FRACT is a fantastic game and even though it’s only in Beta right now, it’s a fully playable beta and the author has graciously made it available for download right now off of his website.
Click here to see the trailer, and the description for it is accurate. If you liked Myst, Rez, and Tron, you will so love this game.
The AT&T “You Will” ads predicted basically every major innovation of the last decade. The only part they got wrong was AT&T actually making any money off of those innovations.
And that’s just over January 3rd’s news about Apples stock price and market capitalization. He’s actually been in a state of joygasm since May of 2010. That’s the date when Apple surpassed Microsoft, becoming the largest company in the U.S. by market capitalization. Let’s review just how far our little Steve Jobs has come:
Early 1980′s:
And that was just the beginning. The revelation that Microsoft “beat him to the loot” as Anthony Michael Hall’s Bill Gates put it, was just the first dip in a downward slide that would lead to Jobs being fired by the company he helped start.
But as others have shown, if you decide to keep going when you have nowhere to go but up, that’s exactly where you go. Jobs would not only found NeXT which would not only create the very first web server but also revolutionize desktop design, he would also use NeXT’s acquisition by Apple to eventually get his old job back. He would soon follow with the iMac, the iPod, and the iPad… all three of which would whittle away at Microsoft’s once dominant market share until ultimately this was achieved…
2010: Apple surpasses Microsoft in market capitalization.
But after successfully telling the grim reaper to fuck off, was Bill Gates ever really that big an obstacle?
I work in the database world. The software I work with is pretty cool at doing data visualization, that is, taking lots of records chock full of lots of data and displaying it in such a way as to make it meaningful to someone attempting to analyze it. Sometimes all it takes is a grid. Sometimes pictures speak louder than words. Here is an excellent example given by Dr. Hans Rosling from the BBC program The Joy of Stats that everybody can relate to using not only a ton of data, but a ton of data collected over a very long period of time. I remember my college statistics experience being very painful. Good visualization methodology properly used makes all that pain go away.
Situation: Amazon (like Barnes and Noble and other online book retailers) offers a vehicle to publish your own e-books. Amazon doesn’t censor what authors put up for sale, probably because of the staff it would require to read thousands of submissions.
Question: Should Amazon be penalized for this? This will no doubt be a precedent setting situation for the entire industry.
Looks like facebook.com is experiencing what is being described as a ‘service disruption.’ Let’s see how many users are staring at their monitors yelling “WORK DAMN YOU!!!!!!” and experiencing the internet’s version of a nicotine fit.
Arthur C. Clarke was right. Today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science fact.
The researchers didn’t find a wide-open door so much as the security employed by a 1920s speakeasy: once they learned the secret knock, the unidentified test car’s controls let them in no questions asked. The team sent fake warning messages from 40 meters away, and in another experiment, got the test car to flash a warning that a tire had lost all pressure while beaming the signal from another car as both drove 68 mph.
Because each sensor uses a unique ID tag, it was also possible to track specific vehicles, in a way that would be far less noticeable than roadside cameras.
The age of the carhacker has arrived.
I’m talking people so fucking stupid that when you tell them to press any key to continue, they look on their keyboard for the key that says ANY. Were it not for these individuals, the Geek Squad would starve, because these are the only people who would happily pay for what the Geek Squad offers.
For the unfamiliar, the Geek Squad is Best Buy’s squadron of deployable nerds ready, willing, and able to perform ambiguous tasks for outrageously usurious fees. To over-simplify what they do… at best, they either do essentially nothing at all, or they do nothing that the average 12 year-old couldn’t handle if you gave them the quick start-up sheet that comes with every computer. At worst, they completely fuck up everything they touch.
Their services run the gamut from installing bloatware to turning things on to charging you to reboot your computer to not following simple safety procedures to taking forever to fix the simplest of problems. A more diverse non-skillset you would be hard-pressed to find in any competitor’s organization. Case in point… the e-Reader configuration “service” (and I use that term loosely) that they offer.
For a mere $29.95, they will (dramatic pause)… TURN YOUR SONY READER ON FOR YOU! (trumpets, confetti, etc.)!!!! WHAT A BARGAIN!!!!
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of facebook.com, apparently played it fast and loose in the area of privacy with his social networking prototype at Harvard, referring to those that submitted their personal information to his site as “dumb fucks.”
Now, I have a facebook account, and like many others, have noticed a disturbing trend toward the amount of your information that is left open to everyone by default. That being said, because of this trend I periodically check my privacy settings to make sure that they are adjusted accordingly. I also make sure that I don’t put every aspect of my life on public, or even semi-public display. This goes for every social networking site on which I participate, not just facebook.
I don’t have a ton of sympathy for those who put their entire life on social networking sites and but then proceed to bitch about invasions of privacy. These individuals are kind of like the people that whine about their weight while they’re eating six big Macs and a diet Coke. On this level, Zuckerberg has a point.
However, referring to the whole of your userbase, whether a few thousand or a hundred million, as “dumb fucks” shows what can happen when your company has a CEO just out of puberty with no adult supervision.
Anyhoo, I took the aforementioned article and posted on facebook, with all the privacy settings for that posting removed.
Who’s the dumb fuck now?
