Monthly Archive:: July 2013

"People who don't play video games would be forgiven if they turned on an Xbox 360 and didn't realize it was a device used to primarily play games. The first screen you see on the Xbox 360 Dashboard is often a mixture of ads for all sorts of goods and services, and many times games are in the minority of ad slots. The latest redesign increased the ad space that can be sold to advertisers, and that in turn increased this problem. Let's be clear, it is a problem. Game discovery is terrible in the current design of Xbox Live, and the usability of a system that used to be about games is suffering in order for Microsoft to make money on ads." Written a year ago by Ben Kuchera for Penny Arcade. In light of increased advertising efforts in Windows 8.1, this has become relevant once more. In a nutshell, do not count on Microsoft being able to strike a proper balance (thanks, Soulbender!).

"Today, Microsoft said its advertisers will be able to target users not just on Web search results pages but directly inside Windows Smart Search. David Pann, general manager of Microsoft’s Search Advertising Group, said in an interview that advertisers don’t have to do additional setup to participate. The Smart Search ads will feature a preview of the websites the ad will send people to, as well as click-to-call info and site links, which are additional links under the main result that direct users deeper into a website to the most likely page they might want." So, you pay for a product, and then Microsoft shoves ads in your face. Scumbags. Then again, they've done the same on the Xbox, which is now virtually unusable due to all the ads plastered all over your dashboard. And then people say Google is bad with ads.

"Douglas C. Engelbart, a visionary scientist whose singular epiphany in 1950 about technology's potential to expand human intelligence led to a host of inventions - among them the computer mouse - that became the basis for both the Internet and the modern personal computer, died on Tuesday at his home in Atherton, Calif. He was 88." We lost one of the greatest - if not the greatest - visionaries of computing today.

Like many of you, I've been watching the big changes in user interfaces over the past few years, trying to make sense of them all. Is there a common explanation for the controversies surrounding the Windows 8 UI and Unity? Where do GNOME 3, KDE, Cinnamon, and MATE fit in? This article offers one view.

"This release adds support for bcache, which allows to use SSD devices to cache data from other block devices; a Btrfs format improvement that makes the tree dedicated to store extent information 30-35% smaller; support for XFS metadata checksums and self-describing metadata, timer free multitasking for applications running alone in a CPU, SysV IPC and rwlock scalability improvements, the TCP Tail loss probe algorithm that reduces tail latency of short transactions, KVM virtualization support in the MIPS architecture, many new drivers and small improvements."