Eric Schmidt “Dropped His Resistance” to Chrome OS
Finally relenting to Sergey Brin and Larry Page after six years.
Michael Jackson First Artist to Sell Over 1 Million Downloads in a Single Week
One more record for the road. Legitimate question: How much longer will Billboard data even be a useful measurement?
China Bans MMO Goldfarming and Real-World Sale of Virtual Goods
This is HUGE news. Andy notes Eurogamer’s estimates: $10 billion dollars amongst 1 million workers.
Imeem Is Deleting All Uploaded User Video and Images
With a week’s notice, and no way to back everything up. This is just unacceptable. You don’t do this kind of thing to your users. You could pay one of your engineers spend a day building an export tool, which in the long run costs you nothing, and buys you immense social capital. When a service is already taking away functionality (users hate this) why make it worse?
via Andy Baio.
U.S. State Department speaks to Twitter over Iran
The reason Twitter got to delay it’s maintenance today was apparently in large part due to Gov’t intervention.
Last.fm’s Founders Leaving
Cannot say I’m surprised. It’ll be two-years after their acquisition, which is probably the earliest they were allowed to leave.
Activision sues Double Fine over Brutal Legend
For once, I agree with EA. Activision abandoned the project, dropped it entirely, and now that it is finally on track for release (Rocktober 13th) they’re trying to block it.
Fuck you, Activision.
Xbox Live to Allow Download of Full Retail Games
Whoo boy. So far includes Sonic, call of Duty 2, Crackdown and Bioshock Mass Effect. The fact that I have to physically get up off the couch and go to a story to buy games for my Xbox is probably the only reason I’m not homeless right now. This is huge news. Obviously this won’t be the standard for some time, because they can’t afford to piss off the retail channel. Still.
Closing Tabs 5/27/09
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Super Mario 64 longplay, grabbing all 120 stars. If you were under the age of 30 when this came out, goodbye afternoon. It’s such an astoundingly well put together game. At every stage, care was taken to make sure it “felt” right. Jason Scott‘s talk about Platform Studies has me rekindling my love affair with it.
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The Metroid Prime entry on Wikitroid. ’nuff said. Exploring the 3D transition of one of Nintendo’s other major franchises, which skipped the N64 and went straight to the GameCube. With Mario 64, everyone expected it to be mind-blowing. With Prime, everyone expected it to be shit. Sometimes everyone is wrong. Disclosure: I have stock options in Wikia.
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ANTHEM Platform. A platform for piping Social Networks, IM, email, OEMs, etc, to cell phone applications. Recently acquired by Good Technology.
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Imified. A service which runs IM bots for you, and acts as a go-between for you and the IM network. You can code up applications that the bot queries with what is said to it, by whom. They provide examples in PHP, which makes me happy.
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Google is “betting big on HTML5”. Speed of web development accelerating,
canvas
,video
, client-side databases, web workers, etc. See also: YouTube using the HTML5video
tag. -
Sleeping with the NME: how the British music press picked up a dose of the crap, which is about the sorry state of the British music press. From Velvet Coalmine, which has become a favorite blog of mine.
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Remote-controlled sperm, or more precisely: remote-controller sperm-like nanodevices.
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CSS-only gradients using CSS3 and no images. Whatsoever. Uses the
-webkit-gradient
property. Hot shit.
The Vendor Client Relationship
This is how pretty much every major client I’ve ever had does things. It is a lot less funny when you are waiting on thousands instead of dozens of dollars.
Canwest Refinances Canwest Media Inc.’s Senior Credit Facility
This is the big news today, here in Canada. CanWest is THE media conglomerate here, and they’ve been missing payment deadlines for months.
Twitter Replies to #fixreplies
This is maybe the fourth response that Biz has had to write, and it’s the only good one. The gist: Twitter screwed up and removed a feature that a lot of hardcore users loved. When they “fixed” it, the explanation of HOW they fixed it made almost no sense to anyone.
Now they’re fixing it for real, I hope. The original setting will not return, though.
Kickstarter
Kickstarter is an attempt at modern, crowd-sourced fundraising. Post a project or idea with a set timeframe, and people can pledge cash. If your fundraising goal gets reached, you get the money. If it doesn’t, then everyone gets a refund. Check out the introduction video.
I could really see using this in the future.
Last.fm Introduces Radio Subscriptions
Users outside of the US, UK, and Germany will now have to pay 3 euros per month to keep streaming music from the popular site. The user backlash has already begun.
As more and more VC-funded startups have to start showing balance sheets, there’s going to be a lot fewer freebies around.
Amazon.com Now Selling WiiWare Game Codes
Following the Xbox Live Arcade codes, this is no surprise, but nice to see. Also of interest to me: Amazon does not allow their associates to get commissions on these cards. Profit margin must be close to zero, if not into the red.
NYT Bits Blog on The Cost of Bandwidth
Hint: It’s falling, not rising. Time Warner got into a big shit-fight over imposing bandwidth caps, which Rogers has already done here in Canada.
Here’s an exercise to illustrate how fucked the telecom industry is: Raise your hand if you believe a word that comes from Comcast, Time Warner, or AT&T.