Newcomers get the thumbs-down
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Barring Sammir Dattani who's been noticed in spite of his disastrous parent-vehicle Uuf Kya Jadoo Hai, all the debutantes in 2004 have been received lukewarmly by the audience.
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Tycho:  I really must stress to online PlayStation 3 partisans the extent to which they were not at E3.  Those of you playing "the home game" might have seen a trailer or two and come away with the idea that with grace and pride your grey altar stood high over conquered foes.  Ain't the case.
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Valleywag is mostly puff pieces. I guess they're writing about people who, for one reason or another, they don't want to offend. Typical of business press. Don't screw your sources or else they'll dry up. Don't speak ill of Steve Jobs or else no cover picture for you. So, it's reasonable to conclude -- if you read something unbelievably nice about someone in Valleywag, that person is a source. Thing is, they're reduced to attacking about five people. And the flow is miniscule. A pointer from VW is worth about 20 hits. In other words, hire a business reporter to do VW, and you get Infoworld, about 25 years too late.
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I asked for advice in reducing vitriol on this blog, and a couple of readers helpfully identified a source of the problem: me. They and many others didnât like my suggestion to require commenters to use their real name. Tartuffo wrote: âAs someone who has been on the Internet since 1981, from alt.flame to the [...].
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I see that Cory Doctorow has made another panicked grab at relevancy once again! His most recent InformationWeek article, How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community, is his latest exercise in self-deception where he tries convincing himself that he knows something about the hip, happenin' thang we call the Innanet.        That Cory has little useful knowledge of keeping hostile jerks from taking over online communities is proven most aptly and amusingly by the way he chose to keep hostile jerks from taking over his weblog BoingBoing: he destroyed its community by shutting off its comments system.
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When I suggested in a recent column that a problematic 5 percent of employees account for 75 percent of the IT support burden, I expected a wave of âright on!â letters from IT support staffers. After the column was published, the letters did come â most of them disagreeing with my premise, with one reader suggesting that the real whiner was yours truly. I still think itâs outside the realm of overextended IT departments to provide training on basic computing skills (which I defined as âmanaging and finding files, and basic working knowledge of suites such as MS Officeâ). But my thinking was adjusted a bit by the thoughtful feedback.
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People who take entry-level jobs are supposed to be young, inexperienced and just out of college.
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Bad contractors can make your life miserable -- avoid them.
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&#39;You suck! You&#39;re a piece of &amp;%$#*! You can&#39;t play worth *$#!% you loser, so SIT DOWN!!!&quot; That&#39;s what a guy was yelling at a visiting player during a White Sox-Angels game earlier this summer.
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Once you ship a product you immediately start getting feedback, and if you're paying attention you can easily find the trends.  One of the big pieces of feedback about FlickrFan relates to branding. When you download the app and mount the disk image, where's FlickrFan? It isn't until after you figure out that you need to open the folder and click on the OPML app that you see FlickrFan. (I need to add a Readme file that makes this much more obvious.) I knew this would be confusing. I could have renamed everything FlickrFan, it wouldn't have taken much work, or testing, and the chance for breakage was nil, since it was a new product. I didn't do it for a simple reason, the engine that runs FlickrFan will run other apps, and I knew I would be shipping one such app within a matter of weeks. Once there's a second app running in the same engine, it may still be confusing. But there will be more after that.  Maybe there won't be millions of users, but my goal is to bootstrap a community of networked living rooms. For that I don't need more than a couple hundred households who want to play and I already have that.  I will soon tell you more about the new app, and if you're paying attention on my Twitter feed, you'll get a pretty clear idea of where this is going. It's all about communities, social features and big media. FlickrFan is about beautiful pictures on high def TV. The next one is about... Stay tuned!
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Target to the blogosphere: youâre irrelevant.
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By Jonathan Storm, The Philadelphia Inquirer  Jun. 24--It's enough to make a critic -- or anybody else who makes less than $1 million a year -- cry.   Big-bucks TV programmers are proving themselves to be stupider than the average-Joe viewer.
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Microsoft's attempt to win over new users with a cut-down version of Windows has come in for strong criticism.
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Tycho:  There was so much news, we had to poke it with a schtick.  I'm allowed one or two puns like that a year.  At least, I hope.    The value of each leisure minute has increased exponentially since the holiday deluge began, that's not precisely news, but the games that are losing out over here are of such a high caliber that it's a little scary.  I downloaded the demo for PGR4 and loved it, in fact I still play it - I'm playing it right now, and you would be horrified if you knew how.  This said, I have no idea where I would fit this game into my life.  This is patently ridiculous - a game of this obvious polish and pedigree would command that tray for weeks at any other time of the year.  We're both in love with Zelda, but can so rarely consummate this love as bright baubles are constantly rolling in.  Gabriel doesn't even make time for nightly Halo - his evening is entirely routed to The Lion War.  When Call of Duty 4 hits on the fifth of November, I have plans to betray our collective in a similar fashion.    The time I did have yesterday wasn't even invested in the long-form retail games that I see as the core of my responsibility to you.  Every moment not devoted to Halo was soaked up by Every Extend Extra Extreme, an XBLA game I had already played on the Playstation Portable and the PC, only to find that its true calling was on the console.  Another game with a strong audio focus from the creators of Lumines and Meteos, the entire objective is to blow yourself up in such a way as to create the most casualties - I can't wait until Jack gets ahold of this one.  It has other modes, but that's the basic idea, and of course it's all very abstract.  Like other games from Q Entertainment, how much you derive from it is often a function of how open you are to its audiovisual synergies.  It's fun, but that fun is not a result of complex systems.      I also picked up Everyday Shooter for the PS3, in further dereliction of my duties, having a series of profound experiences with it that might be too strange to describe.  The game's author expresses a debt of gratitude toward Q's Mizuguchi and others, but he's accomplished something wholly his own here.  Superficially it's one of these dual analog, robotronian shooters every platform is weighed down with now.  Don't be fooled by that trope, and certainly don't think you can come to any conclusions based on screenshots.  Where Lumines or Every Extend Extra draws from electronica, a great match for their style of presentation, Everyday Shooter disarms the player with a suite of earnest, analog songs played on guitar.  At times, during the course of ordinary play, I felt as though I were interrupting him.     In gameplay terms, each level apparently plays around with the idea of chains and combinations, and I say "apparently" because I've only played two levels in - every time I die, I get sucked in by his menu.  It's just a bunch of text, but moving down or right produces a single note, and pressing left or up produces a two note chain.  Pressing a face button produces a string of four notes, and with these rude tools one can actually augment the title music quite well.  I didn't realize I was doing it at first.  When Gabriel came in perhaps fifteen minutes later, I felt as though I had been woken from a dream.
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Sure, it's old and revered -- but it's also critically flawed. Consider ignoring it.
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Tycho:  When I started reading articles about Senator Brownback's bill - the one that would require that the ESRB play through games in their entirety - I expected to agree with it in principle, but take issue with its execution.  The shrill phase of the site, where I would don armor and ride under the aegis of the true gamer no matter how mild the incentive, now rests in the reliquary with Xbox Controller Jokes and Jabs At User Friendly.  I had chosen a singularly poor moment to become reasonable.  Upon further examination, the Senator's plan (which I think may be rightly called a machination) is the sort of thing one might forge in the fires of Mount Doom.
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Toronto Sun. Add Bob Clarke to the list of NHL people who aren&#39;t overly impressed with union boss Bob Goodenow. The Philadelphia Flyers general manager dumped on Goodenow after being asked