If you’ve been watching the news lately, you’ll have noticed that the PlayStation Network, which provides online gameplay and digital game shopping for owners of PlayStation 3 and PSP devices, has been down since last Wednesday. Their on-demand streaming service, Qriocity, is also down. There’s been a huge buzz about it for the last week, but it’s hard to cut through the buzz to get the actual information. I’ve done a little digging, so here are some of the basics.
Month: Απρίλιος 2011
Βλέποντας “Παρασκευή” σε ένα διαφορετικό φως
If you want a break from the tech talk…
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last month, you’ve probably heard of (and had the misfortune of listening to) Rebecca Black’s Friday. Ξέρετε, that song with the 13-year-olds driving cars and the nasally teenager wondering where to sit? That one.
After a shocking experience (more about that later), I’ve had to start questioning why I (and pretty much everyone I know) hate the song. Breaking it down:
- The lyrics are junk, but most pop songs have meaningless lyrics anyway.
- The tune’s pretty catchy, no faults there.
OpenOffice είναι νεκρός
Τα παιδιά στο Oracle έβγαλε ανακοίνωση κάποια στιγμή την περασμένη εβδομάδα σχετικά με τους δωρεάν και open-source σουίτα γραφείου, OpenOffice. Μαντέψτε τι? Θα φαινόταν ότι το κάνει “κοινοτικού έργου”; δηλ.. που φαινόταν ότι αφήνει να πεθάνει.
Το λυπηρό είναι ότι OpenOffice ήταν πολύ δημοφιλής: πολλοί χρήστες Mac να χρησιμοποιείται (μετά το Office για Mac κοστίζει έναν τόνο) και την αφθονία των χρηστών των Windows που χρησιμοποιείται, καθώς και (οι περισσότεροι άνθρωποι δεν πρόκειται να χρησιμοποιήσετε όλες τις δυνατότητες του Microsoft Office, που το κόστος, τι, $100?) Αλλά δεν πρέπει να αποθαρρύνονται, δεν είναι τόσο κακό όσο νομίζετε. Διαβάστε παρακάτω για να δείτε.
Νέα στρατηγική έκδοση του Firefox
Back in the day (and by that I mean a week ago), new versions of Firefox were released “when they were ready” – δηλαδή, when all the features they wanted to put in were in it. That’s called feature-based releases, and most developers use that strategy.
But there’s another release strategy that focuses on releasing new versions every so often. Some features might not make a version, but that’s OK; a new version is coming in x weeks so it’ll be included then. This is called fixed releases.
Yet another rant about Bcc:s
I just got an email addressed to no less than 78 άνθρωποι, and all 78 people’s email addresses were in the To field. You’d think the sender would put all our emails in the Bcc field since, καλά, the recipients don’t really need to know the emails of the other 77 people who got the email. (In its defense, putting all the emails in the To field makes stalking easier, but isn’t that what Facebook’s for?)
I can understand why Cc isn’t that popular: it does the same thing as To, except it carries a different semantic meaning. Most teenagers (and a bunch of adults too) couldn’t care less about the fancy schmancy semantic meaning, so they just use To.
The quest for a decent home page
I’m not sure why home pages were even invented in the first place. Εννοώ, sure, you need a page to open when you boot up your browser, but they just make things, καλά, awkward. Plus they’re not very useful: most of them just serve as a landing page; you don’t really use them except to read news about how kids can’t bring bagged lunch to school (*cough* Yahoo *cough*.) And when you do that kind of stuff, you just get distracted from what you were originally meaning to do all along.
I want to know why that is and how I can help fix it.
DuckDuckGo – the best thing since Google
I was looking on my analytics page (tracking visitors to the site) and noticed someone came to hathix through DuckDuckGo. Being bored, I looked up DuckDuckGo and I was impressed automatically. It’s a great search engine. Here’s why.
Zero-click info
DuckDuckGo’s got this great feature that lets you see some quick background info on a subject when you search it. If I want to know who Nelson Mandela is without having to read a lengthy article about apartheid, South Africa, and that sort of stuff, I can just DDG it and look what I get: