Rants: Say Goodbye, Firefly
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Readers blast the Goodbye Weapon, the state of mobile technology, and the death of science fiction in Hollywood. Plus: Links to our most commented-upon blog posts.
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It&#39;s over. Our relationship just hasn&#39;t been working for a while, and now, this is it. I&#39;m leaving you for another browser.
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The temptation is overwhelming. Go ahead, admit it. You're fighting it as you read this. You are thinking this series is over.
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Plus: Taxicab chats threatened by technology. [News.com Extra]
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Before heading over to the Web 2.0 conference at the Palace Hotel in SF this morning, I couldn't resist doing some more digging into alternate user interfaces for news reading based on the NY Times keywords.  One thing I learned the hard way is that when you access the Times site from a script (not through a browser) if you try to read an article that's too old (not sure what the time limit is) it tries to redirect you to a login page (which is pretty pointless considering that there's no human being around to log in). I hit this problem yesterday, and then hit it again this morning, but couldn't remember what the problem was. So by writing it up this time I hope to remember.  No doubt some debunked hack journalist posing as a tech industry mogul will slander me for this, but the asshat asshole has no idea how blogging works, and who the fuck cares what he thinks anyway. "cheesecake"
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Yahoo's switchover plan for the photo-sharing site draws fire. Plus: Yahoo unveils a universe of brands. In Monkey Bites.
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The BBC seems to be coming in for strong criticism from some of your correspondents. Many people would like to see the BBC abolished altogether.   I have been amazed by the information on many subjects that are available from the BBC on the internet.
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Over the last 24 hours Twitter has been down as much as it's been up. As always this gives us a reason to think about what the world would be like without Twitter and then those of us who are engineers or would-be engineers, start thinking about ways to fix the problem, whatever it is. The Twitter folk say that the recent problems are related to an infrastructure overhaul. Of course I believe them, I take it at face-value. I think the MacWorld Expo outage was about traffic, I don't think last night's Republican debate took Twitter down. Anyway, I'd like to really understand what's going on behind the scenes at Twitter, Inc. They say they're confident the new infrastructure will hold up better, I'd like to understand why. Can we have a meeting, with a few people from the tech community who actively use Twitter and a few people from the company, to be briefed on what's going on. The same way the President briefs Congress when there's some kind of international crisis.  Twitter wouldn't exist without its users. Everyone wants to know what's going on. Let's have some real honest direct communication?
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They are running for the hills but the end of the trail is Little Big Horn, where Custer made his last stand, and lost his life. Of course the Indians didn't do too well either. AP: "Girding for a potential threat from Apple Inc., online DVD rental service Netflix Inc. is lifting its limits on how long most subscribers can watch movies and television shows over high-speed Internet connections." Please oh Netflix strategy gods, get a copy of Marketing Warfare and read it. Netflix owns what used to be a great hill, for some it might still be one, the movies-by-mail hill. They obviously feel they need to be in the Internet movie business, and in that they have a huge head start that they aren't using. They are being too damned fair to their competitors.  Give the users the ability to grant other sites access to their movie ratings. Build Netflix into the social network of movies. You're already there, but you need to make every other social network connect up to Netflix. You need to be the hub for movie-watching on the net. You're lucky that so far that's what you are. But soon you will have to fight for that too, and then it will be too late to try to force your competitors to connect to your site. They will have data that you want. Then the nature of the negotiating will change. Right now you have the data. Use that power! Make the users everyone think of Netflix as the place on the Net for Flix.
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Those little devils who keep the gears turning inside the Twitter machine added a toy that's got the community sending public love missives whizzing around. You can figure it out yourself, or you can cheat and read this howto. @lovelyperson   Substitute the name of your lover in place of "lovelyperson" and you've just broadcast your love to all of TwitterLand.  While we're on the subject of Twitter, a couple of other items. 1. A must-read piece in today's NY Times, gives a clue why kids don't go for Twitter if their parents use it. No kid wants to be observed by his or her parents. Would they go for it if their parents weren't there? No one knows.  2. Conventional wisdom says you can't build a scalable distributed Twitter out of RSS. At first I accepted this, as a puzzle, then I remembered that's why we put the cloud element in there. I felt that for some applications polling would be too much. Since the cloud element has been largely ignored, most of the the apps of RSS couldn't scale to do what Twitter does. But if RSS desktop apps like NetNewsWire or FeedDemon were adapted to understand the cloud element, and if a proxy system was worked out to get through firewalls and NAT, it might just work.  3. Or you could use XMPP.
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The canceled sci-fi series enjoys a fan base as dedicated as the show's run was short. Now Firefly fanatics will be able to live in a massively multiplayer online universe carved from Joss Whedon's vision. A Wired News exclusive by Mark Wallace.
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Goodbye, $1.99 iTunes. Hello, free NBC rentals.
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[Hollywood News]: London, Nov 2 : Remember those times when your only excuse for watching kung flu flicks were those terribly dubbed movies with no story lines whatsoever?
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Tycho:  Our newest comic is available here, regarding the blogger that Nintendo fired recently.  As usual, Gabriel and I disagree absolutely on virtually every point of this discussion, my own perspective favoring greater liberty while he presents a naked defense of fascism.  The two universal axioms we were both able to agree upon were that:
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I just figured something out, and it's the kind of thing that's best said publicly, even though it's likely to: 1. Be misunderstood and 2. Upset some people. But since it's all about this blog it really is best to air it here. First what triggered the epiphany. I was over at Loic Le Meur's house in San Francisco yesterday having lunch with his family and friends. We were all drinking wine (very good wine of course), enjoying the view, and talking about this and that, when the subject turned to Mike Arrington. Loic said that Mike told him that we used to be best friends. I couldn't figure out what that meant, because our friendship was the business kind of friendship not the personal kind. What does it mean to best friends in that way? And how does that relate to having a blog? It never occurred to me that friendship meant that (here's the epiphany) that I would only say positive things about Mike's business. It didn't occur to me until I heard Loic's side of a blog-fight that I saw happen from a distance, with Sam Sethi, Mike and Loic.  Complicated? You bet. Too complicated. An unspoken deal that I never agreed to. When Mike was starting TechCrunch, I pointed to his blog all the time, with glowing phrases. Because I was truly impressed with what he was doing and because I wanted to encourage other people to do it too. I wanted people to write about technology products based on how they used them, not based on alliances, investment, posturing of execs, the crappy stuff that means almost nothing to users, and imho is just a substitute for actually understanding the technology. Mike was approaching products the way I felt they should be approached. Hence the praise. Fact is, my opinion of Mike, as a person, hasn't changed much in the last couple of years. He has a personal charm and charisma that not everyone finds appealing, but I do. I like hanging out with the guy. However, that doesn't mean that if my opinion of TechCrunch, his business, isn't uniformly positive (and of course these days it is actually fairly negative) that I will withhold it. But it's also part of Mike's way of dealing with people that he sees criticism as betrayal. I just don't see it that way. I've had the shit kicked out of me so many times, and as a programmer I understand that criticism is necessary to perfect a user interface, even to get the damned thing working, that even when it hurts, I have to push the hurt aside and listen to what people are saying, and try to respond to it. Professionalism demands it.  Anyway, one of the reasons I want to write this now is that I've written about Loic's business here a couple of times in very positive terms. I don't want anyone, esp Loic, to assume that this will always be so. If they get in the way of other creative people, or otherwise act as a poor example of entrepreneurship in technology, of course I will write about it, and will say what I think. I would expect Loic and people at his company to take what I write to heart, and consider it. My feelings won't be hurt if they don't do what I say.  Same as when I said Facebook sucks. Or when I criticize Techmeme. This isn't in any way meant to reflect on the quality of the people at Facebook (some of whom I know to be outstanding people of high principle) or Gabe Rivera who I know to be a very smart and competent and honorable person. It's possible to critcize someone's work and still admire the person. My epiphany is that a lot of people who thought were my friends, didn't understand this very basic thing about me.
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Saga appears to be nearing end Could the RegisterFly mess be wrapping up at last? That appears to be the case, according to ICANN's blog.â¦
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Tycho:  The news that Mass Effect would feature an uncompromising, high-res simulation of alien lesbian sex was sweet, and hot, like spun sugar.  For Gabriel, at any rate.  Some of the community reaction is dedicated to demanding gay parity for the male persuasion of this sexual equation, lengthy treatises by oiled men who crave starborne sodomy.  The rest of the dialogue is just boring.  Boring, terrestrial, and (quite frankly) myopic.         Where are the bipedal crustaceans in this calculation?  The swirling, aroused gasses?  The lonely, sentient space station whose hermetic bulkheads hold secret clusters of erotic delights, provided your character has both the skills and equipment?  Carpe astrum, you Goddamned backwater clowns.  There must be an entire universe of thrilling, dangerous, sometimes razor sharp genitalia that slavers beyond the Horsehead Nebula.      You might have noticed that we're advertising an Everquest game, an act that I'm aware places us in significant rhetorical peril.  If I had not found the game completely electrifying, I would have turned down the buy.  Of course, what I find electrifying has somewhat strange parameters.    I used to enjoy a deeply indie online CCG called Star Chamber, which was eventually purchased by an online CCG company called Worlds Apart (which did, among other things, the Lord of the Rings online CCG).  As does happen from time to time, World Apart was eventually purchased by Sony Online Entertainment, becoming SOE Denver.  Since then, they also delivered a Stargate CCG that we liked enough to advertise.  Legends of Norrath: Oathbound is a game within a game, similar to Final Fantasy's Triple Triad, that you can play against other players directly in the client.  It's tied into the loot systems for both EQ games, so that cards you get in packs are actually equipment and so forth - I find that interesting, but as a person with no investment in those systems it doesn't motivate me.  What motivates me is a rock solid, deeply tactical card game, which Oathbound absolutely is.  It plays in a stand-alone client which you can download, and comes with a fairly elaborate tutorial that is worth playing all the way through.  I had no interest in it, I felt confident dismissing it out of hand, and it won me over.  You may find yourself similarly surprised.    I have a very high opinion of Eurogamer, but I don't know how a person could possibly have reviewed Team Fortress 2 already.  We put time in both at work and at night, and I don't feel like I'm any smarter about the sometimes extraordinary interplay between the game's nine Goddamned classes, which mesh in real time to create some kind of shuddering Chaos Engine.  I have a lot of fun playing it, though the Medic brings me the most joy, so I've focused on it almost to the exclusion of all others.  A healing "gun" - like the repair module present in Tribes, almost a decade ago - is an immensely satisfying way to model that relationship.  Anytime your medical gun is attached to a player, your "Overcharge" ability is building up.  When unleashed, both you and your target become invulnerable to enemy attacks.  It's an incredible siege breaking technique, and it's earned simply by embodying the virtues of your class.  But where to use it, when to use it, I'm still learning this - and what's more, other players are still learning that I can do it.  I always love the early period in these multiplayer offerings, before the hard limits are known, when players seem to be magicians and anything is possible.