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March 2010
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11Mar

Gaming Goes to the Clouds

Culture, Gadgets, Games, Hardware, Technology, Uncategorized, Web, gaming, onlive No Comments

I would use the phrase the BBC did, but I’m sick of hearing of ___ killers in general. ( I’ll believe it when I see it, y’know?) But regardless of terminology, BBC News had a very interesting little piece in their technology section this morning about OnLive, an internet-based gaming company that essentially kicks the console out of the picture. The company promises on-demand games, and high performance even on older machines and across platforms.

Chief operating office Mike McGarvey explains: “We want to take your dollars from hardware and let you spend it on software. We are a new platform and we’re building a network and infrastructure to last for the next 30 years of gaming, not the next five years.”

I really like the idea behind this–especially the availability of games on the Mac–but I can’t buy into the whole console killer concept; it’s as dead as the iPhone killer concept, even. Why? Because many news sources have very little understanding about how geeks interact with their own consoles and/or hardware. Yes, games are important. But they are not the only reason we use consoles. In our house, the console is second only in usage to our computers—and the two are connected. We stream videos, we play games, we play music, we connect with friends. I’m not a huge Microsoft fanatic (quite the opposite, really) but I absolutely love my XBox and the XBox Live network. And so does my kid.

Cloud gaming has the potential to be a great deal of fun, but the signal always fails at some point. Sure, fast is important (I bitch at DragonAge all the time for loading too slow). But when we didn’t have an internet connection when we first moved, I was still able to play. I think that cloud gaming will be a great addition to gaming, and a wonderful opportunity for developers to think out of the console. But I’m not giving up my XBox 360 anytime soon, thank you very much.

Maybe I’m being a curmudgeon and a holdover. What about you guys? I’m by no means a hardcore gamer, so maybe I’m just reacting badly. Let us know what you think about the future of gaming!

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11Mar

The LXD: In the Internet Age, Dance evolves…

Culture, Uncategorized, Web No Comments

In the following video, the LXD (the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers) electrifies the TED2010 stage with an emerging global street-dance culture, revved up by the Internet. In a preview of Jon Chus upcoming Web series, this astonishing troupe show off their superpowers.

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06Mar

Facebook Abuse

Humor, Uncategorized, Web No Comments

In the following video, office drone Greg lays down the law to office workers for proper and improper Facebook use. Enjoy!

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06Mar

Breaking News: The “Star Wars Kid” – Where Is He Now?

Culture, Uncategorized, Web No Comments

His image is now the stuff of legend: Ghyslain Raza, the Star Wars kid, aged 15, got the attention and ridicule of the Internet—especially its geek contingent—when footage of him wielding a golf ball retriever and fending off a horde of invisible vicious enemies surfaced. Granted, we geeks were a little less harsh. But unfortunately for Ghyslain, the sudden—and often cruel—Internet fame was far from intended. His performance became an Internet phenomenon after four of his schoolmates uploaded his video for the world to see. It has since inspired thousands of remixes. By November of 2006, the video had been viewed over 900 million times.

But now that eight years have passed, have you ever wondered what happened to the famed Star Wars Kid? Here’s a bit of a timeline to fill in the years since the video went public:

In July 2003, Ghyslain’s family filed a $250,000 lawsuit against the families of his schoolmates, mainly to pay for psychiatric therapy for their son due to the derision he received at the hands of a very unforgiving public. Although the suit was dropped in April of 2004, it was settled out of court.

However, these days, Ghyslain certainly is having the last laugh. After climbing what must surely have seemed like an insurmountable mountain, he is currently completing his law studies at Montreal’s McGill University and recently took a position of president of Patrimoine Trois-Rivière, an organization that aims to defend Trois-Rivière’s historical real estate against the city’s frenetical urban expansion. The Force is surely strong with this one.

So, if you ever find yourself in a similar situation someday—your most private fantasies aired to the world (something which is becoming more and more likely in this age of instant news and technology)—consider Ghyslain’s amazing journey. Though things may seem desperate, though you may feel as if the whole world is laughing at you, there is always hope at the end of the tunnel. And through hard work and persistence, it’s attainable for anyone. Here’s to you, Ghyslain.

For nostalgia’s sake, here are a few of the best remixes of the famed Star Wars Kid. We hope that someday Ghyslain can smile when he sees these, too. Because really, he’s just one of us.

The Drunken Jedi

Star Wars Kid- Agent Smith Fight

[Via Branchez-Vous (French) | Picture Credit: Sylvain Mayer]

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05Mar

Scribe SEO Wordpress Plugin: SEO Made Simple and Effective

Blogging, Uncategorized, Web No Comments

I know for a fact that MANY of our readers are bloggers themselves, and among you, a lot use Wordpress as their blogging platform of choice. What I’m going to show you today will not only help you get more traffic from search engines, but will do so without you having to compromise on the quality of your content. Writing specifically to get search engine traffic may get you a few extra hits on the long run, but if you do so, your regular readers will hate you for it, trust me.

Doing basic SEO work on each of your articles as you write them is pretty straightforward, but what if I told you there’s a super easy way of getting everything right with minimal work?

Introducing Scribe

Scribe is a Wordpress plugin that helps you make the best decisions on what to do to improve your content SEO-wise as you are writing it. Oh, there are plenty of plugins that claim to do the same thing out there, but nothing as simple and effective as this one.

Blogging has a lot of built-in SEO benefits, especially all that updated content. But to score search rankings that bring long-term traffic, smart on-page optimization still matters. Now you can efficiently tweak your content for search without confusion or hours of work.

With Scribe you’ll:

* Remove SEO guesswork
* Retain maximum readability
* Reduce optimization time

I’ve been running Geeks are Sexy for almost 5 years now, and so far, I’ve never seen anything that even comes close to the quality of this product.

The plugin isn’t free, but for those of you who want to try it out, you can download the test version, which is good for 10 posts analysis, for free.

[Download Scribe]

Edit: The page on the site states that the plugin is good for 5 analysis, but I got 10 when I installed the product.

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04Mar

Put a Spark into your Presentations with Ignite

Culture, Uncategorized, Web No Comments

If you’ve sat through many presentations, you’ll know there are two common problems with them: over-long ones, and others where the speaker pauses and plays about with his Powerpoint slides before explaining each one in excruciating detail.

Both those problems go out the window in a format being celebrated across the planet this week. Ignite is a presentation style designed to make it easy to share ideas and passions through three simple rules: presentations are fixed at five minutes, they all have exactly 20 slides, and each of these slides are automatically displayed for 15 seconds.

The idea is that the format forces speakers to boil down their ideas into a clear and focused structure, using illustrative slides which convey concise messages: with just 15 seconds to display and explain each point, there’s no room for waffling. The speaker also needs to have a pretty strong idea about what they are talking about in order to keep to the rhythm and avoid getting thrown by the slides advancing.

The concept was developed and first tried out in Seattle in 2006 (having been adapted from a Japanese idea called Pecha Kucha) but is now used for events worldwide. While Ignite events can take place anywhere and at anytime, being locally organized, this week (March 1 through March 5) has been classified as Global Ignite Week, with at least 50 events taking place as far afield as Jakarta, Brisbane and Nairobi.

Event organizers are encouraged to film the talks and upload them to both online video sites such as YouTube and the Ignite website. The general principle is that all events should be free to attend and are being run on a voluntary basis, with the speakers being unpaid and motivated by their desire to share knowledge. (As the movement’s slogan has it: “Enlighten us, but make it quick.”

So what do people talk about at Ignite? Anything and everything, as long as it fascinates and excites the speakers, and hopefully the audience. But here’s a sample of some previous talks:

The secret underground world of Lego

I Speak Klingon: Love 101 for Uber-Geeks

Should you quit your tech job and join a rock band?

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02Mar

Peering Into the Shifting Map of the Internet

Business, Technology, Uncategorized, Web, internet, network, peering No Comments

We use the Internet every day. Some of us work by virtue of the Internet—even our business lives are conducted online. And for many, especially the geeks among us who jumped on the bandwagon early, using the Internet is simply a part of life, something we might take for granted, just another utility like water and power. But really, it’s so much more than that.

As a recent article by John Markoff at the New York Times explains, the face of the Internet is changing vastly, right beneath our fingers—and unless you’re right there, taking the pulse of the information superhighway as we speak, you might not know to what degree it is shifting. One of the reasons for the change is the practice of peering, or as the article explains, “when organizations… directly connect their networks instead of paying yet another company to route data traffic. Originally, the companies that owned the backbone of the Internet shared traffic.” While peering has been done since the beginning of the Internet, it seems to be more widespread–or at least, more influential in changing the landscape of the network. The article highlights the work of a man named Tim Pozar, who specializes in this networking practice.

What does these peering practices mean, exactly? Well, for one thing, it’s becoming more and more difficult to trace information—while at the same time traffic is booming. That can lead to security issues. While traditionally the bulk of information was sent through the bigger providers, like AT&T, it’s changing. The article explains:

And some flows through so-called dark networks, private channels created to move information more cheaply and efficiently within a business or any kind of organization. For instance, Google has privately built such a network so that video and search data need not pass through so many points to get to customers.

So literally, the shape of the Internet is changing, as demonstrated by the graphics in the article. This is far from a series of tubes, but rather nodes and peering fabrics meshed with big company networks. While researchers are working overtime to try and visualize this new map, it’s growing increasingly more difficult—such an “in the moment” science is bound to be. According to the Times, Dr. Albert-László Barabási at the University of Notre Dame and his fellow researchers’ Internet mapping project has uncovered a “scale-free network” where they have determined that “connections were not random; instead a number of nodes had far more links than most.” In other words, it’s all about connectedness, and the more connections the more likely a certain network is going to be successful.

Granted, I am no Internet scientist, but this is still a fascinating look into the way it’s changing around us, especially considering how integral it’s become to our lives. What do you think about the security and connectedness of the Internet? Any web gurus want to chime in with their opinions?

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28Feb

Life Before Google [Cartoon]

Humor, Uncategorized, Web No Comments

A short story about a forgotten era:

[Via Buzzfeed]

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28Feb

Geeks Are Sexy Featured on Discovery News Podcast

Blogging, Science, Uncategorized, Web, [GAS] No Comments

By Jimmy Rogers (@me)
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

A few weeks ago we received a message from the fantastic guys over at the Discovery News Friday Feedbag podcast. It seems one of their loyal listeners passed along a story of ours and they liked it so much they asked us if we’d like to do a little interview … we jumped at the chance!

Yesterday I sat down (via telephone) with Will, James, and Jorge and we spent about 20 minutes talking about bacon. Ok, so we did broach some other topics such as cancer, sea slugs, and ribosomes, but I think bacon really took the cake (or brownie?). If you want any of that to make sense you better listen to the episode!

*Here’s the page for the episode*

It was a real thrill to chat with these guys on the show and I encourage you all to subscribe to their podcast, as they put out some really fun and interesting stuff every week! Also, don’t be surprised if you hear GAS on there again sometime….

P.S. – That story about the quadruplet ribosomes will take me a little bit to write, but look for it in the next week or so!

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