30 August 07 - 19:48How to hide an airplane factory

Quickie link roundup for today, since I'm working on a bunch of paperwork...

If you want to hide an airplane factory, dress it up as a sleepy suburb. This would work quite well, unless the bombers were onto you and started bombing your suburbs. Then you'd have to start disguising everything as an airplane factory.

Try out Gundown. It's casual, like you guys like it, but it also has showers of gore and exploding trucks and motorbikes.

Rocket Mail. Rocket... mail. Read those two words to yourself. Apparently this actually made sense to people. Shockingly, it still does. Still more terrifyingly, it actually worked. Hopefully this leads us closer to rocket toast and rocket e-mail.

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28 August 07 - 07:22Stay classy, Global.

This morning the Global TV anchor informed us that a new racist group that was in the city was obviously well organized and professional because they already had a page "from the online research group Wikipedia".

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24 August 07 - 07:20Java Marketing: The Revenginating

Remember earlier when Sun paid a video blogger to act excited about meeting the architects of Java? Well, apparently they haven't gotten any smarter lately and have decided that changing their stock market ticker from SUNW to JAVA indicates a shift in the management of the company.

What a waste of money. How do all the people you're laying off soon feel about this? How many of their jobs could you have saved, how much security to worried families, with the money this must be costing Sun in admin fees?
Posted by SW on August 23, 2007 at 09:58 AM PDT #

For those of you who aren't CEOs and thus don't have a head full of blow, here's a copy of Schwartz's to do list I found in the trash:

1. Write atrocious development environment wildly disparaged by all
   
2. Atrocious development environment is completely and trivially obliterated by competition
   
3. Convinced that only some developers and users hate development environment, instead of all, add only token features while completely ignoring needs and wants of development community. Pay universities a lot to push it.
   
4. Try to convince Sony to pick it up, because, hey, Sony's on top of the next-gen consoles still, right? Right?!
   
5. Change stock ticker name
   
6. Become a litigation-only company, like SGI and SCO, whose only purpose in life is to harass people actually still listening to their customers
   
7. Escape to Caymans

One of my favourite weblogs, The Truth About Cars, often has a "Chrysler Suicide Watch". I think we should start one for Sun.

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17 August 07 - 13:28Shareware Quality

This chap has submitted what is pretty close to a completely worthless application to a bunch of download sites. And in return, they've engaged in shifty SEO practices.

What a surprise! I've seen my stuff swiped from some download sites and re-uploaded on other sites, which thankfully gets me slightly more exposure, but it also consumes my bandwidth with a deep link and gives them ad views.

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10 August 07 - 20:28Video corner

Now this is why we have the Internet.

Thanks, Iain.

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08 August 07 - 07:47Slashdot screws up again

Check out this /. thread. I'll wait.

Done? Didn't see an article? That's because they pulled it, after the Slashdot comments managed to find such gems as:

The basics of sequential programming are all object oriented.

and

So why can't this be used in games like spore? Well in games with so many options, the IF/THEN list becomes so long it becomes scrambled. Several calls to previous points in the list are made and the whole thing gets disorganized

If you're not interested enough to read the entire thread, make sure to check out this synopsis:

• Programs use if statements
• The more complex the program, the more if statements
• FF7 filled 4 CDs with if statements
• Spore is even more complex than FF7
• Spore must be using some new programming paradigm
• I'm confused about what the paradigm is or what it's called, but I'm sure it uses fewer if statements

Slashdot's editorial quality has dropped below even Digg. And that's an unbelievable situation to be in. Spambots are smarter than most of the Digg membership, judging how many times spambot-submitted news has been eagerly "dugg up" by the frothing masses.

GameFAQs had some difficulty figuring it out, but they eventually even clued in. Even Joel's fanboys figured it out (mostly)! Good for them! Clap clap clap! Wanna buy some cool magnet bracelets that cure diabetes?!

Mixing up "procedural programming" with "procedural content generation" apparently causes massive comedy. Fox 11 is no doubt rushing to do a story on how "procedural programming" will haxt0r into your child's myspace account and emo his dog.

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01 August 07 - 12:27Conrad Black and Izzy Asper's correspondence

Looks like Conrad Black's documents are public, including the correspondence he held with Izzy Asper over controlling the Canadian media.

Under Asper's plan, press competition in Canada would have been even more severely curtailed, but even he questioned whether Canadians would have stood for such tight news media control. "I certainly agree that there should only be one national newspaper," he wrote to Black. "In order to gain all the synergies of the merger, in effect, you might turn the Globe and Mail into merely a Toronto edition of the National Post."

Those of you who know me personally know that CanWest is one of my favoured hobby horses. This is why.

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