Tailen

Extinct, my ASS! from The Original Joe Fisher on Vimeo.

The new Russian president has warned government officials who cannot use a computer that they could soon be out of a job.

"They either should learn or, as they say, goodbye," Dmitry Medvedev said yesterday in a meeting with officials in Petrozavodsk, north-west Russia. "We don't hire people who can't read and write. Computer literacy today is the same."

Since taking office in May, the 42-year-old has made it his mission to modernise Russia and fight pervasive corruption. He said yesterday that if the government carried out more of its work online, it would increase transparency and make corruption more difficult to hide.

He added that there had been no real progress towards putting documents, government purchase orders or the results of government-funded research online, despite years of talk about establishing an "electronic government". He blamed the foot-dragging on poor computer skills. "Civil servants who don't have elementary computer skills cannot work effectively."

It has arrived!



Full unboxing photo series here.

Judging by the amount of press the iPhone has gotten in the past few months, you'd think it was the Second Coming.

Since I'm sick of hearing about it as if it were anything but an overpriced, vendor-locked, stratchable iPod, things like the following parody ad at least cheers me up a little:




It always seemed astoundingly ironic to me that Apple was touting the sales numbers of the previous one, since they so firmly locked it to only one mobile network, they only let you pay with credit card, they limited the number of phones you were allowed to buy, they bricked the jailbreaked phones with every firmware update, and they only sold it in the USA.
To me that's kind of like saying "Look at how many of these we sold, despite our best efforts not to!"

They've certainly come a long way from tossing that hammer in the 1984 spoof ad against those who would oppress the masses.

Everyone I know who has one of these have bought it for the sole reason that it could be jailbreaked. In other words, the iPhone would be great if it wasn't for Apple's stranglehold on it. The hardware is certainly decent, if still overpriced.


Apparently they've sold 1 million of the new ones on its opening weekend, and now we have to hear a good batch of the more uninformed tech bloggers falling over themselves to explain to us how Palm, RIM, Nokia, Samsung and Motorola are positively peeing their pants in fear.

First of all, the second iPhone was released in 21 countries at the same time, so that certainly helped sales a lot. It's almost like Apple was actually interested in people buying it this time around.

But let's get back to reality for a second here.

Total 2008 Q1 handset sales: 282 million
Nokia 2008 Q1 sales: 115.5 million, or roughly 1.28 million per day

Looking at the tech blogs, however, you wouldn't think that this was a niche product. If nothing else, Apple is certainly good at drawing attention to themselves.

As used by the Philippine Secret Service.

Wait for the watermelon slicing.

Just more proof that confiscating knives before you get on the plane is kind of pointless if you can make an umbrella a lethal weapon.

So very wrong.

I never noticed how visceral Happy Feet really was.

I am.. speechless. Which is ironic in several ways.

Anyone who plays PC games probably knows that the Tom Clancy game series has been going downhill for over a decade. His movies were alright, if stretching the term 'plausibility' further than it really ought to, but the video games ever since the Rainbow series started have just been awful. They've rivaled only the Alien Versus Predator games in unplayability, retarded game engines and stupid design choices.
Amazingly enough, Ubisoft managed to redeem these people with the Rainbow Six: Vegas series, which are actually beacons of excellence and something other games should learn from in terms of intuitive handling.

Although it seems that the series has now shat itself and returned to the deepest, shameful sewers of video game crap once again with the impending release of the new game Endwar. This is not a first person shooter like the last many games have been, but rather it's a strategy game.

And here comes the kicker. This game is controlled.. entirely.. by voice recognition. O.O

Because we all know what a wonderfully mature and advanced technology this is!
Check the trailer yourself:


I wish I was making this up.

This game should come with a webcam directly connected to Youtube so we can see all the frustrated gamers jumping up and down in their chair and screaming orders at the game while all their units run towards the edge of the map for no reason.

via triggur

Tim Minchin is full of win.

OMG.



Even the island looks like... well...

Tribute to the greatest stuntman/craziest person ever:

Update: Meh! Should've grabbed a screenshot :/

Best 404 I've seen in a while :)

Charlie Brooker on the upsides and downsides of product placement.

I'm all for product placement, but why not be really bold? Organise a crime in front of your billboard.

Let's say you're trying to launch a new soft drink. Traditionally you'd have to spend millions on a commercial, and millions more booking airtime for it. Screw that. Here's what you do: put up one billboard. Just one.
Somewhere on a route near Buckingham Palace or Downing Street. Point a camera at it 24/7. Then simply pay a sniper to assassinate someone of global importance when they pass in front of it.
Bingo! The clip will run on an endless loop on every news channel in the world, for eternity. Even as viewers gasp in horror watching the victim's head explode like a watermelon, they'll simultaneously be thinking "What's that? New Plum-Flavoured Pepsi? Cool!" each time a chunk of skull flies past your logo.

Talk about brand awareness. That's the future, right there. All it needs is its own twatty marketing-speak buzzterm - something like "Killvertising" or "Atroci-publicity" - and within about six months it'll even seem halfway acceptable. Go creatives. Go you.

For the terminally curious, here is a nice write-up by one of the Firefox3 developers on all the changes in Gecko that has resulted in so much fewer memory leaks in the new version.

Tuning cache expirations (FF drops tab content out of memory after 30 minutes of non-use), better storing of uncompressed jpeg images, better handling of animated gifs, reducing memory fragmentation, and breaking cycles is all part of how the Mozilla team managed to fix almost 400 memory leak bugs from FF2 to FF3.

For anyone not aware, Mozilla (the people behind the Firefox webbrowser) are trying to set an official Guinness World Record for most downloads in a day.

Grab the fox!


The servers have been hammered all day, but the European website seems faster if you're over here.
The page should detect your language automatically, but if it screws up, all the language versions are here.

For tallies on downloads on the world map divided by country, check here.

I have recently been introduced to the maddening game review that is, Zero Punctuation.

And it is hilarious. Finally a game reviewer who can eloquently tell you exactly what's wrong with a game, without any sort of niceness filters on. This guy has obviously played enough video games to see the constant repetition of bad designs, and he's not shy to point them out in a fast paced stream-of-consciousness style.
I found his reviews to be more informative about what's wrong with some classes of games in general, rather than the specific game being reviewed, which is a definite plus.
And the amount of detail in the videos lets you watch them several times and have more fun each time.

Warning! All videos are highly NSFW, especially the inexplicable ad after every review that seems hardwired into the video.

Medal of Honor: Airborne


Mass Effect


Others full of awesome:
Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles
Crysis
Silent Hill Origins
Halo 3
What's wrong with modern FPSs
Bioshock
Tomb Raiders
The Witcher
Sim City Societies
Super Smash Bros Brawl
Grand Theft Auto IV
Army of Two. Gaaaay
Devil May Cry 4
Call of Duty 4
Tabula Rasa
Assassin's Creed
Clive Barker's Jericho

Yahtzee Goes To Game Developer's Choice Awards

Another insightful essay by Schneier.

Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We've been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.

Except that it's nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn't photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn't photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn't photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren't being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn't known for its photography.

Given that real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don't seem to photograph anything, why is it such pervasive conventional wisdom that terrorists photograph their targets?

Because it's a movie-plot threat.

Terrorists taking pictures is a quintessential detail in any good movie. We need 45 minutes of television action before the actual terrorist attack -- 90 minutes if it's a movie -- and a photography scene is just perfect. It's our movie-plot terrorists that are photographers, even if the real-world ones are not.

If we teach everyone to be alert for photographers, and terrorists don't take photographs, we've wasted money and effort, and taught people to fear something they shouldn't.

This is worth fighting. Search "photographer rights" on Google and download one of the several wallet documents that can help you if you get harassed; I found one for the UK, US, and Australia. Don't cede your right to photograph in public. Don't propagate the terrorist photographer story. Remind them that prohibiting photography was something we used to ridicule about the USSR. Eventually sanity will be restored, but it may take a while.