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: April 2011
Seeing “Friday” in a different light
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. Je weet, 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 is dood
The guys at Oracle put out a statement sometime last week about their free and open-source office suite, OpenOffice. Guess what? They’re making it a “community project”; dat wil zeggen. they’re leaving it to die.
The sad part is that OpenOffice was very popular: many Mac users used it (since Office for Mac costs a ton) and plenty of Windows users used it as well (most people aren’t going to use all the features of Microsoft Office, which costs, what, $100?) But don’t be discouraged, it’s not as bad as you might think. Read on to see.
Firefox’s new release strategy
Back in the day (and by that I mean a week ago), new versions of Firefox were released “when they were ready” – dat, 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.
Nog een andere tirade over BCC:s
Ik kreeg net een e-mail gericht aan niet minder dan 78 mensen, en alle 78 van mensen e-mailadressen waren in het veld. Je zou denken dat de zender zou al onze e-mails in het veld BCC sinds gezet, goed, de ontvangers niet echt nodig om de e-mails van de ander kennen 77 mensen die de e-mail kreeg. (In haar verweerschrift, zetten van alle e-mails in het Aan veld maakt stalking makkelijker, maar is dat niet wat Facebook voor?)
Ik kan begrijpen waarom Cc is niet zo populair: het doet hetzelfde als te, behalve het draagt een andere semantische betekenis. De meeste tieners (en een bos van volwassenen ook) kon niet minder zorg over de fancy schmancy semantische betekenis, zodat ze gewoon te gebruiken om.
De zoektocht naar een fatsoenlijke home page
Ik weet niet zeker waarom homepages zelfs werden uitgevonden in de eerste plaats. Ik bedoel, zeker, u een pagina moet openen wanneer u start uw browser, maar ze gewoon dingen maken, goed, onhandig. Plus ze zijn niet erg nuttig: de meesten van hen slechts dienen als een 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: