Comment yo dawg (Score 1) 658
I updated 11 Windows XP updates today
I herd u like updating, so I updated your updates so you can update while ur updating.
Wii 'Popularity Bubble' to Burst? 426
A combination of industry and developer observations has prompted Tech.co.uk to wonder if the Wii's overwhelming popularity is due to end sometime soon. This is based on a report from Japanese business newspaper The Nikkei, which published an article recently entitled 'Software Houses Miscalculate Audience, Demand For Wii'. "The report goes on to discuss the likelihood that many Wiis are gathering dust in owners' cupboards, citing one software house president as saying, 'People bought it out of curiosity, and it's likely a lot of them haven't used it.' Given that September saw Wii sales fall sharply in Japan for the second consecutive month, it seems reasonable to speculate that the bubble inflated by the novelty factor is starting to deflate, but writing Nintendo off at any stage is a perilous course to steer." Is this just worrying, or is there validity to this?
The N-Gage Will Rise Again 79
The New York Times has an article up this week talking about Nokia's third attempt to get their N-Gage brand into the minds of gamers. This time it's a service, not a device, and the company is betting that branding mobile games will be a better tactic than their previous attempts. "The Ideo and Nokia executives concluded that users mainly want to play against their friends and, at the very least, they want to know the skill level of their opponents. As a result, the new N-Gage permits users to see what games their friends have on their phones and whether they are online. They can also see how many points a person has earned in the game, as well as how much time they devote to solitary play versus group play. The researchers also asked players what their greatest frustrations were. High on the list was buying a game that turned out to be disappointing. In the new N-Gage service, customers will be able to sample games free before buying them. The selection will lean toward the casual side of gaming, with soccer and fishing titles and the popular puzzle game Bejeweled, among others. Nokia has not yet discussed prices."
More Evidence for Early Oceans on Mars 93
DestroyAllZombies writes "More news about Mars. The good news: New Scientist reports that more analysis of Rover data supports the claims for widespread oceans in Mars' distant past. The bad news, from the article: 'An ocean of water once wrapped around Mars, suggests the discovery of soil chemicals by NASA's rovers. But the same chemicals also indicate that life was not widespread on the planet at the time the ocean was present.'"
Comment Re:difference between "not private" and "announced (Score 1) 426
Yes, the new feature is exactly like incorporating a feed reader, which is of course why I made that comparison. However, the purpose of Facebook -- or at least the purpose most users have for it -- is not to provide them and their acquaintances with instantaneous updates about each other's activities. It is a tool for social networking. A way of keeping in touch with your friends that is built in most ways like an extension of real life, not a replacement of real life with completely different features. When the features of the site get too far away from the ways in which information is shared in meatspace, people get uneasy because it's not the sort of social interaction that they have been living with for 20 years.
If my method of accessing the information changes, that *does* affect the other users, because it is *their* information. They are used to that information being delivered in certain ways based on the system that Facebook had set up. Because people care about the way information about them is presented, changing that system is going to upset people.
It doesn't matter *at all* that the information was already there. Everybody knows that the information was already there. It's about the *ways* in which people prefer to share certain types of information. Previously it was a way that most users thought felt natural, and now many users no longer feel that way. Maybe they'll change their minds after getting used to it, and maybe not.
The fact that third party tools already existed to do this is also not important, unless use of those tools was pretty widespread to the point that "a lot" of people (whatever that means to any individual user) already had this aggregation going on. As long as those users were a pretty small minority, it would have a very small impact on most others' use of the site.
If my method of accessing the information changes, that *does* affect the other users, because it is *their* information. They are used to that information being delivered in certain ways based on the system that Facebook had set up. Because people care about the way information about them is presented, changing that system is going to upset people.
It doesn't matter *at all* that the information was already there. Everybody knows that the information was already there. It's about the *ways* in which people prefer to share certain types of information. Previously it was a way that most users thought felt natural, and now many users no longer feel that way. Maybe they'll change their minds after getting used to it, and maybe not.
The fact that third party tools already existed to do this is also not important, unless use of those tools was pretty widespread to the point that "a lot" of people (whatever that means to any individual user) already had this aggregation going on. As long as those users were a pretty small minority, it would have a very small impact on most others' use of the site.
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