Warranting Discussion

I have tasty morsels of linking joy to deliver. Hot and fresh, just for you.

• In spite of a curious lack of pricing information, how freakin’ cool would this be?
• A curiously useful vacation planner for the wired vagabond in all of us.
• Sports fans are weird. In other news, I’m glad that Livan Hernandez is no longer a San Francisco Giant.
• There has been a lot of buzz today about Microsoft’s desire to rename RSS. The creator of RSS thinks otherwise, in a shocking development. I personally think that acronyms in general are horribly overused, especially in software and engineering (and government) but I tend to agree with Dave Winer that changing the name of something is a good way to just further the confusion. I don’t think the problem with adoption of RSS is directly tied to it having a dumb acronym as a name, but more that it is a little difficult to describe the benefits of syndicated content. It’s like trying to describe what the World Wide Web was ten years ago; once you got it it was really cool, but until then it was just too difficult of a concept for some people to grasp until it was obvious it was here to stay and people had to force themselves to understand.
• The XBox360 will cost $399. I don’t consider the stripped down version to be a real 360 model since it doesn’t have a hard drive and it has a lame wired controller. It is $100 cheaper, but I’d be happier if they just had the hard drive-capable model alone and set the standard price at $350. My rationale is that the hard drive will be basically ignored since developers can’t rely on it being available on all units which means that while the hard drive was one of the best features of the original XBox (aside from Live), it has been reduced to a really large built-in memory card. Dumb.
• Boston.com has a fascinating and surprisingly thorough article on the causes of homosexuality. The genetic predisposition argument (which is logically the most likely and unsurprisingly falls somewhere in the middle of the extreme spectrum ends of totally genetic or totally choice) is compellingly made despite what overall seems like a pretty fair and open-minded approach to the topic.
• The endlessly fascinating PVRBlog offers thoughts on TiVo Wishlisting. I’ve often found myself wanting finer-grained control of my Wishlist creation using some sort of (even primitive) boolean and other mathematical operators to weed out the stuff I want. TiVo has a better interface than any other PVR out there, but it sometimes seems to me like they’ve let it go kind of stale lately as they’ve instead scrambled to find some clever new way to make some actual money. I’m not really blaming them, but it would be nice if they tried a little harder to do the best they could with what they already have. I mean, eventually they’re not even going to have the bragging rights to the best interface (someone out there making competing products has got to realize eventually that their clunky UIs are keeping them from being really widely adopted). What will be left then? Half-supported PC interaction? Downloadable movies? Speaking of downloadable movies, a lot of people have been grumbling that the oft-rumored movies-on-demand feature that TiVo is slated to offer will be either crummy quality or require long download times. Let me tell you something: People are already waiting for long times to download movies. Right now. Don’t believe me? Go check any BitTorrent site or Grokster. There are hundreds of full length movies in high quality files available for download and people nab them all the time. Let me do it legally right to my TV and I’ll wait patiently, just please don’t give me picture quality that is total pants. The couple of hours I may save is totally not worth it.
• So I guess some guy who makes bad video game movies wants to do a Metal Gear Solid movie. I could care less about the director, but it reminds me that I tried yet again to play Metal Gear Solid 3 last night and I couldn’t do it. Hideo Kojima has wasted too much of my life already with his incessantly prattling/preaching characters hijacking my otherwise interesting games. So I give up. You win, Hideo. Make all the jibber jabber you want; I can’t take it anymore. I’m going to play games that don’t feign intellectualism with sheer quantities of dialogue and, should a movie ever be made, count me out. I’m not that much of a masochist.

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