

If I own it, I own it.  I’m not “licensing” it.  I freaking own my copy.  It’s the way it’s always been.  You can’t just change that midstream now.  Though it’s certainly not stopping people from trying to remonetize on what you already paid for.  Like Apple and their iTunes Match, convincing people to pay an additional twenty five bucks a year to listen to music that they already bought.

I’m just really getting tired of these scams.  I’m paying once and only once, thank you very much!

I know, I know.  There really haven’t been many new blog entries lately.  I can’t help it.  Technology news just seems so … s l o w lately.

I mean what do we have?  Nintendo releasing their 3D handheld Gameboy, the 3DS.  Oooh.  Ahhh.  Whatever. We’ve heard so freaking much about the 3DS already that honestly, it’s very old news even if it is “new”.  That’s the problem with pre-hyping products so darn much.  By the time they actually come out, they already seem like so last year.  Meh.

Same with the Apple iPad2.  Which, honestly, I don’t give a fig about anyway.  It’s just another tablet.  And not the good kind of tablet.  This is still the “it’s really just a ridiculously oversized cell phone without the calling capabilities” type of tablet.  In my opinion you’d have to be pretty daft to find that interesting.  If you’re going to get some kind of tablet device, at least let it be capable of doing interesting things.  With Atom CPUs and such, tablets can easily be made to run full operating systems and run real applications, instead of just gimmicky “apps”.  If not Windows, than at least Linux!  Why be glad that you can open a Word document on some cut-down app when you can have the whole real shebang of Word or OpenOffice?  It’s just freaking stupid.  To everyone … except the people making a fortune on selling you those apps.  And yet, so many people are sheep.  You tell them how cool it is and they lap it up.  They have to be riding the bandwagon of the latest trend.  Instead of spending their money wisely on something that can do ten times as much for the same cost.

Frankly, a lot of the technology world is letting me down in that respect lately.  It’s like people have stopped thinking.  Like this whole “cloud gaming” thing.  Otherwise known as “on demand gaming”.  Whatever. I mean seriously.  It’s just turning a networked device into yet another thin client.  How is this even news?  It’s certainly not new.  The business world has been doing this forever.  All that’s new about it is that it’s not doing anything useful.  It’s just being used to play video games.  Whoo-hoo.  And if you don’t have a truly unlimited data plan, just how much do you think it’s going to cost in the end to stream all of that video and audio?  And how many ISPs are going to start putting your account into some kind of limited category that will lag you badly once you start sucking down that bandwidth?  There’s a reason gaming, even networked, is done on devices, not on servers.  I really can’t see this as anything other than some lazy gimmick to capitalize on people’s gullibility.

…Just like most of these tablets / pads.

And the security world?  Maybe I’m just feeling jaded a bit here, but honestly, it would be news if for once someone actually did something competent.  Oooh.  Yet another vulnerability found in -insert product here-.  I mean I know it’s important to keep up on these things, but at what point is this not a broken record spinning endlessly, skipping back to the same old song?  Is it too much to ask that someone actually be proactive about security?  It seems like Intel is the only one truly thinking about that.  Security on a chip.  Great idea!  Put it below the kernel level where it can really prevent things.  Where running great security doesn’t suck up your processing power.  Wonderful!

But why McAfee? I freaking hate McAfee!  They’re the worst resource hog bloatware security that I’ve ever seen!  It doesn’t even matter if they get the job done, because in the end using them is worse than being infected!

Sometimes I really do wonder about Intel…

Then, of course, there’s the “yet another patent lawsuit” news.  Blah.  Seriously people, can’t anyone do business with honestly and, dare I say it, integrity, anymore?  On both freaking sides!  Frivolous lawsuits.  Or actually stealing technology.  Jeeze Louise!  What I wouldn’t give for week without that crap.  And don’t even get me started on the “antitrust” BS.  Is it really so hard to do the right thing anymore?

But the worst of all, the one that really gets my goat lately, is the Fukushima Daiichi nuke scaremongering.  Yes, they had a problem.  Yes, it’s being solved.  No, it’s not the end of the world. It’s nothing like Chernobyl.  Get over it.  There’s really nothing newsworthy there anymore unless you want to maybe praise the hard work and braving potentially dangerous conditions to make things safe.  No, radioactive iodine is not a danger.  The half-life is ridiculously short.  Levels are already harmless, and the general populous was never exposed to anything actually dangerous in the first place.  The worst anyone got was the equivalent of a sunburn, and those were the techs in the very thick of things.  They’ll be fine.

When it comes to radiation, we’re really freaking stupid sheep.  We forget that our sun itself is a nuclear reactor, constantly bombarding us with radioactivity.  What do you think the sun’s heat is?  And let’s not forget that plants pull radioactive materials out of the earth to give to us, their consumers.  Why do you think smoking causes cancer?  It’s not the tar.  It’s the freaking heavy metals emitting radiation that the tobacco pulled out of the ground, which you then freed into tiny particulates by burning the dried leaves and inhaled directly!  Der! And yet how many people don’t get cancer?  Don’t get sick?  Why not?  Because in spite of popular belief, our bodies are actually designed to handle this schiznit!  In small doses at least.  And so long as we don’t keep overdosing constantly.  So yes, people in Japan might have taken in more radiation than usual lately.  But not in dangerous levels.  It’s all been well within our natural ability to tolerate and overcome.  And now that the situation is well under control, levels have dropped back to the same background amounts all of us are always being hit with.

If you want to worry about Japan, worry about the people injured and the damages done from the earthquake! There’s a lot of suffering there.  But to freak out over the nuclear powerplant is at this point highly counter-productive at best.  That is over.  You scaremongers can move on now.

I don’t know.  Maybe I’m just not in such a thrilled mood lately, but I’m that close to just closing up shop on the technology world right now and turning to something productive, like cooking.  Do you really want to see InsanIT.net turned into a cooking blog?  Do you really want me to become a Foodie?

No, I don’t think so.

So world at large, freaking start impressing me again!  I’m a technologist, dammit!  Give me a reason to actually smile.  Stop insulting my intelligence!

Alright.  I guess that’s enough ranting for one day.  Carry on. 

Here’s one we all should have seen coming, but strangely didn’t: Amazon is getting into the used video game market by buying (ish) you old no-longer-wanted video games.

Amazon wants to buy up your used video games.

It’s a new beta program (meaning it’s still working out the kinks) where by Amazon will give you electronic gift cards usable at Amazon.com in exchange for your used video games.  To learn more about Amazon’s trade-in program and check out trade-in values, take a gander over here.

The real question is, can Amazon really pull away any decent business from GameStop?  Unless Amazon offers significantly better trade-in value, I doubt it.

There are other qualms as well.  Such as, namely, the very limited platform selection.  Game platforms that Amazon is supporting are: Sony Playstation 3 (PS3), Sony Playstation 2 (PS2), Microsoft Xbox 360 (360), Nintendo Wii (Wii), Nintendo DS (DS), and Sony Playstation Portable (PSP).  The most notable omission from this list is, of course, the PC.  But it also is plainly evident that “older” used games are also not wanted by Amazon.  Only presently manufactured consoles are being supported.  Perhaps as Amazon becomes more confident in their program they will open up to these overlooked platforms?

Well, in any event, according to Amazon’s announcement, they’re also offering added incentive to participate in their program right away.  “As a bonus for trying Amazon’s new trade-in program, for the first two weeks of the beta, we’re offering 10% off a future purchase of any game or accessory in Amazon’s video games store.“  Umm … yay?  A whole ten per cent off of a single purchase.  People everywhere just must be positively jumping for joy.

Still, it’s a start… I guess.  We’ll just have to hang on and see if Amazon can make any magic happen, or if gamers find Amazon’s new market as lost in translation as, “All your base are belong to us.”