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Archive: December, 2007

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Paris Hilton Get’s Screwed (It’s not what you’re thinking)

Holy crap. The current head of the HIlton fortune has decided not to will the money to down the family line, but give it to the charity they established.

Paris loses out: Hilton fortune pledged to charity | Entertainment | Reuters:
Wed Dec 26, 2007 3:38pm EST
By Michelle Nichols

NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. hotel heiress Paris Hilton’s potential inheritance dramatically diminished after her grandfather Barron Hilton announced plans on Wednesday to donate 97 percent of his $2.3 billion (1.16 billion pounds) fortune to charity.

The article implies that Barron Hilton’s just flat out embarrassed by his grand-daughter’s behavior.

Wow. That man’s hardcore. Good on him.

categories Funny

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Army working in more Macs to diversify systems, thwart attackers – Engadget

Army working in more Macs to diversify systems, thwart attackers – Engadget:
Posted Dec 22nd 2007 8:04AM by Nilay Patel

The Army’s been poking around with OS X for a while — Xserves have run army.mil for a couple years now — but it looks like it’s about to deploy even more Apple machines in an effort to diversify its install base and frustrate would-be attackers. The move is partially due to the upcoming release of software that will allow OS X machines to work with the Army’s Common Access Card smart card system, but the Army’s experience with the Xserves seems like it’s really the deciding factor: “[The Army's Xserves] are some of the most attacked computers there are,” according to Lt. Col. C.J. Wallington, of the Army’s office of enterprise information systems.

Wow.  My brother just told me about this last night.

I think it’s fantastic news for both the Army and Apple.

Since moving to a job that’s primarily Macs, I’ve noticed a distinct difference in the amount of support necessary compared to past jobs where Windows was the workstation OS.  That’s not to say that they’re perfect, but life’s been pretty good.

I’ve found that the machines that have the most problems are the ones that are driven by impatient and disorganized users.  These are the types of users who cannot wait for the machine to finish a task.  If, for example, they click the print button, and the dialog button doesn’t come up right away, they’ll click it a few more times, then click on their mail’s send/receive button, then open a spreadsheet, then go back to the print dialog, then open InDesign, then chat on iChat and then launch a few more programs.

I try to explain to them that if the machine isn’t responsive, then it’s either working very hard on trying to complete a task, or it’s got something wrong w/ it.  Adding more tasks to the to-do list only complicates matters.  What’s worse is that they also tend to have thousands (12k in one instance) of files on their desktop, and hundreds of documents strewn about all over the hard disk.  While neither of these are catastrophic, what I’ve noticed about these users is that they don’t read dialog boxes and generally drag files all over the place.  My suspicion is that they eventually drag an important system file or directory out of it’s proper place, and then click through the warning dialogs.

I’m sure the Army has their share of users like this, and OS X isn’t impervious to their particular brand of (unintentional) attacks.  Nevertheless, for the other 98% of my users, OS X is very stable, rarely gets in their way, seldom is cause for frustration and is almost always dead simple to troubleshoot.

I doff my cap to you, US Army.

(Go Navy!)

categories Hardware

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New firmware enables PS1 games on PSP through Remote Play – Joystiq

Credit: Joystiq.comWow! I updated my PS3, but haven’t done the PSP, yet. It’s ironic that the patch that just came out does this for me, because I only just tried connecting them for Remote Play on Tuesday.

New firmware enables PS1 games on PSP through Remote Play – Joystiq:
by Christopher Grant Dec 18th 2007 1:45PM

DivX for the PS3 and internet radio for the PSP weren’t the only treats buried in this morning’s latest Sony firmware updates. Nope, they’ve got a little something special for those of you rocking both of Sony’s latest consoles: PS1 games are now playable via Remote Play. What does that mean to you, Joe Gamer? You can download PS1 games on your PS3 through the PSN Store but, instead of swapping games on and off your no doubt ballooning Memory Stick, you can stream them straight from the PS3. You can also leave your favorite PS1 game in the drive and Remote Play that, if digitally distributed media ain’t your thing.

Coupled with the PS3′s recently acquired Remote Start capability and the PSP’s internet-enabled Remote Play functionality, you can tap into that library of PS1 games at home from anywhere in the world. That’s a pretty exciting feature … but, there is one shortcoming: when’s that library of PS1 games coming?

After I made the connection between the two devices, I tooled around the PS3′s cross media bar (XMB) to see what was available and mostly started some game demo downloads (why are Sony’s downloads so unbearably slow?). Once I was satisfied w/ that, I figured I’d try downloading and playing one of the games from PSN. Much to my dismay, the game only worked on PS3, but this new update means I can access quite a few games I have for PS1 now :D

categories Gaming, Hardware, Software

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Heard something interesting at the grocery store

I have no idea how, but today at the grocery store, the cheesy music suddenly piped A Forest by The Cure.

wth?

categories General

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Memoirs

So I finished Memoirs of a Geisha today.

I’m struck by the subtlety of the Japanese culture that I was largely ignorant of.

I was raised wholly American, which is to say that I didn’t learn my parents’ native tongues, and didn’t learn any of their traditions and cultures.

As a US Army soldier, my father heavily courted my mother while stationed in Japan. I use the word courted here, but in truth he hounded her, to hear her tell the story. It’s really quite cute and makes me smile to listen to the two of them recount it from time to time.

When they both left Japan to go to my father’s next duty station in Texas, some time between February 1964 and the following February, they found a very racially charged America. They were two young kids who barely understood one another, communicating between themselves in their own dialect of broken english. They feared that raising children who couldn’t communicate with their schoolmates would lead to a lifetime filled w/ the same kinds of horrible inhumanities they’d seen all too often in the news.

My brothers and I, sheltered from our heritage, have had the thread w/ our past severed. This book helps me repair that damage.

categories Books

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SCEA CEO, Jack Tretton — We blew PS3′s first year. Um. Duh?

While I’m really happy that they’ve finally owned up to having an abysmal first year w/ the PS3, Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) still has some work to do, in my mind.

Tretton: We Dropped the Ball in PS3’s 1st Inning : Next Generation – Interactive Entertainment Today, Video Game and Industry News – Home of Edge Online:
By Tom Ivan

SCEA CEO Jack Tretton has admitted that “missteps” limited the PlayStation 3’s user base during its first year of availability, but says he’s confident Sony will dominate the console market once again.

“The first year is important,” Tretton told MSNBC, “but it’s the first inning of a nine-inning baseball game. You’re not going to win many baseball games if you panic when you’re down 1-0 in the first inning.

”I don’t think there’s any question that there were missteps, but I don’t think anybody is being honest with you if they say that the first year of any platform goes perfectly according to plan.

“I think the biggest miss for us was the launch, in that we had easily a million consumers in North America alone that wanted to get their hands on a PlayStation 3 … and we had roughly 200,000 units to take advantage of that demand. … I think that that was probably the biggest disappointment for the first year.

Well, sorta. It’s definitely true that there was a lot of hype for the PS3, but the demand quickly dwindled. There were a lot of speculative buyers who tried to corner their local PS3 market, buying as many consoles as they could in the interest of flipping them for a profit. I distinctly remember seeing PS3s going for MSRP on all of the popular online auction & personal sales sites.

”But if you put it into perspective, we’re not taking the safe route. We didn’t take the PlayStation 2 and add a few bells and whistles to it. … What we’re trying to do here is … refocus the game industry towards high-definition gaming, a real state-of-the-art, future-proof machine for the next decade.

This is where I think they goofed up. Sony put a LOT of trust in Ken Kuturagi, the man behind the playstation hardware, in every of it’s iterations. With the PS1 & PS2 being the industry juggernauts that they were, it made perfect sense to go back to the well, but what they failed to do is notice Kuturagi’s enormous pride getting in the way of what made the most business sense. While he managed to put together the most impressive console ever, he was reportedly unwilling to flinch on it’s specs, dragging the company down like an over-heavy anchor.

Sony’s refusal to keep him in check early-on and believing wholly in his vision got them to the $600 price point, which still lost them money on each sale.

“If you summed up the mission statement for PS3, it’s short-term sacrifices for long-term gains,” he added. “There was clearly an easier route to go, but we think the route we’re taking is the one that’s going to pay dividends for years to come.”

If Sony were paying closer attention to the impact of their first attempt at marketing one of their consoles as an all-in-one machine, they would’ve noticed that no-one really likes paying for UMD movies on the PSP.

The PSP is enjoying a huuuge up-turn in sales. Sony’s stopped marketing it as an all-in-one device and has re-focused on it’s gaming potential. That could be a coincidence, but let’s face it, w/ DVDs and DVD players being dirt cheap, mobile movie-watching for their target audience is largely pornographic in nature. Not many kids are going to go to the trouble of finding porn on UMD (is there even any available?) to take to school w/ them. That says nothing of them putting it on their memory cards, but that’s completely out of Sony’s control, and isn’t making Sony money anyway, so it wasn’t part of their push in the first place.

Back to the PS3: huuuuge up-turn in sales over the Thanksgiving season in response to the new $400 model and the new marketing campaign that focuses solely on games and gameplay. Gone is the confusing white room campaign w/ a doll-baby’s head…. floating around… or something. The new campaign shows GAMES. THAT’s where the meat of their loyal fan base is.

Good job, Sony. I’m glad to see you’re head’s back in the game. I’m sad to say it, but firing Kuturagi has been helpful in getting some meaningful changes in place. Getting the Sony pictures branch out of the picture (see what I did there?) has been a great move, too.

categories Gaming, Hardware