General | Cinder Inc.

Nintendo DS Marketing Speach

I saw on 1up that Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo’s new marketing guru, was speaking at the Ziff Davis Games Summit. 1up was kind enough to publish the transcription of the speach too. How kind.

I think I like this Reggie. His speach of course is very pro-Nintendo, but still maintains an air of “we don’t think the PSP is bad, we just think ours is going to be better.” He covers some of they “whys” of the Game Boy’s past success, and what he belives the philosophy is for the new system. Convergence is the key, or at least the prediction. People want multiple things in one small package, the problem is no one has been able to do it right so far. Both the PSP with it’s video and music playback and the DS and it’s dual screens and stylus gaming, are interesting concepts that will make the next few years exciting.

Why Blog – Part 2

I’ve already written about this “blog” personally a few times. I thought to write again, as I’m still finding my voice for it and figuring out what the focus or concentration of the blog should be.

Already I’ve determined to myself that there would be two subjects that I would try and avoid as much as possible: religion and politics. I don’t think I need to explain, but if you really want me to I will. I also didn’t really want to go much into my personal life. People generally don’t care that I went grocery shopping last night and got some lunch meat to make sandwhiches for work. Trivial details suck. You’ll hear personal stories when they have relavence to what I want to discuss, and not for much else hopefully.

As for the focus of what I want to do? Who knows. It’s still a work in progress, and I’d like to experiment with a few other ideas: reviewing/commenting on what I’ve been reading book wise, retrospectives on older games (like this one) and more commentary on technology, old and new. We’ll see.

Stupid Site Registrations

After being frustrated at the fact that if I want to read The New York Times online I must register to actually read any article. They say it’s because they are tracking for ads and targeting ads at different user bases. The thing is, I’m not the only one who doesn’t truthfully answer those invasive questions as to who I am and where I’m from.

Another site, Bug Me Not, has also taken a great approach to the matter. If you have an account on one of these places, submit it to Bug Me Not and other people will be able to use the logon as well. They’ve got a ton of sites in there as well as a plugin for Firefox (my new browser of choice). Go try them out, if you come upon another annoying site that forces registration to read content. You’ll like it, and it keeps your privacy intact. Very good.

Lost Levels – Earthbound

Lost Levels is at it again. For those who don’t know, Lost Levels is a site who’s focus is bringing out the story of games that were cancelled and never released. We’ve collected a number of excellent interviews with actual developers and articles that have a lot of first hand information concerning the games in question.

The latest article covers the unreleased NES Earthbound. Released in Japan as “Mother”, the game was fully localized and translated into English, but never released in the US. When a copy of this “Americanized” version apeared on the Internet years ago, people questioned it’s authenticity. Now the story can be settled once and for all. Enjoy.

BBS Documentary

BBS – The Documentary. I cannot wait. In much the same way that I had to purchase Mindcandy (the PC Demo DVD), this is a must purchase item. It represents a big chunk of my childhood, and a big chunk of my learning about how computers worked.

Looking through the site, I see that he’s interviewed 200 people and done some great collecting of all the old BBS programs accross tons of different systems. It’s impressive, and fun to go down the list and find the different board software that I remember logging into. I even tried to setup my own WWIV board back then, and I had a friend create me a few ASCII graphics to put up on it. Ahh.

These kinds of niche documentaries and collections are wonderful. They bring back the memories that for the most part are long gone and tenderly present them with the love and respect they deserve. Thanks.

Where did it go?

While making some routine searches this morning, I found I was getting error messages from Google and it was an odd sensation. When you are used to using a tool and having it be reliable and quick, when it’s broke you arn’t quite sure what to do at first. I eventually gave up, and searched later when it came back up, but it supprised me that I was unable to really remember any other search engines that I could even want to use. Sure there could be altivista, or Yahoo, or MSN, but these didn’t really come to mind, let alone some of the newer ones I’ve heard about but would never use becasue of my bond to Google, and it’s browser toolbars.

Apparently, outage was due to a virus, as usuall it seems these days. People don’t patch their computers, or open an attachment from “Sal” that has “Hot deals for you on Via-GrA” and then pay the price. From technical perspective the virus is interesting. It looks at your “address book” and then searches Google and other engines for e-mail addresses that go along with the different domains (i.e. [email protected] – the virus searches Google for other e-mails @bingo.com).

I thought about ranting concerning people who do dumb things with their computers, but then it’s not always their fault, and neither is it all Microsoft’s fault. But two things. One, after all these years of hearing on the news, and reading in the papers about not opening up e-mails from people you don’t know or wern’t expecting, you’d think people would learn. They don’t. Not that Microsoft has been doing better about letting their customers know, but hey let’s just release patch after patch and maybe it will be fixed someday.

Billionaire hangs with the locals

It seems that Bill Gates takes his days off like the rest of us, except he can do it pretty much any day of the week. Still I like his tan. I think it’s better than mine at this point. Sad, but office life does that to you way too quickly.

RSS Fiendish?

I found this article on RSS while reading Slashdot.

In it Chad Dickerson, of InfoWorld, talks of the growing pains of RSS (Really-Simple-Syndication) as the number of users of feeds go up, and the clients that they use are not “smart”. He likens the hits InfoWorld gets at the top of every hour to a DoS (Denial of Service) attack, because of so many different clients from all over all asking at the same time.

He makes an interesting observation in that but he doesn’t take it further or offer solutions. He gave the problem and left it at, “If RSS is going to go from fairly big to absolutely huge, we?re all going to need to do a little more work on the plumbing.” I’m a more recent convert to RSS “feeds” and getting used to using them instead of going from site to site to site and checking for updates. It’s usefull and wonderful, but not if the tool can’t be managed correctly.

I’ve heard solutions to the problem, and many of them have to do with making the RSS clients smarter, in that they only download the feed if it has been updated and not everytime. Doesn’t sound hard does it? The other major solution is fixing the users. I’ve had people tell me they have their RSS reader check their list of feeds once every 15 minutes, and then there are stories of people doing it every 5 or less. Please people stop. Sure the amount of data exchanged is small, if you are doing a small thing many times it adds up quickly, and especially for smaller sites (I’m really not worried about this one for any time soon) their bandwith bill most likely comes out of their pocket.

I’m not an expert by any means, but I think RSS has a great potential in the future, and I see a combo of it and something like BitTorrent could be an amazing way to publish writings and files in the years to come. Go the future.

The Scion xB

After seeing this orange box type car when driving around, and falling completely in love with it’s design appeal I had to find out what kind of car it was. Getting way to close, but close enough I could read the little “Scion” on the emblem. Who the hell is Scion? A little helpful Google brought me to the Scion homepage.

The little box/car that I had seen was the new Scion xB. The Scion line was created by Toyota to be a new “hip” line of cars for the Gen-Y crowd. Similar to Honda’s foray into the market with their Element (which is a great vehicle, of which I am very impressed). After reading a review of the car, I still want one. At the rate I’m going my new Volvo is going to be far off. Maybe I could get a used Scion xB in a year or two? We’ll see…

Linky linky

– Cnet has a great article on how the iPod is undermining Microsoft’s efforts at being the DRM king (DRM = Digital Rights Management). With iPods being the hip new accessory these days, people are complaining that the Microsoft encoded files included on some newer releases, won’t play on their iPod. When consumers speak, sometimes, just sometimes, the industry might listen. Not that having Apple as a DRM overlord is better than Microsoft though.

– From the design culture has nothing better to do dept.: a coffee mug with a key so you can prevent others from using your mug while you are away. Don’t you feel better now?

– Looks like the Windows XP Service Pack 2 will be late. Should we be suprised? It’s optomistic that Microsoft says its next generation of Windows will be out by 2007, but really, shouldn’t we fix what we’ve got before making new holes?

– You must go to Orisinal. This guy has a knack for flash games that are easy to play, wonderful to look at and cute without being “cute”. Play a few, worth the time.