Over at Hugs for Monsters it’s Jersey boy owner/visual artist Joe Lifrieri isn’t putting up with coding his site for arcane web browsers or the users that still refuse to upgrade. The target is IE6 users who really should upgrade to ANYTHING really.
I have a mac which means I’m using a flavor of -NIX for my operating system. To all you PC users shut the fuck up. I’m not installing Microsoft Silverlight. I try and stay out of bed with as many companies as possible. Sure everyone switches sheets, but I’ll be damned if I leave this world due to a venereal disease. This is just another clue that the software running our government needs to be removed from the commercial world. I’m sure the bleeding costs behind the investment on one side and the lobbying on the other are staggering.
It a turn of good news the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a brief about reversing a decision that border agents can search laptops and mobile devices.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) filed an amicus brief on Thursday with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, asking the full court to rehear and reverse a decision by a three-judge panel that ruled that border agents can routinely search files on laptops and mobile devices.
The random searching of laptops is “widespread,” said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney with the EFF. The U.S. Department of Justice “claims that U.S. border agents have the power to do so, no suspicion needed, and there are plenty of reported incidents,” he added.
It’s not surprising that big companies hate Net Neutrality. Its the cornerstone concept of the internet model! Around here we try and track the issue as we do anything else. Most of the time we catch the big stories, but love it when something smaller shows itself. Well this is a big deal, but little is known about it. Its time to spread the word.
“I’ve worked in industry for many years, and I have no doubt that these kinds of plans are being made. But it will only happen if we let it. If you are a reporter, or know a reporter, there’s a huge story here.
Also, I urge everyone to join the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and donate to the cause of net neutrality. They’ve been fighting the good fight against usurpation of the internet by monied interests since dinosaurs roamed the Earth (or thereabouts…). And while you’re at it, buy Cory Doctorow’s bestseller, LITTLE BROTHER, a can’t-put-it-down thrill ride that deals with these kinds of issues.
I have said before, and I truly believe, that equal access to the internet is not just a First Amendment issue, but also a Second Amendment issue. The founders intended to create a power balance between and among the different actors in our democracy. The power people hold over our government is not through handguns and assault rifles; it is through our ability to share information and join forces to hold the powerful accountable to us.”
Nick Carr, the author of The Big Switch, recently wrote an article for The Atlantic questioning whether the usages of new technology are removing intelligence from humans. To tell the truth I follow Egon from Ghostbusters quote of, “Print is Dead,” for the most part due to loving the transition of magazines and newspapers into an online format. Why does this pertain to the article? Well, its not online yet, but has been published. This led to going down to the bookstore to actually peruse the magazine section.
We really don’t want to think like Google. We don’t want to speak like Twitter. We don’t want to converse like email. And yet we increasingly do, as the Internet reshapes the world in its image. Carr writes:
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition….The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is recreated in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
In a world where education is paramount UK universities are now available on iTunes U.
Educational content is already available in the United States through the non-charging “iTunes U” section of the music downloading service.
But European universities are now joining, providing video and audio material for students to use on iPods or computers.
The service will include recordings of lectures from leading academics.
“Our students will be able to revisit materials presented to them in lectures, so they can learn anywhere and anytime,” says Professor Peter Mobbs at University College London (UCL)...
Years of business school and working for the man imparted many observations about professional business people. One of those gems is that even though business people may play games, they know shit about the gaming industry as a whole. This evidence repeats itself when Forbes Magazine publish an article describing why the iPhone will kill the Nintendo DS.
Of course many people would prefer to only carry one multipurpose device. This business model has been tried before and died a slow death that would make being bitten by a Komodo Dragon a preferable fate. Hell, even Nintendo considered it at one point filing a patent for a gaming phone. What it seems Forbes is attempting to base their conclusions on (and this is just my theory) is the success of the Microsoft XBox in the US and Europe.
What Forbes hasn’t seemed to take into consideration is an unspoken primary law for a company to succeed in the gaming industry. In order to succeed in the short AND long term any gaming company must gain market share in Japan and keep it. Although the law has expanded to include more of southeast Asia with the popularity of MMOs in that region, it is still something that cannot be ignored in the long run. Hell the iPhone hasn’t been introduced to Japan yet, though they’re planning on remedying that soon.
For now my opinion on the situation stands. I doubt that Apple will overtake Nintendo in the handheld industry. They would need to succeed in Japan. They would need to get developers in Japan to do so. Most importantly they would need to convince millions of Japanese that a phone developed outside of Japan can rival anything built there. Its the last task that’ll need some magic to accomplish. After all in the land of the rising sun the general rule is that their technology is about five to six years ahead of the rest of the world.
Good luck Apple. I do love your computers, but I don’t think you’ll succeed in the gaming industry unless you make some great deals and take some major risks.
