Google Maps is pretty cool, though the lack of credible local data compared with Yahoo! Yellow Pages makes it just a pretty demo for panning around a large tiled image. (Google still thinks my company's headquarters is where it was 3 1/2 years ago, for example.)
Other sites like Yahoo! are catching up with public APIs and beta maps that allow click-and-drag goodness, albeit with Flash. Microsoft will have all sorts of first-party web services tied in with Windows Vista, and of course they still control the #1 web browser and the #3 search engine.
Meanwhile Google search remains polluted with link farmers, ad-filled blogs (the automated kind and the regular kind), and links that don't go anywhere. What happened to the company that did one thing and did it well?
And this is somehow different than the Saturn, Dreamcast, PS1, PS2 and Xbox memory cards how?
It isn't. The point I was trying to make is that game consoles rarely support "standards" as defined in the PC/CE* way. I'm impressed that Nintendo chose to support 802.11 period without requiring an overpriced proprietary device, as most console makers do with memory.
See also: the Dreamcast keyboard, the SNES mouse, the Famicom disk system, etc.
For those of you who don't know Seth MacFarlane's "brilliant philosophy," I urge you to pick up his best-selling book Remember That Time I Built a Successful TV Show Out Of 20-Year-Old Pop Culture References?
It's awesome. It's just like that time I tried to emulate something I saw on TV 30 years ago.
Geometry Wars is one of the cheaper downloadable games, actually. Zuma is 800 points or $10 US. Many of the other PopCap games sell for about as much for the Xbox 360 as they do for the PC.
(Take a page out of the Dave & Busters / Jillian's book, you can't buy EXACTLY enough points to buy just one game. To buy Geometry Wars for $5, I had to shell out for at $6.25 or $12.50 worth of points. That's not much more money, but for Microsoft it adds up quickly.)
I remember Disney's America being announced. A lot of people were upset that Disney was going to be building a theme park based around its corporate vision of American history, and from what I recall Disney backed out due to all the bad PR.
Besides, wasn't Disney's America going to be in Virginia? I know your town didn't have all these things, but there are already a few big theme parks in and around VA and there are a ton of Civil War-related attractions without a corporate facade.
Google Maps at launch didn't have a scale. It took months to put one in.
Gmail at launch didn't have an obvious delete button. You had to move a message to the trash, click "Trash," and click "Empty Trash."
As with all software products, a lot of features were missing at "launch," but everyone's cool with that because neither Google Maps nor Gmail were finished products. Google Maps has since come out of beta and can be considered "complete," but with Gmail you have to continue posting bug reports and feature requests to the official board (on Google Groups Beta, no less) in the hopes that Google will listen to you.
If everyone in the world used Firefox, Firefox would suck ass. Imagine if every web site had a "designed for Firefox" logo and used vendor-specific CSS properties like "-moz-opacity." Imagine if every web site said, "to continue, click 'Install' when the installation box appears" and a wave of XPI spyware swept over the earth.
A web browser monoculture is bad, whether it's "YOU MUST USE IE" or "YOU MUST USE FIREFOX."
Other hits on the Wayback Machine yield Google home pages with gray boxes where the logo should be. I forget when exactly it was that Google decided to be a search engine in its own right; way back when, you got links to "perform your search on Yahoo, Altavista," etc. when doing a Google search.
Gamespot does that. They provide an editorial rating and then let readers rate the game separately. The "objective guy" rating can differ significantly from the "people's review" average. Here's one game that got a mediocre review (5.0) for being "too self-referential" about the anime series on which it's based; not surprisingly, the People rated it significantly higher (7.6). Gamespot also provides links to other review sites, whose reviews average out to be between the two (6.6).
Now because this is Slashdot, I'm sure I need to be beaten with the cluestick because Gamespot is a corporation which obviously caters to its advertisers, but I'd rather swallow corporate publications than fanboy spin.
I want to read a review from a guy who's reviewed 200 games before and who can be convincingly objective to me. I don't want to see a bunch of 10/10 reviews from fanboys who think that the game is completely misunderstood by the Mass Media, and I don't want to see a bunch of 1/10 reviews from people who will condemn a game they hate based on a Penny Arcade strip that made fun of it.
Take a look at amazon.com, gamefaqs.com, and ebgames.com to see how awful the result is when you let everyone review a game regardless of they've even bought it (or whether it's been released).
You charge people for "300MB of extra usage" for downloading security patches on a dial-up account and you're calling another company "Microshaft"? Take a look in the business mirror there, cowboy.
Choose it as the startup disk in System Preferences, then reboot; otherwise I think you can hold down a key (command? option?) at power-up and see a menu of disks from which to boot.
I think those AOL commercials have really been sinking in.
"Did you know that with a high speed connection, you're more vulnerable to attacks? Get AOL Broadband to keep yourself safe! Just $15 on top of your DSL fee per month."
If Google caves in and gives out data, the Slashdot crowd, the vocal message-board-and-blog minority, will cry foul. Most people will still use Google because it's hard-wired into their brain and their web browser*. Slashdot will be one of many web sites advocating a freer web search engine, and the geek torch will pass once again. It's not going to kill Google's business -- after all, Yahoo! and AltaVista are still around, right?
* Ever try to change Safari's search engine association? How many people outside the aforementioned message-board crowds install Firefox extensions to change their search engines?
After that news story broke (Takei "officially" coming out) I did a Google Groups search for takei and gay. The earliest hit was a posting in 1985. The earliest hit that related to Takei as the one who was gay? Early '90s, still back in the day when you meant "USENET" when you said "the Internet."
I hate blogs as much as the next Slashdot user, but I think they've been instrumental in bringing RSS back from the dead. Now that every web browser supports RSS, I can syndicate dozens of web sites, saving me valuable seconds*!
I imagine that blog authors would appreciate being "pinged." Instead of linking to a blog which links to a blog which links to a blog which links to a useful web site, you could instead link to a useful web site and add ping elements to the three blogs you'd like to credit. I know I'd appreciate a direct link instead of PageRank-inflating gibberish.
Slashdot Mirror
Google Maps is pretty cool, though the lack of credible local data compared with Yahoo! Yellow Pages makes it just a pretty demo for panning around a large tiled image. (Google still thinks my company's headquarters is where it was 3 1/2 years ago, for example.)
Other sites like Yahoo! are catching up with public APIs and beta maps that allow click-and-drag goodness, albeit with Flash. Microsoft will have all sorts of first-party web services tied in with Windows Vista, and of course they still control the #1 web browser and the #3 search engine.
Meanwhile Google search remains polluted with link farmers, ad-filled blogs (the automated kind and the regular kind), and links that don't go anywhere. What happened to the company that did one thing and did it well?
And this is somehow different than the Saturn, Dreamcast, PS1, PS2 and Xbox memory cards how?
It isn't. The point I was trying to make is that game consoles rarely support "standards" as defined in the PC/CE* way. I'm impressed that Nintendo chose to support 802.11 period without requiring an overpriced proprietary device, as most console makers do with memory.
See also: the Dreamcast keyboard, the SNES mouse, the Famicom disk system, etc.
* Consumer electronics, not Windows CE
You should be thankful that Nintendo supports any standards whatsoever. This is a company that still expects you to pay $20 for two megabytes of flash memory when we all know you could get 32 MB for that much in an easily-read format.
(Imagine that -- Memory Stick Duo is actually more cost-effective than something!)
It's funnier when a pixelated alien with 5000 dimensions says it.
http://www.adultswim.com/shows/athf/
Outrages, right. Got it.
For those of you who don't know Seth MacFarlane's "brilliant philosophy," I urge you to pick up his best-selling book Remember That Time I Built a Successful TV Show Out Of 20-Year-Old Pop Culture References?
It's awesome. It's just like that time I tried to emulate something I saw on TV 30 years ago.
Geometry Wars is one of the cheaper downloadable games, actually. Zuma is 800 points or $10 US. Many of the other PopCap games sell for about as much for the Xbox 360 as they do for the PC.
(Take a page out of the Dave & Busters / Jillian's book, you can't buy EXACTLY enough points to buy just one game. To buy Geometry Wars for $5, I had to shell out for at $6.25 or $12.50 worth of points. That's not much more money, but for Microsoft it adds up quickly.)
I remember Disney's America being announced. A lot of people were upset that Disney was going to be building a theme park based around its corporate vision of American history, and from what I recall Disney backed out due to all the bad PR.
Besides, wasn't Disney's America going to be in Virginia? I know your town didn't have all these things, but there are already a few big theme parks in and around VA and there are a ton of Civil War-related attractions without a corporate facade.
Google Maps at launch didn't have a scale. It took months to put one in.
Gmail at launch didn't have an obvious delete button. You had to move a message to the trash, click "Trash," and click "Empty Trash."
As with all software products, a lot of features were missing at "launch," but everyone's cool with that because neither Google Maps nor Gmail were finished products. Google Maps has since come out of beta and can be considered "complete," but with Gmail you have to continue posting bug reports and feature requests to the official board (on Google Groups Beta, no less) in the hopes that Google will listen to you.
If everyone in the world used Firefox, Firefox would suck ass. Imagine if every web site had a "designed for Firefox" logo and used vendor-specific CSS properties like "-moz-opacity." Imagine if every web site said, "to continue, click 'Install' when the installation box appears" and a wave of XPI spyware swept over the earth.
A web browser monoculture is bad, whether it's "YOU MUST USE IE" or "YOU MUST USE FIREFOX."
Shame on me for not using preview. I ain't gon' get fooled again!
http://tinyurl.com/36hj8 (1998 version)
http://tinyurl.com/dk37w (1999 version)
Google itself was in beta for years. I remember back around 1999 when it started, the Google home page had a ilttle "beta" tag snuck in there.
http://www.google.com/">Google on December 2, 1998
http://www.google.com/">Google on April 23, 1999
Other hits on the Wayback Machine yield Google home pages with gray boxes where the logo should be. I forget when exactly it was that Google decided to be a search engine in its own right; way back when, you got links to "perform your search on Yahoo, Altavista," etc. when doing a Google search.
Gamespot does that. They provide an editorial rating and then let readers rate the game separately. The "objective guy" rating can differ significantly from the "people's review" average. Here's one game that got a mediocre review (5.0) for being "too self-referential" about the anime series on which it's based; not surprisingly, the People rated it significantly higher (7.6). Gamespot also provides links to other review sites, whose reviews average out to be between the two (6.6).
Now because this is Slashdot, I'm sure I need to be beaten with the cluestick because Gamespot is a corporation which obviously caters to its advertisers, but I'd rather swallow corporate publications than fanboy spin.
Microsoft made Gaim and Trillian? No wonder they're so terrible on Windows.
I want to read a review from a guy who's reviewed 200 games before and who can be convincingly objective to me. I don't want to see a bunch of 10/10 reviews from fanboys who think that the game is completely misunderstood by the Mass Media, and I don't want to see a bunch of 1/10 reviews from people who will condemn a game they hate based on a Penny Arcade strip that made fun of it.
Take a look at amazon.com, gamefaqs.com, and ebgames.com to see how awful the result is when you let everyone review a game regardless of they've even bought it (or whether it's been released).
Because having choices is important. Who wrote the rule that you're only allowed to have one application per purpose per platform?
sub is_evil {
/^sony\b/i);
my $company = shift;
return ($company =~
}
You can't? What kind of shitbox did Apple sell me? They exactly told me that it could do everything a PC could and more.
You charge people for "300MB of extra usage" for downloading security patches on a dial-up account and you're calling another company "Microshaft"? Take a look in the business mirror there, cowboy.
Choose it as the startup disk in System Preferences, then reboot; otherwise I think you can hold down a key (command? option?) at power-up and see a menu of disks from which to boot.
I think those AOL commercials have really been sinking in.
"Did you know that with a high speed connection, you're more vulnerable to attacks? Get AOL Broadband to keep yourself safe! Just $15 on top of your DSL fee per month."
If Google caves in and gives out data, the Slashdot crowd, the vocal message-board-and-blog minority, will cry foul. Most people will still use Google because it's hard-wired into their brain and their web browser*. Slashdot will be one of many web sites advocating a freer web search engine, and the geek torch will pass once again. It's not going to kill Google's business -- after all, Yahoo! and AltaVista are still around, right?
* Ever try to change Safari's search engine association? How many people outside the aforementioned message-board crowds install Firefox extensions to change their search engines?
After that news story broke (Takei "officially" coming out) I did a Google Groups search for takei and gay. The earliest hit was a posting in 1985. The earliest hit that related to Takei as the one who was gay? Early '90s, still back in the day when you meant "USENET" when you said "the Internet."
I hate blogs as much as the next Slashdot user, but I think they've been instrumental in bringing RSS back from the dead. Now that every web browser supports RSS, I can syndicate dozens of web sites, saving me valuable seconds*!
* Cue David Cross "electric scissors" routine
I imagine that blog authors would appreciate being "pinged." Instead of linking to a blog which links to a blog which links to a blog which links to a useful web site, you could instead link to a useful web site and add ping elements to the three blogs you'd like to credit. I know I'd appreciate a direct link instead of PageRank-inflating gibberish.