If Microsoft wants to improve the user experience for most windows users they should encourage their developers to spend time with users. Not in focus groups or other controlled experiements. Just as them to spend a week going around thier neighborhood asking if anyone needs any help with thier PCs. I’ve been doing some of…

MSNBC Link MR. RUSSERT: On Thursday, President Bush broke with the tradition and policy of six predecessors when he said that Israel can keep part of the land seized in the 1967 Middle East War and asserted the Palestinian refugees cannot go back to their particular homes. Do you support President Bush? SEN. KERRY: Yes.…

When trying to understand terrorism or even simple domestic violence its helpful to remember that a basic problem with the world we live in is the supremacy of physics to all forms of human endeavor and creativity. I don’t mean that people working on string theory are better than everyone else. In fact, I’m not…

While the latest videos from Unreal 3 show that Mr. Sweeny has basically completed his kicking of John Carmack’s ass, it still may not be the coolest thing I have seen this week. This is one of those things that is so cool it makes me glad I am a geek. While I still think…

Is this cool or just scary? ‘When the 40,000 subscribers to Reason, the monthly libertarian magazine, receive a copy of the June issue, they will see on the cover a satellite photo of a neighborhood – their own neighborhood. And their house will be graphically circled.’ The more I think about it. Its really not…

Link Some Excerpts: Despite a $300 million investment, “The Sims Online” from Electronic Arts Inc. only has about 80,000 subscribers more than a year after its release, far short of the company’s stated goal of 1 million. By 2008, 40.2 million gamers worldwide will be going online with video game consoles, says market research firm…

Recently Microsoft annouced a new initiative called XNA which is supposed to unify development across (thier) game platforms. You might recall that they have made this point before when the Xbox shipped that since it used DirectX it would be easy to program because developers already knew how to use it. And they told the…

So even though I am not in the game industry anymore I did attend the GDC this year. Overall it was pretty fun seeing people that I haven’t seen in a while. The trade show seemed smaller this year. There were a few companies that I used to see that didn’t seem to have booths…

This link tells how you can play old text adventures with an IM client. Pretty cool. Infocombot:> You are in a clearing, with a forest surrounding you on all sides. A path leads south. On the ground is a pile of leaves. NiktoIM: get leaves Infocombot: > Clearing Score: 0 Moves: 6 A grating appears…

Been using firefox/bird/phoenix as my default browser for a while now. Today I went looking for a plugin to block ad images which even with broadband and the fact that I browsing RSS more than HTML seem to be slowing down my surfing enough to be annoying. I installed Adblock and its just what i…