I was trying for a headline that played on Yakov Smirnoff's old “In Soviet Russia, TV watches you!” schtick from the '80's as a way of pointing to the New York Times' article titled New to Russia, Google Struggles to Find Its Footing. While Google's had difficulty in other countries, such as China, the problem is Russia is one of linguistics rather than politics, as well as the local search companies' ability to receive payment at brick-and-mortar banks since credit cards are still a rare thing there.
Category: Uncategorized
If there's a gamer on your Christmas/Chanukah/Chrismukah/Kwanzaa list, you might find Joystiq's Holiday Gift Guide for Gamers helpful. Listed in the gift guide are:
- Wii, PS3, XBox 360 — the pros and cons of each
- DS Lite and PSP — the pros and cons of each
- Must-have games for the Wii, PS3 and XBox 360
- Console peripherals — the good, the bad and the weird
- Gamer-related clothing and jewellery
I saw this story on the local news in Toronto, but it's now caught the attention of the New York Times:
When Detective Sergeant Jorge Lasso of Hamilton, Ontario, wanted to circulate a surveillance video while investigating an apparent murder near a hip-hop club, he thought of his own children, who are in their 20s.
“They get all their news from the Internet,” he said. “I realized if I was going to communicate with this demographic, we were going to have to go that way.”
So rather than just giving the video — which shows two men whom the police want to question entering a nightclub — to local television stations Sgt. Lasso also posted it on YouTube.
Here's the video in question:
As Federated Media puts it: “Another example of crowdsourcing, but then good police work always has been.”
Links:
(You might want to see this earlier article, News Flash: Hollywood Depictions of Hacking and Cracking are Not Accurate!)
Although Star Trek often got computer interfaces wrong (remember the monotone voice saying “Working…” whenever the Entriprise's computer got set to a task?), there's a great truth about UI in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
In that movie, Captain Kirk and company must return to Earth in the late 1980's to retrieve a pair of humpback whales. There's a scene in which Mr. Scott asks to use a plexiglass manufacturer's computer — a Mac Plus — with funny results. First he tries speaking to the machine, which has no result. He is then handed a mouse, which he looks at quizzically and then assumes is a microphone for voice commands. Finally, he's told to just use the keyboard, to which he replies “A keyboard? How quaint!”. The odd thing is that he starts types at something resembling 200 words a minute, although it's likely he's only seen a keyboard in the 23rd century equivalent of a history book.
User interface guru Jakob Nielsen points out this nitpicker's detail — “Time travellers can use current designs” — in his top ten list of Hollywood UI bloopers. I've listed his bloopers below, but for details, go visit his site:
- The Hero Can Immediately Use Any UI
- Time Travelers Can Use Current Designs
- The 3D UI
- Integration is Easy, Data Interoperates
- Access Denied / Access Granted
- Big Fonts
- Star Trek's Talking Computer
- Remote Manipulators (Waldo Controls)
- You've Got Mail is Always Good News
- “This is Unix, It's Easy”
Of course, like the Hollywood depictions of computers that I blogged about earlier, these bloopers exist because they're good storytelling devices. That doesn't stop people from expecting computers to work this way, but then again, everything I know about American jurisprudence I learned from Law and Order…
Steve “Micro Persuasion Rubel” points to a Comscore Media Metrix study that shows that Canada has the largest percentage of blog readers in their online population, followed by Spain, France, the U.K., Netherlands, the U.S., Italy and Germany:
As the Canadian half of Global Nerdy, I'm getting the sudden urge to re-jig my Google Ads layouts. It's Christmas, you know.
Links:
When I get a new computer, I generally put away the mouse that came with it and plug in my trusty Logitech MX 500 mouse. Whether it's for filling out TPS Reports, blogging or coding, it's the one mouse I swear by (actually, two mice — one for the Mac, one for the Windows box, but they're both the same make and model). I hear that its button action isn't that hot for games, but since I prefer console gaming these days, thats not a really big problem for me.
As both my Logitechs approach their fourth year of daily use, one of them is showing signs of poor motion tracking while the other's button action is getting a bit “bouncy”. I've been eyeing replacement mice, and the recent new York Times piece on the MX Revolution caught my interest. The article describes it as…
…a high-end mouse designed not for those shooting games, but for an activity far more fearsome: handling the vast pile of reports, Web pages, spreadsheets, e-mail threads and other materials that the average desk jockey can face each day at the office.”
Implicit in that description is that it'll make going through code and ebooks — and I'm going through increasing amounts of them these days — like a hot knife through butter.
The speed boost comes from a new scroll wheel, “a heavy, finely balanced wheel that spins through distances that would normally require many scrolling motions and many minutes,” and software that allows for high-speed “coarse” scrolling — great for zipping through hundreds of pages at high speed — as well as standard “fine” scrolling, when you want to scroll line by line.
As a bonus, it's cordless, unlike my current MX 500s.
The MX revolution requires some software to be installed to take advantage of its hyper-scrolling capabilities. Windows XP is supported out of the box, you have to download the Mac OS X software and there's a Vista beta available from their site (the final version of the Vista driver is promised for January 2007).
The price tag is a bit steep — the Logitech site prices it at US$99 — but considering that I recently blew $60 on an XBox 360 wireless controller that I use nowhere nearly as often as a mouse, it might be worth it.
Links:
You've probably heard by now that we — er — “You” are Time magazine's person of the year. Let me tell you, this wasn't how I planned to get that title.
I'm that this title will please some people, make some others groan and will probably annoy the hell out of one of their advertisers. Case in point: if you were to navigate to Time's “Person of the Year” section as of this writing, you'll be treated to this Chrysler Sebring ad first:
Here's a closer look at that video window in the center of the page:
Well, if there's something positive to say about this, it's that it would appear that there is a “Chinese wall” between Time's editorial and advertising departments…