Revolution specs.
IGN claims
insider info on the Nintendo Revolution specs. Bottom line is, it's an evolution of the Gamecube hardware and ends up being a little bit more powerful than the XBox.
The original XBox.
We'll see how this goes.
Some Sort of Genius.
Jigsaw.com takes an interesting approach to how it collects personal data for resale: it pays you
a buck for each person you enter.
Truly, that is genius-level evil. They've raised the game; congrats all around.
Hey guys
I'm gonna
play some XBox 360.
"We Grant Patents at a Level of Abstraction That Is Unwise."
Absolutely. And it's far past due that a
big stink be made about it. Let's see patent reform as a campaign issue -- certainly it's easy enough to tie it to Social Security, economic security, and employment.
Flat, and uncertain.
While on vacation, I finally had time to start on the post-Christmas stack of reading. I picked two of medium difficuly from the pile (sorry,
The Confusion, but you're just not beach material) which provided an interesting view of the world when read back-to-back. The first was Friedman's
The World is Flat, a meditation on globalization. It summarizes the current state of the business-optimization art, discusses what global competition for jobs means for the long out-of-school workforce in the U.S., and attempts to provide insights into how individuals can ride the global economy to greater success. I'd say it succeeded at the first two goals, and did about as good a job as can be expected on the last one (summary: be paid for your creativity and adaptability, not your knowledge). On the whole, a highly recommended read.
The second,
What's the Matter With Kansas?, is ostensibly a discussion of how the Republican Party uses emotional issues to advance their economic agenda, and how that leads to millions of Americans voting against their own success. To be fair, it covers precisely that for the first hundred pages or so, but it then moves on to cover broader topics -- like the impact of globalization on blue-collar workers in post-industrial America.
The author of
Kansas, Thomas Frank, is a bit more emotionally attached to his work than Friedman was, but rightly so, as
Kansas is largely written as an opinion piece. Frank's attitude towards globalization is similar to how it's presented by Lou Dobbs and other America-first commentators: as an insidious, growing force, one best controlled through legislation and boycotting those dastardly outsourcing companies. By contrast, Friedman sees it as the inevitable and entirely unemotional market-driven response to new skills, workers, and types of work. If Frank's recommendation is opposition, Friedman's is acceptance. He thinks early action and reeducation are more realistic courses of action for the displaced than reactionary trade embargoes, and eventually he will be right.
In any event, I found the most interesting comparison point between the books to be how they present their case studies. Frank discusses a particularly poor Kansas county in a generalized way:
"What seems to enrage Kiowa County is the government power that has kept them afloat through their hardship. Nearly 29 percent of the county's total personal income comes in the form of government benefits and other transfer payments; in crop subsidies alone Kiowa County farmers have received $40 million since 1995. And yet what Kiowa County wants -- desperately, urgently, if the art of M.T. Liggett is any indication -- is for the liberals to pack up their communist EPA and their fascist feminism and their "anti-Christian" evolution and leave them alone. Al Gore received only 18 percent of the vote out here, and in 1992 the county actually voted to secede from Kansas, to be done once and for all with the high-handed ways of those city slickers in Topeka."Friedman, on the other hand, takes as case studies his interviewees and contributors, using them as concrete (albeit statistically unusual) examples of successful adaptation to a changing business world. Friedman's subjects are as adept at riding the outsourcing wave as Frank's are awkward, but one finds Friedman's examples more resonant as they're actual people. Frank's aggergations lose some credibility by comparison.
Which brings us to the collision that originally inspired this post: Friedman discusses, in
Flat's final pages, how various national and international conflicts will help or hinder the transformation of the global economy. About extremism in the Middle East, he writes:
"(...) Humiliation is the key. It has always been my view that terrorism is not spawned by the poverty of money. It is spawned by the poverty of dignity. Humiliation is the most underestimated force in international relations and in human relations. It is when people or nations are humiliated that they really lash out and engage in extreme violence. When you take the economic and political backwardness of much of the Arab-Muslim world today, add its past grandeur and self-image of religious superiority, and combine it with the discrimination and alienation these Arab-Muslim males face when they leave home and move to Europe, or when they grow up in Europe, you have one powerful cocktail of rage. As my friend the Egyptian playwright Ali Salem said of the 9/11 hijackers, they 'are walking down the streets of life, searching for tall buildings --for towers to bring down, because they are not able to be tall like them.' "Which is really an elaborate restatement of
Kansas' thesis, that emotional and moral issues resonate so strongly with conservative Christian voters that they lash out against the perceived enemy (Democrats) when in fact they're tightening their own nooses.
Perhaps the United States and Middle East have more in common than we'd like to admit.
Take note, RIAA.
Maybe music sales are declining lately because service industry jobs have been
increasing lately. Workers subjected to top 40 on the PA all day aren't likely to go buy the instruments of their torment at night.
Just a thought.
High mehfinition.
Evidence suggests an unresolved divide in the game industry between people who believe HD improves the gaming experience and people who think it's just useless flash and dazzle. We are now at the stage where someone's suggested XBox 360 games be given
different scores depending on the TV and resolution used during the review process.
Is this an issue the game industry has discussed within itself, and decided upon? I suspect not. On the one hand, Microsoft has stipulated that 360 games
must support HD resolution:
In an unprecedented move, all Xbox 360 games have been given the following edict: Support widescreen formatting and 720 progressive scan. These aren't suggestions, they're requirements, and the benefit to HDTV owners is significant.But on the other hand, game developers haven't expressed a whole lot of excitement about this requirement. In fact, the current golden boy of the industry seems pretty decisively
against it:
"The graphics on any game fall away within the first 10 or 15 minutes, and you're pretty much left with the interactive experience. Are you mentally engaged in what you're doing? (...)
I'm only interested if I can achieve-and if the team I'm working with can achieve-an emotional impact or a story impact via what makes a game a game: interactivity."Whether or not we choose to acknowledge it, this is a highly devisive issue in gaming circles and it isn't going away. Games are becoming accepted into popular culture, and the industry is beginning to recognize its maturation. The question is, will the unique quality of the medium -- interactivity -- be cited as the key reason for the curious to care about games? Or will the developers allow console manufacturers to dismiss their gameplay experiences as raw materials only properly enjoyed via high-def displays and 5.1 surround? The gamers who've been around awhile seem uniformly unimpressed by the old better-graphics-is-better-fun saw, but it's pretty well-proven in the marketplace, and graphical excellence continues to be a key talking point for magazine previews.
If interactivity is going to win out over soft-edged self-shadowing at 1900x1200, there must be clear examples of games that overcame their unremarkable looks to be successful both in the marketplace and with best-of-2005 articles. Fortunately, there's a real forehead-slapper of an example: the most popular game of the last few years was GTA, and it was not exactly a graphical powerhouse.
Perhaps there's life in this debate yet.
Okay, look.
I can understand that the Office team wants to overhaul the interface. Everyone agrees, it's way past its sell-by date. And, I get that their philosophy is that it's better to sacrifice more screen space permanently for the "ribbon" in order to lose the floating toolbars and other detritus that clogs the screens of past versions.
But I refuse to believe that we really need
that many buttons on a pop-up email composition window. Good god, what a mess. Is the purpose of this window not simply to enter text?
(From
here.)
Stand back, folks -- interaction designers at work.
You may or may not have noticed that, over the past few months, Dunkin Donuts has phased in a new lid design for their regular coffees. It features a protruding, somewhat strawlike lip, like a
sippy cup, and also a piece of loose plastic which snaps into the opening like a latch. Upon first glance it is thoroughly unremarkable, and certainly doesn't look like an improvement. In fact, adding a moving part to a disposable cup lid seems like an invitation for usability disaster. It looks like it needs a manual.
The thing is, though, it works beautifully. This new lid never spills a drop. In a cup holder, in your hand, driving, running: it's a solid performer. Exceeds expectations, you could say. I actually -- and you can try this -- I actually knocked over a completely filled medium coffee by accident, at the post office. The little latch was in, I bumped it with my elbow, and the cup fell hard onto its side. What happened?
Nothing. The cup was actually watertight. It rolled back and forth a little, and then settled. On its side. Not a drop leaked out. It was astonishing.
The closest competitor in the premium lid segment, the white Starbucks lid, is a sadistic thing by comparison, gleefully firing superheated liquid skyward even as you ease the car out of the parking lot. I see you're nodding. You've been there. You've used eight napkins to wipe all the Starbucks-lid-assisted coffee ejaculate off of your windshield, radio, dashboard, and, yes, self. It sucks. It gives the impression that they've never tried driving with one of their products. It gives the impression that they don't care if their customers leave the parking lot unhappy every single time they stop in.
User experience matters. It really does. Since the new lid's come out, I've gone exclusively to Dunkin Donuts. The coffee itself I find mildly preferable, but the complete customer experience -- in particular, the
not being scalded, assholes -- is what seals the deal for me. It feels like someone's paying attention over there. Someone's thinking through the details. Have you noticed how there's a trash can
before the drive-through window, so you can throw out whatever's still in your cupholder from last time? They're paying attention. I can get behind that.
Comedy gold.
I totally have real posts coming, I swear. Until then, I humbly submit
this enumeration of a BOOL as the best laugh the internet has provided me in a long time.
