Apparently, using lists screws things up to holy hell. There were tons of malformed <p> tags, a bunch of whitespace, as well as complete disregard for switching from numeric order lists to alpha ordered lists, when nesting lists. Manual intervention was needed to clean up the gobs of whitespace strewn about my last post on fatblogging.

So… needless to say, I wouldn’t recommend using OneNote/Office’s automatic blog posting feature for anything more than the simplest of posts.

This is 512 bytes of nonsense, since the Firefox 2 developers, in one of the strangest decisions ever, decided they would obsolete XML styles by overriding them without permission. Furthermore, the developers appear to be disinterested in fixing this. Therefore, we use the unofficial workaround, which includes filling up the first 512 bytes of a document so that the sniffer doesn’t encounter the RSS tag. I really enjoy using Firefox, but this particular behavior really annoys me! Anyway, since I’m almost at 512 characters, I’m going to ramble on for another minute in this comment, and then, without further ado, present you with a valid XML feed.

Also, Hi. It’s been a long time. Things have been good here.

Sorry Tor, for many reasons from business to technical, ripping of game titles to the Xbox 360 hard drive is not a scenario or feature we can support.

I get the business side of it, but not the technical. I guess I could go on and on and whine about it but I still can’t think of any problems that aren’t solvable here, especially not because of the technology. Case-in-point: Steam rocks, and it works. Essentially, I rip PC games to the hard drive all the time.

I can however see the publishers getting very very antsy about game ripping and possibly denying all access to a net distribution service. In ten years though, I think this is going to be the norm, and publishers in their traditional role will be left in the cold or diminished severely in power.

Microsoft, court the development studios and cut the distribution channels away.

So putting piracy aside what did most of them do? They made it a media player. They had it connect to portable devices. They had it copy my music off of my PC so I could get it here. They did visualizers. They made themes. They made it something they could actually participate in. Well, we took a lot of those great ideas and said, “You want to make a theme? We’ll give you a theme editor. Go put themes on.” You don’t have to chip your box to make your box yours. You don’t have to unscrew it to put little green lights in it. Just rip off the faceplate and go put on a theme. Because everyone wants to do a lot of what legitimate modders wanted to do.

He leaves out one major convenience of modding, and that’s ripping games to the hard drive. Please please please, let us rip our games to the hard drive. I can’t stand scratching my discs, and I’m lazy as hell when it comes to switching cds. Given that the 360 supports detachable storage devices, it would be amazing to be able to just unplug your hard drive and take all your games, savedata, and everything else to a friend’s 360. The process for ripping should be as follows.

1. User plugs in hard drive via USB 2.0 or uses standard detachable HD.
2. Inserts game to rip.
3. Selects rip game from the menu.
4. Live prompts user for login, and game key, just like Steam does.
5. (Optional) User selects rip target drive.

Microsoft has DRM, it has Live! infrastructure, and patching capability. Make this goodness happen.

Update: Better yet, just implement something like Steam on Live!. I don’t want to wait for pre-orders. I don’t want to move my lazy butt to the store on opening day, or wait out in the cold at midnight. I want to be able to play my games on any 360, and I’m sure you want the retailer’s share of current revenue for yourself.

Here’s proof.

I wonder if they’ll leave the link up…

“Although Tor claims to improve safety and security, the article goes into detail on how Tor can be used as a anonymous attack platform.”

It’s all true, every last word.

If it weren’t bad enough that they created a competing format, they only allow the spec to work with their proprietary format, AAC. The Voxmedia Wiki, the most comprehensive source for how to implement AAC multimedia markup, states that Garageband/Podcast Chapter Tool is only compatible with AAC files. Apple’s decision to only support this markup in their player for AAC files fucking sucks. I’m really, really mad about this. I see no reason why the annotations can’t be applied to other file formats, as it should be the player’s job to associate the timestamp in the XML file with the position of audio playback.

Maybe I don’t get this. I hope I don’t, and if I don’t, someone please set me straight. But from where I’m sitting, this new development is a mixed blessing. It’s too bad that the functionality that podcasters have been desiring is caught up in this GarageBand/iTunes/AAC quasi-open format bullshit.

Found by way of Scoble.
Update: It looks like Simon is a bit miffed too.

• 360 is white.
• 360 can stand on it’s side.
• 360 has different face plates.
• 360 has wireless controllers.
• 360 can go online…

All of these factoids are unispiring or are so vauge as to border on useless. They left out all the meat, and failed to show the world anything other than “more screenshots”. Microsoft really dropped the ball.

As an aside, I’m a Scoble-whore, because I use the word Scoble in this post (forgive me). Hopefully, he’ll see this and let the responsible party at Microsoft know how badly they failed to educate and excite people about what should be their newest coolest product. You had tons of eyeballs, you had MTV, and you filled up an hour with the amount of information that could have been printed on a brochure.

On a quasi-related note… Does anyone know when/if MTV will show music videos again?

The fact that he’s back collaborating with the Dust Brothers shows through, as it’s somewhat reminiscient of Odelay, though, I’d categorize this album as simpler and far less processed than Mutations, Odelay, or Midnite Vultures.

I thought this was a terrible legal fumble on behalf of Google, but then I realized that this isn’t Google pushing this type of behavior on people. Consumers are clicking a button that essentially asks Google to “add value” to the content that they are reading. Whether or not that value is indeed valuable to users remains to be seen, but that’s not the point.

An author’s right to control a work extends only as far the recipient’s right to consume, annotate, and discuss the work. You can’t enforce nor expect me to not highlight and annotate your work, yet. You can’t expect me to refrain from asking another person of their opinion. The only difference between my annotation and discussion of content with peers and AutoLink, is that AutoLink users are asking a commercial entity for annotations with the assistance of software.

I concede though, that I don’t know how AutoLink is implemented. If it’s storing these pages with added links and re-serving them to the client, I’d be inclined to say Google’s in the wrong because they’re actually redistributing this content. If they’re simply modifying the html on my screen, then I see no problems.

Most of my favorite bloggers, (Robert Scoble, Joel Spolsky, Mark Cuban, Gabe and Tycho, Tim Bray, Iggy, and Tracy and Trev) besides being authoritative, all share a focus and consistency of content that makes their respective sites worthwhile. Their adherance to a topic is one of the key qualities that makes their respective sites valuable.

I’m sure Scoble is a well rounded individual and is interested in many things besides Microsoft and related technology, but I don’t care. I don’t read Ongoing because I think Tim Bray is a good person and I don’t read his site expecting to hear about his newest hobby. I read their blogs because they give me focused info on topics I’m interested in and I don’t have to wade through crap.

So many bloggers would do well to remember their audience when they are searching for what to make of their webspace. I’ll do my best to keep this from turning into this.

Update: Forget this. I may not read “shotgun” blogs that jump around from topic to topic, but I realize that shouldn’t have anything to do with how and why I blog. I write for my own sanity, to keep a record of interesting bits, and to hopefully help someone else out.

Update 2: Don’t forget this, just forgive me for being to rash in both previous revisions. I just don’t think strict adherance is what’s going to make my blog good. More accurately, I have a need to stray every now and then from regular technological writings to keep my own sanity. To be a useful resource though, I have to stay on target. The best place for myself and brainscat is somewhere in the middle. End of navel-gazing. I promise…. for now.