For those of you who see this as a goldrush or a good idea, you have to consider:
ICM wants to charge $75/year for a.XXX domain, for relatively little extra value - How many domains are you going to go on a spree for with $75 reg fees?
By having a domain on.xxx, you must follow ICM's (not ICANN's) 'Best business practices' or else lose your.XXX - could this include selling them/parking them?
There are bills in congress to make.XXX mandatory, meaning american run adult sites would not be allowed on.com/.net etc.
Their policy includes the right to 'Reserve geographic and religiously/culturally sensitive names', how far could this be expanded? - would someone really end up paying $75 per year for sex.xxx?
There are now hundreds of thousands of adult websites across the.tld spectrum, ranging from.com, to.co.uk to.jp - not all of these will switch, with international webmasters not bound by US rulings - this could create an unfair marketplace for US businesses
From this self-penned article about what is one of the worst ideas in recent years when it comes to TLDs.
Something I haven't seen mentioned yet is the developers of FarCry, who have a 100-strong team in Germany told 1up.com that if the German goverment were to enforce this rule - they would simply relocate. Now surely this would not only hurt their development industry but also the sales industry (with a 3million+ selling game like Gears of War dissallowed, people will start being reluctant to paying out the prices for next-gen consoles if they can't get their favourite games for them). Another point to consider is that where will they stop, first it's video games - on the same page you can also then move on to movies and TV programmes... hell let's do books while we are at it. I think someone in the government needs to have a realisation of what they are trying to do here - as it seems like it will do a lot more damage than it will good (it's not like if these kids don't play counter strike they can't go and watch terminator 2 and see much of the same kind of thing).
For those of you who see this as a goldrush, you have to consider:
ICM wants to charge $75/year for a.XXX domain, for relatively little extra value - How many domains are you going to go on a spree for with $75 reg fees?
By having a domain on.xxx, you must follow ICM's (not ICANN's) 'Best business practices' or else lose your.XXX - could this include selling them/parking them?
There are bills in congress to make.XXX mandatory, meaning american run adult sites would not be allowed on.com/.net etc.
Their policy includes the right to 'Reserve geographic and religiously/culturally sensitive names', how far could this be expanded? - would someone really end up paying $75 per year for sex.xxx?
There are now hundreds of thousands of adult websites across the.tld spectrum, ranging from.com, to.co.uk to.jp - not all of these will switch, with international webmasters not bound by US rulings - this could create an unfair marketplace for US businesses
From this self-penned article about what is one of the worst ideas in recent years when it comes to TLDs.
It's not so much the government I would be worried about abusing this system, it's the contractors hired to create/maintain it - as well as the possibility of commercialisation of certain parts of it. Let's say company X will pay so many millions to get details on the type of car a certain demographic drives (of course anonymous to avoid civil liberties being eroded) - how far would they allow this and how much money would it take to start getting full data - (for those who say it wouldn't be allowed, and example of it in action is the DVLA in the UK which issues drivers licenses - who sell all of the data required for you driving license for as little as $4 each to any company that request it). This is of course forgetting the drive that companies/hackers/criminal gangs would have to get access to that database - whether it be through a human access point (having someone with authority use it for them, or finding bugs - the monetary rewards available for the data that could be obtained would more than enough pay teams of hackers to try and gain access.
I have the worry that although this may be implemented in the best of faiths, it will eventually be perverted and used for a number of different reasons that it was originally developed for.
It seems as if the talk about the Wiimote straps breaking is becoming almost as big news as the console itself, if you speak to anyone on internet gaming forums or offline who enjoys console gaming and you bring up the Wii, you will last about 5 minutes before someone tells you a story of how they know somebody who killed their TV/Cat/Sister with the Wiimote flying out of their hands. The BBC reported some advice from Nintendo and it seems like the last point adresses reason why most people are having this problem - "Do not use excessively rapid, violent or wide swinging motions during game play."
I'd dare say that over 80% of the reason for the breakages right now is because people have been booting up Wii Sports and taking on, say, the Golf game thinking they have a real seven iron in their hands. Of course people are going to pretend it's the real game while playing Baseball or Boxing and with these kind of multiplayer games, when your with a friend you will both pretty easily start going at it with more violent movements. Games such as red steel in the shooting part are unlikely to have that many breakages happen, but as soon as you get into the sword fighting parts people will start thinking they are one of the fourty-seven samurai and start throwing the controller around. It's good to see Nintendo are beefing up the wrist strap with the recall but I still think it's less about product failure and more about people not using common sense while playing - on the flipside of that it is a game console (with a target market of young people), so surely Nintendo should have expected people to get a bit over excited and be at least slightly prepared for this.
Good to see them documenting the rise of email spamming, but I'm suprised the article doesn't talk more about the spammers who are running amock across websites rather than people's inboxes nowdays. While the problem of email spam is still growing, it has pretty much always been there and the public are fully aware of it (with mainstream services such as Gmail offering spam protection, etc), the huge rise at the moment is the amount of web applications and sites that are being exploited. Take for instance Youtube (with many of the most popular videos having their comment threads spammed hard), or any mainstream forum software (most commonly phpBB), where spam bots are continually developed to get around registration methods (including OCR) and then spam the forum with either their profiles or posts. Not forgetting the guestbook spamming which many of the people behind these use for SEO purposes, so they can get phising or product selling pages to the top of search engines (even if it is for a day or so before they are penalised/blacklisted).
While email spamming is still the main problem, it would be nice to see the mainstream media realise that there is a growing danger in people exploiting community websites nowdays, because all it takes is for one of these operations to install enough spyware/get traffic from sites/top search engines for banking/insurance etc websites, then they will start taking consumer's data faster than spam would - all without the majority of customers realising, because they think the main threat is in their inbox.
I don't think that many people are saying the climate doesn't change over time and that us as humans are affecting it greatly, but one of the main claims is that by creating more greenhouse gases and contributing to 'global warming', we are slowing down the process of glaciation. (after the Devensian/Wisconsinan period, the holocene epoch (interglacial period) has lasted longer than usual, and this is what a lot of people are pointing to, despite glacial periods being known for their fluctations in length. Another good theory on it can be found here, where it is claimed that he observed warming actually reflects the Urban Heat Island effect, as most readings are done in heavily populated areas which are expanding with growing population (which of course will be hotter due to roads/buildings/people etc trapping heat).
I definitely think it is a good time for people to start investigating the possible bias on this issue, as those who are lobbying government for changes in policy on industry are going to start having serious economic effects (on both companies and the country as a whole) without the majority of the public being aware that global warming is a theory, and not fact, but hey - if global warming is the accepted theory, i'm happy to reduce the methane levels in the atmosphere by eating more steak, heh.
I have no doubt the ability to record from the microphone when the phone is off is available to certain people, most phones nowdays have alarms where you can set it for a time - turn the phone off and it will turn itself back on at the specific time and sound your alarm. Now if you think about what does this, then surely there are other abilities built into using the phone when you believe it is "off". Hell, the whole "geographic communications cell that the call was made in is stored with the details of the call" giving away your location, and then being able to pinpoint it via triangulation from other cells is worrying enough.
It seems as if with the advent of mobiles taking over from landlines in the vast majority of calls, network operators are being made to (or doing it for their own reasons) to provide vast amounts of information and features so that calls and conversations can be tracked like this. It's all very well catching criminals (although the Orwellian feelings are building within me already), but what happens when it's misused. This situation reminds me very much of ISPs and net service providers with the email tracking/reading and browsing history situations.
It's somewhat ironic at a time when governments such as Britain's are pressuring their citizens to be ecologically responsible and do their part, when at the same time they are just taking their issues and hiding them 'under the carpet to say'. Especially when MEDC countries are pressuring the developing countries in order to lower their economical aspirations in order to be environmentally aware ("Meanwhile the British leader is likely to raise the issue of global warming, and what developing countries like India can do to help tackle it." at the BBC). Seems to me as when the developed world is pushing on one front in order to gain public support and more education towards global warming, behind the backs of this they are just doing the same as usual in order to get rid of problems that would require investment, something we should be ashamed of.
I may be wrong, but it is my understanding that "Tolkien Enterprises" hold the rights to the films (LOTR, Hobbit etc) and were paid by New Line in order to grant them a license to create them (evidently this would have been for a large sum of money and all of the films at once, rather than licensing each individual one at a time as it would have given either side a chance to renegotiate based on the success/failure of what was release). This deal would have been signed with a clause saying that it "ends" in X amount of years, so that Tolkien Enterprises take back the rights and can either produce it themselves or relicense it to another studio in the case of New Line not producing the film in time, putting it on the backburner or just deciding not to work on it for monetary/staff reasons (such as the dispute with Peter Jackson now).
If New Line do not get production underway pretty soon, they risk the rights being taken away from them and I have a feeling that is the primary reason why they are making noise about moving on without Peter Jackson, because evidently they do not want to stop fighting the lawsuit but that is probably the only way it could happen any time soon. What they risk is the backlash that is beginning now, with stars such as Ian Mckellen expressing "dissapointment" at the Jackson scenario, I have a feeling that New Line will run into some problems getting a number of the actors and crew back on board without the man who practically 'made' the franchise what it is.
A small number maybe, but Sony are also undoubtedly losing out on the import markets. After they recently shut down Lik-Sang.com and got importing PS3's to the UK and a number of other countries banned by law they will have surely shut out a sector of the market of those who are the most hardcore gamers and cannot wait for their consoles (with the European and Australasia launch coming in March 2007 due to lack of Blu-Ray components). It's a shame they had to go to these lengths, which would be understandable if they had have had a global launch date, but leaving some countries without the console for a number of months isn't the best idea, and by blocking imports to those countries they are only loosing more sales and aggravating consumers.
I have a feeling that Sony will need to start giving incentives or at least making it a desirable environment for developers in order to create some games that will become a MUST for the console buyers (like Halo for Xbox, Gears of War/Halo 3 for Xbox360, Mario for N64 etc) if they want to really compete with the low priced Wii and the 360 which is flaunting it's powerful internet features now.
From the looks of things, Microsoft are trying to seperate PC gaming and console gaming even (while trying to favour the latter with more dedication to products and software development) at the same time as merging them together. With the whole inclusion of Media Center on Vista, MS are making the package of having an Xbox 360 hooked up to your home network a lot more enticing, but at the same time they are adding some features to the new OS that are making it look tough for games to emerge and be enjoyable from, at least until a lot of gamers upgrade and fully prepare their systems. Something tells me that although PC gaming will remain a strong force, with these extremely powerful consoles that are becoming more intertwined with what a PC can do (Wifi, Browsing, Media playing, Demo & Video etc downloading, IM, Email etc) that we might just see a decline in the extremely casual PC using people who decide that their console is a more fun way to do some things, without constant upgrades, costs, monitors etc - especially gaming.
I'm all in favour of Microsoft's new plan, it will be good to see some more media content on the Xbox Live Marketplace rather than just game trailers or promotional clips, however what makes me worried is the size of these things. Take for example you are the average user of an Xbox and you download a few demos first (Need For Speed Carbon alone is 1.1gb) and then you decide to rent 2 movies or so. I'd say you will very quickly find yourself running out of harddisk space on premium consoles, or cores that have been upgraded. Especially the way they are letting people buy and keep TV shows, it seems as if they will need to start upping the hard drive sizes pretty quickly if they start offering this amount of content, not to mention the speed of the network which already almost grinds to a halt during weekends due to the huge amount of traffic. It will be interesting to see how it works out and how much competition there will be between the Xbox 360, the iTV and anything Sony can produce in the entertainment section with the PS3.
Damn FTC - always ruining people's day. Here was me thinking xx_Sexy_Girl_99_xx was really interested in me, now I wonder why she always wanted my address.
I'm hoping Microsoft will address a problem that a friend who works at Microsoft said they had recieved a lot of complaints over, one of which was from me as it can get pretty darn frustrating. When you download the trial of an arcade game on the Xbox Live and then delete it (whether because you don't want to buy it or you want to buy it at a later date), the game will always show up in the "My Games" part with no gamerscore attached which then lowers your overall points percentage. Not even deleting the game data on the system will fix this due to the fact that as soon as it is downloaded it is added to your profile on Xbox.com and your Gamercard.
Other than that, it is good to see Microsoft working on keeping the system up to date, as are some of the games (Perfect Dark Zero has updates 'frequently' compared to games such as Ridge Racer 6, which have glaring glitches that really disturb gameplay and the general feel of the game which are never patched). I hope more developers who are working on the 360 start following MS's lead and making sure all of their products are kept up to date and user friendly.
On one hand they are foolhardy for doing this, on the other it is a brave decision to improve the game. Almost every shop around here is full of WoW stuff leading up to christmas - the 15 day trial packs are literally flying off shelves which shows they will have more than enough new players getting the game for christmas and joining in. However there would have been a huge upsell market for the Burning Crusade pack if it was released in time for Christmas, granted most people who play Warcraft will eventually pick it up but Christmas would have been a perfect time for Blizzard to cash in on both new gamers and existing players.
However, by choosing to delay it they have put the playability of the game over the profit they could make by throwing it out there and just continually patching it up to standard (cough, Gothic 3, EA, cough). I'm quite happy to see a game studio finally taking the time to make a game good before cashing in on it, instead of throwing out whatever they have done to make the sales that will occur anyway. I just have to wonder whether this will be the last delay we will see for Burning Crusade, or whether more lay in wait in development hell.
Google giving advice is always going to help two sets of people - those who already have websites and want to optimise them, and those who are attempting to create websites to rank highly. If we look at why people creating websites usually want to get them to rank highly google the reasons are primarily monetary, which means that this tool is mainly giving advice to those who are trying to displace older (and possibly better sites). Say I have site A. which is dedicated to mountain biking news and has been running since 1997 with messageboards, news etc and hasn't been optimised for the best google rankings and we have Site B. which was created 3 months ago and uses RSS syndication to just serve up content from other sites and monetising it with something like adsense is the main point, then which should really rank higher in Google? I'm thinking A because it is more of a legitimate site.
I think there is a point where trying to rank highly in Google is OK for wanting to growth in your site, but if Google continue to give out such tools then surely people will start producing sites that match exactly what it wants to see in order to get traffic. I'm starting to think that it shouldn't be sites that have to be optimised for Google to rank them highly, but Google to be optimised to pick up the best sites for each search term instead of landing pages or shells that are just there for advertising revenue.
Is this really the way E3 want to be going? the whole point of it was mass exposure to the gaming industry along with the public. It was a spectacle, an event and being over the top was part of it. Now there are many other expos like this in other industries which run well, and the main reason for that is that the exhibitors have a reason to be there other than displaying their product (most usually it is networking with those in the same industry (an example being web expos, trading links/traffic etc)). However in the games industry, a rep from Nintendo isn't exactly going to hop on over there to the Sony booth and start discussing how they can do business, because in this industry it is done a lot higher up. E3 had some core problems and mis-management only aided these, along with the fact that so many people use the internet to get their news (Gamespot, IGN etc) that they don't need the previous magazine coverage of the event or even the event in order to stay in touch with what is happening. I think the decline of E3 is only bringing in a new era for the way that the games industry interacts with critics and fans alike.
The iPod is a revolutionary device, although maybe not techinically, it has entered the conciousness of the public and it will be extremely hard for anyone to even try and match it's market dominance. The one thing Microsoft could have done with the Zune was to make sharing music unrestricted, but once again red tape has stopped it and the DRM will limit the function that could have made the Zune the better choice (along with Apple cutting the price, a move Microsoft didn't expect). I think the only thing to match the iPod now will be a device that is a mix of genres, much like the phone that is rumoured to be in development from Apple, if they can successfully merge the best features of an iPod (plus storage) with the good functions of a phone and make it stylish (not a hard job for Apple right now) then they may just have a chance of beating one of the devices of the decade. For other companies, it will be very hard to beat the iPod in the long run, and the only front I think they will have is pricing - which will only hurt their bottom line, as people will pay a premium to have the iPod. Congratulations to Apple on their market domination with this one, it's well deserved.
I doubt this will ever become realised in the mainsteam concious, it's been ingrained on the entire world and I don't think there is anyone (english speaking) who wouldn't be able to quote it. I don't think it's ever really been an issue of dropping the 'a', the line gains memorability for that. At the end of the day I think this research will end up as a nice section of trivia somewhere, but we will all remember the quote that came through on that day, and surely the communications glitch was a part of history too, so it should be remembered that way IMHO.
Is it just me, or do a huge number of people claimed to have purchase flights on the Virgin Galactic flight. For the last three years or so there have been sporadic news stories about celebrities, businessmen and just generally wealthy people getting their place on there, it makes you wonder if it isn't just PR on some of their accounts. What worries me more is about their preparations for the journey, astronauts spend years preparing to go into space and now it is being treated like a long-haul flight for some, I'm sure they will have some training but are they sure it is enough for the kind of forces that their body is going to experience while taking off?
As much as I hail Richard Branson for his innovation (as one of the few successful British entrepreneurs), I must add my view that for something like this, we really should leave it to the professionals before we are sure of what can and can't be done on commercial levels (after all, Columbia and the launches after that have only served to remind us of what a dangerous feat it really is).
"In a February story for CNet, it was estimated that the total cost of components for the PS3 would be in the neighborhood of $725 to $905". I highly doubt that this is still the case, especially after they cut the price of the Japanese launch machine on Friday (link). This is backed up further by the fact that the Japanese market is by far their strongest and it is definitely where they are going to sell the most machines, considering the US has already got market proliferation from the Xbox 360 which will be challenging it thanks to a price cut at christmas, along with the introduction of the Wii. Not to mention Europe, which doesn't even get it until March 2007.
In Japan, the PS3 will be the main console over there and sales this christmas will be huge for them. There is no way Sony would take such a hit on the launch machine, and I'd put money on the cost of components having dropped a good deal in the last few months.
I can see those students having a problem with that, after all it is your work and you don't really want others to keep hold of it while checking. It's like turning up to an airport, handing your mobile over for them to check it wasn't dangerous, and then them handing it back to you after copying your phone book and all of your messages off of it. The company should check it against the database, and then get rid of it, their database shouldn't be automatically updating with every paper that goes through it because eventually it will start catching out genuine work purely due to the amount of data that is being processed through it.
I think the problem here is that the company is permenantly keeping it, and I'd be pretty smarted about that as well, but then on the flip side of the coin for the company and the school, the more copies they have, the more likely (in their view) it is that they will catch those who for example, are using their older brothers essays to go through or using work taken from old pupils. It's a tough situation to gauge, but the students have a strong point on the IP there. That being said, why not just add Wikipedia to the database and catch 99.9% of students, heh. Juding from teachers I know, Wikipedia is the bane of their existance when it comes to schoolwork.
This is all great from Microsoft, but the TV's really need to start catching up. In the UK there are barely any true HD units out, the rest just replicate it even when branded as HD, which means that not only will this not help our gaming, but it will be pretty much redundant for most of the life of the console thanks to the saturation of HDTV in the UK being so slow. I think Microsoft definitely need to think about their target markets more and how technology is improving there, because it is all well and good making the console excellent for those who can run it on top-notch hardware - but that is bound to be a small percentage of those who buy the console.
This story reminds me of the time when a random FPS (i think it was one of the Rogue Spear games) featured a website adress on one of the posters in a level and the guy who owned the domain noticed a serious amount of traffic start hitting it, which I guess can tell you that if anything it will expose people to your brand. Project Gotham 3 and games like Fifa 06 used all of the advertising boards to make extra cash and this wasn't picked up so much because players were so used to adverts being there in real life, but I think it will be definitely harder for different genres of games to start making inroads into advertising in game, sure you could see Solid Snake walk past a Coke machine but I doubt we will see Sonic eating some butterfingers anytime in the near future.
Slashdot Mirror
For those of you who see this as a goldrush or a good idea, you have to consider:
.XXX domain, for relatively little extra value - How many domains are you going to go on a spree for with $75 reg fees?
.xxx, you must follow ICM's (not ICANN's) 'Best business practices' or else lose your .XXX - could this include selling them/parking them?
.XXX mandatory, meaning american run adult sites would not be allowed on .com/.net etc.
.tld spectrum, ranging from .com, to .co.uk to .jp - not all of these will switch, with international webmasters not bound by US rulings - this could create an unfair marketplace for US businesses
ICM wants to charge $75/year for a
By having a domain on
There are bills in congress to make
Their policy includes the right to 'Reserve geographic and religiously/culturally sensitive names', how far could this be expanded? - would someone really end up paying $75 per year for sex.xxx?
There are now hundreds of thousands of adult websites across the
From this self-penned article about what is one of the worst ideas in recent years when it comes to TLDs.
Something I haven't seen mentioned yet is the developers of FarCry, who have a 100-strong team in Germany told 1up.com that if the German goverment were to enforce this rule - they would simply relocate. Now surely this would not only hurt their development industry but also the sales industry (with a 3million+ selling game like Gears of War dissallowed, people will start being reluctant to paying out the prices for next-gen consoles if they can't get their favourite games for them). Another point to consider is that where will they stop, first it's video games - on the same page you can also then move on to movies and TV programmes... hell let's do books while we are at it. I think someone in the government needs to have a realisation of what they are trying to do here - as it seems like it will do a lot more damage than it will good (it's not like if these kids don't play counter strike they can't go and watch terminator 2 and see much of the same kind of thing).
For those of you who see this as a goldrush, you have to consider:
.XXX domain, for relatively little extra value - How many domains are you going to go on a spree for with $75 reg fees?
.xxx, you must follow ICM's (not ICANN's) 'Best business practices' or else lose your .XXX - could this include selling them/parking them?
.XXX mandatory, meaning american run adult sites would not be allowed on .com/.net etc.
.tld spectrum, ranging from .com, to .co.uk to .jp - not all of these will switch, with international webmasters not bound by US rulings - this could create an unfair marketplace for US businesses
ICM wants to charge $75/year for a
By having a domain on
There are bills in congress to make
Their policy includes the right to 'Reserve geographic and religiously/culturally sensitive names', how far could this be expanded? - would someone really end up paying $75 per year for sex.xxx?
There are now hundreds of thousands of adult websites across the
From this self-penned article about what is one of the worst ideas in recent years when it comes to TLDs.
It's not so much the government I would be worried about abusing this system, it's the contractors hired to create/maintain it - as well as the possibility of commercialisation of certain parts of it. Let's say company X will pay so many millions to get details on the type of car a certain demographic drives (of course anonymous to avoid civil liberties being eroded) - how far would they allow this and how much money would it take to start getting full data - (for those who say it wouldn't be allowed, and example of it in action is the DVLA in the UK which issues drivers licenses - who sell all of the data required for you driving license for as little as $4 each to any company that request it). This is of course forgetting the drive that companies/hackers/criminal gangs would have to get access to that database - whether it be through a human access point (having someone with authority use it for them, or finding bugs - the monetary rewards available for the data that could be obtained would more than enough pay teams of hackers to try and gain access.
I have the worry that although this may be implemented in the best of faiths, it will eventually be perverted and used for a number of different reasons that it was originally developed for.
It seems as if the talk about the Wiimote straps breaking is becoming almost as big news as the console itself, if you speak to anyone on internet gaming forums or offline who enjoys console gaming and you bring up the Wii, you will last about 5 minutes before someone tells you a story of how they know somebody who killed their TV/Cat/Sister with the Wiimote flying out of their hands. The BBC reported some advice from Nintendo and it seems like the last point adresses reason why most people are having this problem - "Do not use excessively rapid, violent or wide swinging motions during game play."
I'd dare say that over 80% of the reason for the breakages right now is because people have been booting up Wii Sports and taking on, say, the Golf game thinking they have a real seven iron in their hands. Of course people are going to pretend it's the real game while playing Baseball or Boxing and with these kind of multiplayer games, when your with a friend you will both pretty easily start going at it with more violent movements. Games such as red steel in the shooting part are unlikely to have that many breakages happen, but as soon as you get into the sword fighting parts people will start thinking they are one of the fourty-seven samurai and start throwing the controller around. It's good to see Nintendo are beefing up the wrist strap with the recall but I still think it's less about product failure and more about people not using common sense while playing - on the flipside of that it is a game console (with a target market of young people), so surely Nintendo should have expected people to get a bit over excited and be at least slightly prepared for this.
Good to see them documenting the rise of email spamming, but I'm suprised the article doesn't talk more about the spammers who are running amock across websites rather than people's inboxes nowdays. While the problem of email spam is still growing, it has pretty much always been there and the public are fully aware of it (with mainstream services such as Gmail offering spam protection, etc), the huge rise at the moment is the amount of web applications and sites that are being exploited. Take for instance Youtube (with many of the most popular videos having their comment threads spammed hard), or any mainstream forum software (most commonly phpBB), where spam bots are continually developed to get around registration methods (including OCR) and then spam the forum with either their profiles or posts. Not forgetting the guestbook spamming which many of the people behind these use for SEO purposes, so they can get phising or product selling pages to the top of search engines (even if it is for a day or so before they are penalised/blacklisted).
While email spamming is still the main problem, it would be nice to see the mainstream media realise that there is a growing danger in people exploiting community websites nowdays, because all it takes is for one of these operations to install enough spyware/get traffic from sites/top search engines for banking/insurance etc websites, then they will start taking consumer's data faster than spam would - all without the majority of customers realising, because they think the main threat is in their inbox.
I don't think that many people are saying the climate doesn't change over time and that us as humans are affecting it greatly, but one of the main claims is that by creating more greenhouse gases and contributing to 'global warming', we are slowing down the process of glaciation. (after the Devensian/Wisconsinan period, the holocene epoch (interglacial period) has lasted longer than usual, and this is what a lot of people are pointing to, despite glacial periods being known for their fluctations in length. Another good theory on it can be found here, where it is claimed that he observed warming actually reflects the Urban Heat Island effect, as most readings are done in heavily populated areas which are expanding with growing population (which of course will be hotter due to roads/buildings/people etc trapping heat).
I definitely think it is a good time for people to start investigating the possible bias on this issue, as those who are lobbying government for changes in policy on industry are going to start having serious economic effects (on both companies and the country as a whole) without the majority of the public being aware that global warming is a theory, and not fact, but hey - if global warming is the accepted theory, i'm happy to reduce the methane levels in the atmosphere by eating more steak, heh.
I have no doubt the ability to record from the microphone when the phone is off is available to certain people, most phones nowdays have alarms where you can set it for a time - turn the phone off and it will turn itself back on at the specific time and sound your alarm. Now if you think about what does this, then surely there are other abilities built into using the phone when you believe it is "off". Hell, the whole "geographic communications cell that the call was made in is stored with the details of the call" giving away your location, and then being able to pinpoint it via triangulation from other cells is worrying enough.
It seems as if with the advent of mobiles taking over from landlines in the vast majority of calls, network operators are being made to (or doing it for their own reasons) to provide vast amounts of information and features so that calls and conversations can be tracked like this. It's all very well catching criminals (although the Orwellian feelings are building within me already), but what happens when it's misused. This situation reminds me very much of ISPs and net service providers with the email tracking/reading and browsing history situations.
It's somewhat ironic at a time when governments such as Britain's are pressuring their citizens to be ecologically responsible and do their part, when at the same time they are just taking their issues and hiding them 'under the carpet to say'. Especially when MEDC countries are pressuring the developing countries in order to lower their economical aspirations in order to be environmentally aware ("Meanwhile the British leader is likely to raise the issue of global warming, and what developing countries like India can do to help tackle it." at the BBC). Seems to me as when the developed world is pushing on one front in order to gain public support and more education towards global warming, behind the backs of this they are just doing the same as usual in order to get rid of problems that would require investment, something we should be ashamed of.
I may be wrong, but it is my understanding that "Tolkien Enterprises" hold the rights to the films (LOTR, Hobbit etc) and were paid by New Line in order to grant them a license to create them (evidently this would have been for a large sum of money and all of the films at once, rather than licensing each individual one at a time as it would have given either side a chance to renegotiate based on the success/failure of what was release). This deal would have been signed with a clause saying that it "ends" in X amount of years, so that Tolkien Enterprises take back the rights and can either produce it themselves or relicense it to another studio in the case of New Line not producing the film in time, putting it on the backburner or just deciding not to work on it for monetary/staff reasons (such as the dispute with Peter Jackson now).
If New Line do not get production underway pretty soon, they risk the rights being taken away from them and I have a feeling that is the primary reason why they are making noise about moving on without Peter Jackson, because evidently they do not want to stop fighting the lawsuit but that is probably the only way it could happen any time soon. What they risk is the backlash that is beginning now, with stars such as Ian Mckellen expressing "dissapointment" at the Jackson scenario, I have a feeling that New Line will run into some problems getting a number of the actors and crew back on board without the man who practically 'made' the franchise what it is.
A small number maybe, but Sony are also undoubtedly losing out on the import markets. After they recently shut down Lik-Sang.com and got importing PS3's to the UK and a number of other countries banned by law they will have surely shut out a sector of the market of those who are the most hardcore gamers and cannot wait for their consoles (with the European and Australasia launch coming in March 2007 due to lack of Blu-Ray components). It's a shame they had to go to these lengths, which would be understandable if they had have had a global launch date, but leaving some countries without the console for a number of months isn't the best idea, and by blocking imports to those countries they are only loosing more sales and aggravating consumers.
I have a feeling that Sony will need to start giving incentives or at least making it a desirable environment for developers in order to create some games that will become a MUST for the console buyers (like Halo for Xbox, Gears of War/Halo 3 for Xbox360, Mario for N64 etc) if they want to really compete with the low priced Wii and the 360 which is flaunting it's powerful internet features now.
From the looks of things, Microsoft are trying to seperate PC gaming and console gaming even (while trying to favour the latter with more dedication to products and software development) at the same time as merging them together. With the whole inclusion of Media Center on Vista, MS are making the package of having an Xbox 360 hooked up to your home network a lot more enticing, but at the same time they are adding some features to the new OS that are making it look tough for games to emerge and be enjoyable from, at least until a lot of gamers upgrade and fully prepare their systems. Something tells me that although PC gaming will remain a strong force, with these extremely powerful consoles that are becoming more intertwined with what a PC can do (Wifi, Browsing, Media playing, Demo & Video etc downloading, IM, Email etc) that we might just see a decline in the extremely casual PC using people who decide that their console is a more fun way to do some things, without constant upgrades, costs, monitors etc - especially gaming.
I'm all in favour of Microsoft's new plan, it will be good to see some more media content on the Xbox Live Marketplace rather than just game trailers or promotional clips, however what makes me worried is the size of these things. Take for example you are the average user of an Xbox and you download a few demos first (Need For Speed Carbon alone is 1.1gb) and then you decide to rent 2 movies or so. I'd say you will very quickly find yourself running out of harddisk space on premium consoles, or cores that have been upgraded. Especially the way they are letting people buy and keep TV shows, it seems as if they will need to start upping the hard drive sizes pretty quickly if they start offering this amount of content, not to mention the speed of the network which already almost grinds to a halt during weekends due to the huge amount of traffic. It will be interesting to see how it works out and how much competition there will be between the Xbox 360, the iTV and anything Sony can produce in the entertainment section with the PS3.
Damn FTC - always ruining people's day. Here was me thinking xx_Sexy_Girl_99_xx was really interested in me, now I wonder why she always wanted my address.
I'm hoping Microsoft will address a problem that a friend who works at Microsoft said they had recieved a lot of complaints over, one of which was from me as it can get pretty darn frustrating. When you download the trial of an arcade game on the Xbox Live and then delete it (whether because you don't want to buy it or you want to buy it at a later date), the game will always show up in the "My Games" part with no gamerscore attached which then lowers your overall points percentage. Not even deleting the game data on the system will fix this due to the fact that as soon as it is downloaded it is added to your profile on Xbox.com and your Gamercard.
Other than that, it is good to see Microsoft working on keeping the system up to date, as are some of the games (Perfect Dark Zero has updates 'frequently' compared to games such as Ridge Racer 6, which have glaring glitches that really disturb gameplay and the general feel of the game which are never patched). I hope more developers who are working on the 360 start following MS's lead and making sure all of their products are kept up to date and user friendly.
On one hand they are foolhardy for doing this, on the other it is a brave decision to improve the game. Almost every shop around here is full of WoW stuff leading up to christmas - the 15 day trial packs are literally flying off shelves which shows they will have more than enough new players getting the game for christmas and joining in. However there would have been a huge upsell market for the Burning Crusade pack if it was released in time for Christmas, granted most people who play Warcraft will eventually pick it up but Christmas would have been a perfect time for Blizzard to cash in on both new gamers and existing players.
However, by choosing to delay it they have put the playability of the game over the profit they could make by throwing it out there and just continually patching it up to standard (cough, Gothic 3, EA, cough). I'm quite happy to see a game studio finally taking the time to make a game good before cashing in on it, instead of throwing out whatever they have done to make the sales that will occur anyway. I just have to wonder whether this will be the last delay we will see for Burning Crusade, or whether more lay in wait in development hell.
Google giving advice is always going to help two sets of people - those who already have websites and want to optimise them, and those who are attempting to create websites to rank highly. If we look at why people creating websites usually want to get them to rank highly google the reasons are primarily monetary, which means that this tool is mainly giving advice to those who are trying to displace older (and possibly better sites). Say I have site A. which is dedicated to mountain biking news and has been running since 1997 with messageboards, news etc and hasn't been optimised for the best google rankings and we have Site B. which was created 3 months ago and uses RSS syndication to just serve up content from other sites and monetising it with something like adsense is the main point, then which should really rank higher in Google? I'm thinking A because it is more of a legitimate site.
I think there is a point where trying to rank highly in Google is OK for wanting to growth in your site, but if Google continue to give out such tools then surely people will start producing sites that match exactly what it wants to see in order to get traffic. I'm starting to think that it shouldn't be sites that have to be optimised for Google to rank them highly, but Google to be optimised to pick up the best sites for each search term instead of landing pages or shells that are just there for advertising revenue.
Is this really the way E3 want to be going? the whole point of it was mass exposure to the gaming industry along with the public. It was a spectacle, an event and being over the top was part of it. Now there are many other expos like this in other industries which run well, and the main reason for that is that the exhibitors have a reason to be there other than displaying their product (most usually it is networking with those in the same industry (an example being web expos, trading links/traffic etc)). However in the games industry, a rep from Nintendo isn't exactly going to hop on over there to the Sony booth and start discussing how they can do business, because in this industry it is done a lot higher up. E3 had some core problems and mis-management only aided these, along with the fact that so many people use the internet to get their news (Gamespot, IGN etc) that they don't need the previous magazine coverage of the event or even the event in order to stay in touch with what is happening. I think the decline of E3 is only bringing in a new era for the way that the games industry interacts with critics and fans alike.
The iPod is a revolutionary device, although maybe not techinically, it has entered the conciousness of the public and it will be extremely hard for anyone to even try and match it's market dominance. The one thing Microsoft could have done with the Zune was to make sharing music unrestricted, but once again red tape has stopped it and the DRM will limit the function that could have made the Zune the better choice (along with Apple cutting the price, a move Microsoft didn't expect). I think the only thing to match the iPod now will be a device that is a mix of genres, much like the phone that is rumoured to be in development from Apple, if they can successfully merge the best features of an iPod (plus storage) with the good functions of a phone and make it stylish (not a hard job for Apple right now) then they may just have a chance of beating one of the devices of the decade. For other companies, it will be very hard to beat the iPod in the long run, and the only front I think they will have is pricing - which will only hurt their bottom line, as people will pay a premium to have the iPod. Congratulations to Apple on their market domination with this one, it's well deserved.
I doubt this will ever become realised in the mainsteam concious, it's been ingrained on the entire world and I don't think there is anyone (english speaking) who wouldn't be able to quote it. I don't think it's ever really been an issue of dropping the 'a', the line gains memorability for that. At the end of the day I think this research will end up as a nice section of trivia somewhere, but we will all remember the quote that came through on that day, and surely the communications glitch was a part of history too, so it should be remembered that way IMHO.
Is it just me, or do a huge number of people claimed to have purchase flights on the Virgin Galactic flight. For the last three years or so there have been sporadic news stories about celebrities, businessmen and just generally wealthy people getting their place on there, it makes you wonder if it isn't just PR on some of their accounts. What worries me more is about their preparations for the journey, astronauts spend years preparing to go into space and now it is being treated like a long-haul flight for some, I'm sure they will have some training but are they sure it is enough for the kind of forces that their body is going to experience while taking off?
As much as I hail Richard Branson for his innovation (as one of the few successful British entrepreneurs), I must add my view that for something like this, we really should leave it to the professionals before we are sure of what can and can't be done on commercial levels (after all, Columbia and the launches after that have only served to remind us of what a dangerous feat it really is).
"In a February story for CNet, it was estimated that the total cost of components for the PS3 would be in the neighborhood of $725 to $905". I highly doubt that this is still the case, especially after they cut the price of the Japanese launch machine on Friday (link). This is backed up further by the fact that the Japanese market is by far their strongest and it is definitely where they are going to sell the most machines, considering the US has already got market proliferation from the Xbox 360 which will be challenging it thanks to a price cut at christmas, along with the introduction of the Wii. Not to mention Europe, which doesn't even get it until March 2007.
In Japan, the PS3 will be the main console over there and sales this christmas will be huge for them. There is no way Sony would take such a hit on the launch machine, and I'd put money on the cost of components having dropped a good deal in the last few months.
I can see those students having a problem with that, after all it is your work and you don't really want others to keep hold of it while checking. It's like turning up to an airport, handing your mobile over for them to check it wasn't dangerous, and then them handing it back to you after copying your phone book and all of your messages off of it. The company should check it against the database, and then get rid of it, their database shouldn't be automatically updating with every paper that goes through it because eventually it will start catching out genuine work purely due to the amount of data that is being processed through it.
I think the problem here is that the company is permenantly keeping it, and I'd be pretty smarted about that as well, but then on the flip side of the coin for the company and the school, the more copies they have, the more likely (in their view) it is that they will catch those who for example, are using their older brothers essays to go through or using work taken from old pupils. It's a tough situation to gauge, but the students have a strong point on the IP there. That being said, why not just add Wikipedia to the database and catch 99.9% of students, heh. Juding from teachers I know, Wikipedia is the bane of their existance when it comes to schoolwork.
This is all great from Microsoft, but the TV's really need to start catching up. In the UK there are barely any true HD units out, the rest just replicate it even when branded as HD, which means that not only will this not help our gaming, but it will be pretty much redundant for most of the life of the console thanks to the saturation of HDTV in the UK being so slow. I think Microsoft definitely need to think about their target markets more and how technology is improving there, because it is all well and good making the console excellent for those who can run it on top-notch hardware - but that is bound to be a small percentage of those who buy the console.
This story reminds me of the time when a random FPS (i think it was one of the Rogue Spear games) featured a website adress on one of the posters in a level and the guy who owned the domain noticed a serious amount of traffic start hitting it, which I guess can tell you that if anything it will expose people to your brand. Project Gotham 3 and games like Fifa 06 used all of the advertising boards to make extra cash and this wasn't picked up so much because players were so used to adverts being there in real life, but I think it will be definitely harder for different genres of games to start making inroads into advertising in game, sure you could see Solid Snake walk past a Coke machine but I doubt we will see Sonic eating some butterfingers anytime in the near future.