web 2.0 is for suckers

No, not really.

But I love the overblown bullshit that rags like Time spill out about this new phenomenon. They named "you" as the Person of the Year for 2006, which is ridiciulous to begin with, but their reasoning just kills me:

"And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, Time's Person of the Year for 2006 is you. "

Yeah, well done. You busted your ass making movies for absolutely nothing, and the founders of YouTube sat back and collected 1.6 billion dollars. I hope you feel empowered for creating WEB 2.0! We appreciate your free creativity, suckers.

It makes me both optimistic and depressed at the same time to watch all this miraculous input that the new web allows. It's all powered by people contributing to the movement, and that makes or breaks the new generation of websites, but the root of most of these sites seems to be hoping that other people will create cool shit and then asking for money for the eyeballs.

On the other hand, it's not all bad. Companies are opening up design contests and all sorts of other neat things that don't boil down to people poorly lip synching songs in their underwear for pageviews. There's something cool coming out of this whole mess after all.

Web 2.0 has so much potential. I'm going to start playing with APIs over the next few weeks, I've got a few ideas for neat things that I'll share if I can get them working. The tools we have before us are so exciting if we actually do something with them. I think one of my 2007 goals is to stop being a link-passing zombie and actually CREATE something. So much of our existance has become showing other people's clever things to each other, and I've started to miss how I used to actually make things..

A Brief Look At The Year In SF Television

God bless your twisted, black heart, Warren Ellis:

"I’ll watch BATTLESTAR GALACTICA again once I get a written guarantee that Baltar will stop fucking crying.

2006: Year Of The Fucking Crying.

2007: Stop Fucking Crying."

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=3436

Word to that. The wuss factor was a big reason I totally lost interest in BSG. That and nothing fucking happening. And I don't care how hot she is, watching Number Six on screen makes me want to put my head through a wall. Oh and MAGIC CANCER CURING BABY. Fuck you.

people drive me crazy

With the upcoming release of Vista looming, there are people all over message boards on the net screaming about how Vista is a ripoff of Mac OSX and how Microsoft just copies everyone else.

Putting aside the actual factual nature of this statement, which really only applies to cosmetics, I'd bet that the user base screaming this is a huge fan of open source software. Take a look at the vast majority of open source software, what does it do? It rips off an existing commercial product. There's very few original ideas in the open source community, they're largely playing catchup. (With the possible exception of P2P software). People need to get their standards straight.

Innovation is a series of incremental improvements, almost always. Occasionally you'll get something new, but most of the time, you'll integrate a bunch of good ideas someone else had, and then add some of your own, or just combine them in a new way. There's nothing wrong with that, that's how we advance.

ebay karma

I'm really enjoying the fact that there's now more of a bounty on Ebay for the Wii than the Playstation 3. I mean, seriously, there are 1/10 as many PS3's. These things were going for thousands until they were actually available.

Now they shipped like 2 million Wiis and 200k PS3's, and a core PS3 is selling on Ebay for $540 now. That thing is $500 retail. A freaking $40 bounty on the PS3! No one wants the goddamn thing!

If you look, there are over 19000 hits for PS3 on Ebay. There's less than that for the Wii, and most of those are for remotes. And the Wii has at least a $100 premium on it, and often more than that.

Here's a lesson, folks. Buy a gaming system to actually play it. No one actually wanted the PS3 for anything other than selling it on Ebay. I love watching the invisible hand of the Market bitch slap greedy bitches.

firefox sucks

I've been in a world of pain for months, my work desktop isn't fast to begin with, and I have it running three monitors, so that impacts its abilities even further.

So every time I'd have like 10 tabs open, or go to relatively intensive sites like IGN, it would drag my machine to a halt. Even going to gmail and chatting in their ajaxy interface would take like 80% of my processor.

I figured this machine was slow and crappy and that was just the price I had to pay.

Wrong. Firefox fucking sucks.

I downloaded Opera today, and the change is like night and day. I'm in IGN streaming high res videos without any video hiccups, while having several putty windows and Outlook open. Another tab has Gmail running without a hitch. Processor usage is like 35%.

It looks like Opera has some sort of slower optimizations for initally drawing things, it takes a little bit longer for the page to load right off the bat, but you're talking half a second or so. And after that it handles it like a champ.

I've gone to all my standard sites, and Opera runs them just fine. It feels like a whole new computer, I can't believe the difference. I highly recommend if you're a Windows user, get off the Firefox bandwagon and try an actual lightweight, fast, efficient browser. Opera is fantastic.