Geeks are great 🙂

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I found this while cleaning out some mail folders and I think it's still very relevant. Why Geeks and Nerds Are Worth It…

My favorite:

You’ll almost never have to hear, "Yaw dawg whazzap!!" plop out of their mouths. Unless it’s in jest. They spell properly, use correct punctuation, and are able to tell the difference between the toilet and the floor. They almost never get "wasted", so you won’t have to worry about coming home to find him and his friends passed out on the floor amidst a pile of beer bottles. Mt. Dew cans, perhaps...

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I've heard about this before. Using the right equipment, you can see most of what is on someone's computer monitor from a good distance and through walls.

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Apparently, a student made a game map of his school and uploaded it for his friends to play on. What this means is that anyone who plays on that map could play a given game and have a virtual shootout at the school.

People have lined up on both sides of this issue saying that it was harmless and others who think it encourages school shootings. To each I ask this question, if a neighbor kid had made a game map of your house and yard where the goal was to break into the house steal, rape, and kill the people inside, would you be ok with it?

Make all the custom maps you want, but if you want to model real structures then you'd better keep it to yourself.

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The title is the Addictiveness of Virtual Violence, but even by admission of thier own article, it's not the violence that's addictive, but the psuedo-social aspects as well as the feeling of building something worthwhile. "If I just work another 8 hours, I'll gain a level (whee!)".

On that note, you might be interested in my article about avoiding gaming addiction while still playing the game. In my case, I play the far less popular City of Heroes (as opposed to the massive audience of WoW), but the principle still applies.

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Shigeru Miyamoto asks in Yahoo's answer service, "How old were you when you first heard of Nintendo and what does it mean to you?".

I’ve seen this around before, but apparently, they’re getting closer to releasing it. What is it? A keyboard where the keys are made of tiny displays so the keyboard can change to suite the application that you’re using. Just go check it out and you’ll see what I mean.

Optimus keyboard in PhotoShop mode	Optimus keyboard in Quake mode

Update

Apparently due to price concerns, they’ve scaled back on the features and a lot of people are really mad about it. Of course, there’s obviously a lot of interest so maybe even if this product doesn’t make it, a competitive model probably will.

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In an analysis of studies done showing violent video games leading to real world violence, Dr. Christopher Ferguson explains that current work doesn't take into account real-world situations and other violence factors such as family life.

The overall conclusion is that there does appear to be a connection between violent games and violent thoughts in a laboratory setting. But the connections between such thoughts and violent behavior in the lab or elsewhere are tenuous at best. The studies that try to address those questions currently suffer from a lack of a standardized measure of violent behavior and a lack of sufficient background on other potential influences on the test subjects' tendencies towards violence, such as family environment.

So… what if people who are violent already are drawn to violent video games?

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Today on Schneier's blog, he describes in farily decent detail why the DRM in Windows Vista is bad. Some choice bits:

And Vista continuously spends CPU time monitoring itself, trying to figure out if you're doing something that it thinks you shouldn't. If it does, it limits functionality and in extreme cases restarts just the video subsystem. We still don't know the exact details of all this, and how far-reaching it is, but it doesn't look good.

What the entertainment companies are finally realizing is that DRM doesn't work, and just annoys their customers. Like every other DRM system ever invented, Microsoft's won't keep the professional pirates from making copies of whatever they want. The DRM security in Vista was broken the day it was released.

In the meantime, the only advice I can offer you is to not upgrade to Vista. It will be hard. Microsoft's bundling deals with computer manufacturers mean that it will be increasingly hard not to get the new operating system with new computers. And Microsoft has some pretty deep pockets and can wait us all out if it wants to.

The wrong choice, every time.

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According to the Washington Post, IE was unsafe for more days out of the year than not in 2006.

For a total 284 days in 2006 (or more than nine months out of the year), exploit code for known, unpatched critical flaws in pre-IE7 versions of the browser was publicly available on the Internet. Likewise, there were at least 98 days last year in which no software fixes from Microsoft were available to fix IE flaws that criminals were actively using to steal personal and financial data from users.

Well dang. It's no wonder every computer expert I know says to use Mozilla or any non-IE browser.

Microsoft - profits before customers

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Apparently, Vista will not let you install on an empty hard drive with the "upgrade version" as previous versions of Windows did. This is a problem only for some, but it's significant.

What Microsoft is trying to do is convert their software market into a licensing market. This way, no one owns software, only licenses. As an analogy, assume you've purchased the ever so expensive xbox 360, but you're moving across town next month. When you hook up the game system in the new place, it refuses to play games stating that you need to call Microsoft to purchase a new site license. You call and demand to know what happened and the foreigner who answers says that the original purchase price of the xbox allows for only one site so you need to purchase the right to use it elsewhere.

Consumers who want to be in control of their own computers should stay away from Vista.