Linked List: November 29, 2007

Thursday, 29 November 2007

Cable Dispute Blocks Cowboys-Packer Game From Football Fans 

So tonight’s Cowboys-Packers game — the first regular season game between two 10-1 teams in 17 years — is only being broadcast on the NFL Network, a channel that Comcast (and other major cable providers like Time-Warner) don’t include in their regular line-up. So I can’t watch this game without coughing up an extra $5 a month on top of the $120/month I’m already paying. Fucking bastards, all of them, according to this report on the situation from NPR.

Terrific Interview With Nintendo Game Designer Yoshiaki Koizumi 

“Thinking about the camera is game design, too.” (Via Kottke.)

Andy Ihnatko on the Kindle 

Andy Ihnatko:

So here’s what Amazon went and did. Metaphorically, the company invented a humanoid robot capable of autonomous action. Every day at 4 a.m., it gets in your car and drives all over the state, buying fruit, milk, butter, eggs and other staples straight from the farm. By the time you wake up and trudge into the kitchen, there’s a steaming plate of waffles waiting for you, made from scratch, and topped with fresh-picked strawberries and whipped cream.

It’s one of the most awesome consumer products ever. It might even be a landmark moment in technology. … and Amazon is promoting it as a $399 waffle maker.

Commoditizing Our Future 

Charlie Stross on Asus’s Eee PC, a sub-notebook that’s selling for about $400:

Moore’s Law suggests that every component of a PC halves in price on a roughly 18-month cycle. A desktop PC today should be roughly 100 times as powerful as a desktop PC of similar price 10 years ago, and 50 times as powerful as a PC of eight and a half years hence. A naive soul with no prior experience of consumer capitalism might ask why, instead of doubling in power, the manufacturers don’t concentrate on cutting prices? But that’s not how the industry worked. Until now.

Logitech Control Center Still Sketchy 

Allan Odgaard reports that Logitech’s latest mouse driver software is still problematic — creates conflicts with a bunch of apps, including TextMate and Growl.

The Man Who Grew Roots 

Disturbing story of an Indonesian man afflicted with a skin condition that results in tree-like growths covering his body. I’ve never seen anything like it. (Update: I’ve changed the link to a later story, which includes the news that doctors are hopeful they can help him.)

Google Gadgets for the Mac 

New software from Google, lets you run Google gadgets as Mac OS X Dashboard widgets. It’s an interesting idea, as it sort of attempts to turn Google Desktop into a cross-platform meta platform for HTML/CSS/JavaScript *-dgets, but my first thought is that it seems needless. Looking at Google’s developer docs for writing cross-platform gadgets, it really looks lowest-common-denominator. If you’re a developer with a Google gadget that you want Mac users to run, I think it makes more sense to port it to a native widget, which will let all Mac users run it, rather than only those who’ve got Google Desktop installed.

(Speaking of cross-platform “widgets”, I don’t hear much about Yahoo Widgets (née Konfabulator) these days. Just me?)