Embedded here the first part of the debate. The rest is available here.
Haven’t wathced it yet so no rumblings.
May 31
May 30
Looks like Microsoft has an incredibly cool product in its hands. Question is, is it going to be a disastrous flop like the tablet pc or a smashing hit?
I totally love the video. I’d spend days playing Minority Report if I only had enough space in my flat to fit in one of those coffee tables. The only other possible drawback is that maybe, just maybe, a power cable coming out of your coffee table from the middle of the living room may not be the most elegant thing.
May 24
Just found this on prezvid.com, he makes some very interesting points which politicians should pick up since it would seem that electoral campaigns are going to be fought on the web from now on.
May 24
I’m neither a Christian nor a Muslim, in fact, I’m not religious at all, unless I need some higher power to momentarily blame for a minute of rotten luck.
Nevertheless when I find this sort of things on a widely read and credited source for news on the web it drives me crazy, ignorance and manipulation at its best!
dteichman2 writes “It appears that some UK schools are ignoring the Holocaust. A government-backed study, funded by the Department for Education and Skills, found that some teachers are reluctant to teach history lessons on the Holocaust for fear of offending Muslim students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial. Additionally, similar problems are being encountered with lessons on the Crusades because these lessons contradict teachings from local mosques.”
The Daily Mail here is not only manipulating facts, but also distorting the beliefs of a faith. The article is probably going to provoke outrage amongst pupils and their parents, and it’s going to do so because their only source of information is probably… the Daily Mail.
I don’t know whether the teachers’ words were literally “…fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.”, and if they were, shame on the teachers as well.
Mr dteichman2 when publishing the article on Slashdot was kind enough to link the word Holocaust to Wikipedia’s explanation, but he apparently forgot to add another link. The one to what Muslims are saying.
The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) currently maintains a policy of opposing the existence of Holocaust memorial day, on the grounds that it is inappropriate to give the Holocaust special attention among genocides. The MCB does not send official representatives to any of the official events associated with Holocaust Memorial Day. The latter policy has been generally referred to as a boycott, although the MCB leadership has objected to the use of that term.
OOhh, the memorial day, not the holocaust itself.
I agree with the fact that history, particularly in school should not be censored in any way. It is, however, also true that whilst weeks are spent talking about the Holocaust perpetrated during the second world war just a few minutes are considered sufficient to cover the Armenian Genocide by the Ottoman empire.
Perhaps distributing the time more fairly would help avoiding controversy and disagreements between the councils representing the various religious minorities in the UK. Also teaching the teachers that just a handful of hand-picked nutcases are denying the holocaust and that the Muslim faith does not do so in any way would help.
All this article achieves is making people even more doubtful and increase the tension between two communities which cohabited without much fuss for a long time. As far as I’m concerned those terrorists are not Muslim, they’re just people in great need of mental help or, maybe, senior traders, big swinging dicks.
May 22
The debate as to whether newspapers and the old press is a better source for information than blogs is endless, I don’t think it has a definite answer and I’m certainly not qualified enough to take a stand on the matter. A fact is that all paper periodicals are moving to the web and struggling to adapt to it.
The Italian press, however, seems to have more problems with it. They sure do have websites which they keep constantly up to date. Despite their internet-awareness it seems they still don’t know what a link is. Their articles are really quite interesting and sometimes very insightful but they can’t put a link to save their lives even when it comes to articles about the web.
That is quite annoying and stupid, it looks as though they want to keep all the traffic to their site, not send surfers away. This brings me to the next point. Everybody knows that there’s no point in reinventing the wheel, especially with web technologies, just leverage the existing ones. Well, everybody knows but them.
Whenever they feel that something has become hip on the net they replicate it. recently both Repubblica and Corriere (two of the biggest newspapers in Italy) created their own sites to share and watch videos. Rather than embedding content from YouTube they went through the trouble of re-developing the technology and taking up the costs of the bandwidth for the streaming. That is not sustainable… and not really smart because I don’t think they’ll ever reach a wide enough audience to justify the expenses. And they didn’t stop just at the video, they also tried to replicate Skype!
Wake up! Look at the New York Times, they don’t only link external articles, but also discuss blog posts on they newspaper.
May 20
I spent most of my Saturday working and discussing Blizzard‘s announcement with some friends. The very same people with whom I met up almost every week for a LAN party between 1998 and 2003, and of course our favorite was… Starcraft.
You can imagine how excited we are now about the release of Starcraft 2, already organizing big matches over the internet (at the time we all lived in Italy, now some of us are in the UK some in Spain and others are still in Italy).
Amongst this Starcraft-junkies collective there was one voice who spoke against the praising choir. This friend of mine was a bit disappointed because as far as he can see there is no innovation in Starcraft 2. Just a few new units but the formula is basically the same of the original game.
I am not disappointed, but I’d be lying if I said that I’m not a bit… bemused. Arguably we don’t know all the facts yet and most of the details of the game haven’t been revealed yet. I’m eagerly refreshing the movies page on the website to sneak a peak at the gameplay video. Blizzard may very well have some more surprises in store for us.
Blizzard’s probably decided to take the safe way, why would you go and alter a winning formula which you’ve seen work for almost ten years now. Furthermore as I said in my previous post Blizzard has not missed one shot so far, all their games have been incredible splashes, and I don’t expect Starcraft 2 to fail.
I haven’t been playing allot lately and haven’t really followed the videogames scene, but it seems to me that this industry is totally lacking pioneers. Don’t give me the “there’s nothing more to invent” speech because I don’t buy that, there’s always a brilliant game designer waiting for a developer to pick up its smashing new idea.
Hopefully with the new wave of indie game developers we’ll be able to see something capable of putting to shame the painfully cloying and endless series of sequels from companies like EA. And I’m glad that a system like Steam exists, which I believe to be one of the main propellers for indie games distribution.
This is the end of my ramble.
Stefano… the bored player.
Oh… just found this on Youtube.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sog2k6s7xVQ]
May 19
Finally, everybody knew it was coming and it’s here! STARCRAFT 2!
There’s little details on the website except for an incredibly spectacular cinematic trailer and a good number of screenshots to keep us fans salivating till the release date!
Apparently they’ll continue with the tactic of unlocking new material on the site day by day to keep building the hype, and tomorrow we’ll finally be able to watch the gameplay trailer and see if it’s exactly as we wanted it!
And now bad news for those of us who wanted an additional race. According to the FAQs on the site we’ll have only the three old races (Protoss, Zerg and Terran).
It’s going to be tough for Starcraft 2 to live up to all our expectations, after such a long wait and all the hype, but Blizzard hasn’t failed one so far so I’m confident we’ll see a great game!
May 18
Just found this interesting interview with Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder, by Wallstrip. Worth watching!
May 18
Rather poorly timed entrance for Santa but very welcome nonetheless.
It’s been almost 10 years since the original Starcraft was released, and people today are still enjoying every single mission, map, game of it.
Whether you know it or not Starcraft was initially release in 1998 and by 1999 Blizzard had already registered the domain starcraft2.com.
Well, something happened on the sequel’s domain during the last week or so. On the 14th of May the site went live and started “unbarring” one Blizzard game every day. The 17th of May was Diablo II, today is World of Warcraft. I bet that by Sunday we’ll have some big news from the folks at Blizzard.
There’s been rumors floating around about the possible release of a sequel to the original game since the day after Starcraft itself was released. Lately with WoW being released and all those rumors started ebbing away, until last Monday.
I personally can’t wait to take control of my hyper-upgraded carriers and start wrecking havoc in a human, apologies… terran, base!
Take it easy,
Stefano
May 06
5 more Joost invitations for the first five comments on this post. Go go go!
