Riven did a much better job of incorporating the puzzle into the story. most of the puzzles were just broken or locked objects. you just needed to figure out what was wrong with them.

Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), which is basically anything that you find in a supermarket, has always struggled with how to approach the internet/digital. Their model for the last fifty years has been to blast ads all over TV, which was easily segmented into specific groups depending on the product. I spent some time working with these companies, and by and large they are not sure how to approach the internet.

Buying up lots of banner ads isn't the same as buying lots of time during specific shows. No one wants to sit through their commercials, and tracking Return on Investment on their ads is entirely different than what they are used to, and the jury is still out on effectiveness of those ads. Facebook lets anyone come along and build out some very, very specific segments and advertise their niche product. Also, as TV watching drops, CPG HAS TO find a better way to reach people online.

Because CPG still hasn't found something that "clicks" in the online space, and this looks like an experiment for Crest to see if this is an area that makes sense for them to explore long term... they can't reach people on TV because people are playing games, so why not advertise to them in the game?

Like previous attempts, it just doesn't really make sense to the audience. CPG still has some work to do to find a way to reach people, and there is a LOT of money to be made by the person that figures it out.

Star Wars may be the brainchild of Lucas, but Gary Kurtz is what gave it its soul. My theory is that once Kurtz and Lucas split after Empire, the franchise was toast. Kurtz wanted Jedi to be much darker, Lando and the Falcon were to be destroyed during the battle, and no happy teddy bear celebration at the end. In my mind, this would have been a much more powerful film.

If you look at the tone of Jedi, especially the Ewoks, it is easy to see that Lucas was starting to get no critical feedback of his ideas. Kurtz filled this role. Without him, the franchise falls apart and we wind up with the crap that was the prequels. Lucas is a terrible director on his own. Just awful.

This is why I have high hopes for Ep. 7- Lucas is out the door, and Abrams probably understands what Star Wars means to the fans better than Lucas ever did. I just hope that Ford's role isn't too similar to Nemoy's role in Abram's Star Trek movie... a star cameo that helps our protagonist when he needs it most.

IT departments won't go away, but it will be less common for a small or medium sized business to have dedicated IT people, because the services the business relies on will not need full time people.

For example, the onsite maintenance and administration time of Google Apps is much, much lower than using Microsoft Exchange. Google has an army of people maintaining the servers, but the end business doesn't have to incur this cost.

Beyond money and desire- do they have the talent? Startups actually put ads on public transportation and billboards out here trying to recruit developers. In a market where the chances of making it rich at a startup are actually fairly high, it's hard for Yahoo to capture or retain talent in the face of Google, Facebook, or one of the thousands of startups.

I wonder if things would have been different under Microsoft management. Would Microsoft have folded it's better Bing technologies under the better-known Yahoo! Brand? (For example, Bing maps could have been the improved Yahoo maps) Would Microsoft have cut this number of people from Yahoo, or would none of those cuts ever happened?

Reddit isn't that small anymore- they had two billion pageviews in December.

Eventually, we will just analyze everything that makes us enjoy a sporting event, and the computer will just spit out a game that we will enjoy watching, for sheer entertainment value.

China has come a very, very long way from when they used to only turn out crap. Look around you- most of the things you'll find were at least partially made there.

The speaker grill and printing "iPad 2" on it seems pretty un-apple.

... why are they not just making the OS free for all? The Hexeh Chromium builds have shown that it can run on a variety of hardware... I don't understand why Google is partnering with device manufacturers instead of just letting this into the wild for everyone...

I think the author is making a very valid point that yes, you'll have greater speed, but you'll have to be very careful with it. I had been considering getting a 4G device to be my main internet connection, but I'd chew through the plan after watching a couple movies on NetFlix.

Verizon is going to have to come up with new pricing plans if they expect people to jump to this sort of tech en masse

-The first time Marty goes back -When Biff takes the DeLorean from 2015 -When Marty and Doc go back to get the almanac -While all that is going on, there's also the DeLorean in the cave

This is how Zuckerberg is protesting the new Facebook movie- he's keeping everyone from procrastinating, making them all do work. Bastard.

The difference being that the precedent with video games is that once you buy it, you own it and you can play it whenever you want- I still break out Riven every now and again just for fun. However, with an MMO, you are kind of gambling that the servers will stay there as long as you want to play the game. It makes it impossible to relive some nostalgia if the servers are not there.

Now, with a little luck, the studio will open source the server software so someone can run it.