Finland Mandates Broadband Internet for All Citizens
This week the Internet is abuzz with news from Finland about how they’ve decided that the right to broadband Internet is a something every citizen should have. They feel that it would improve quality of life in their most remote areas, and boost business and Internet banking. This is a huge step, and as the world relies on the Internet more and more, something other countries should look into.
Finland is small compared to the United States, but that’s no reason to avoid the issue. Providing access to the Internet, and at reasonable speeds, would go a long way towards boosting the quality of life in less connected parts of the nation. While many would still not be able to afford it on their own, there would be Internet cafes, and friends, and libraries that might not otherwise be able to supply it. Rather than these communities be cut off from the rest of the nation as we move on technologically, they’d be right there with us.
Finland compared the right to broadband Internet to the right to have water and electricity. I’m not sure quite as important yet, but it gets closer and closer every day. The information it provides empowers people. It helps people keep in touch, educates people about things beyond their location, and provides a place for local information such as garbage pickup, school closings, and traffic. Especially in smaller areas, the Internet provides the ability to shop and purchase products for your home and business that aren’t available locally.
It would be quite expensive for the United States to undertake something like this, and it’s true that healthcare is at least as important, but we shouldn’t let money get in the way of progress. Whether it’s in promoting the Internet, other technologies, science and research, or anything else, what makes a country a superpower is the quality of life for it’s poorest citizens, not money, or weapons. Finland may be the first to mandate speed, but other countries have deemed Internet access to be a human right. The United Nations agrees. The United States may be one of the only industrialized nations that doesn’t, and that’s something that’s unacceptable.
The world is a changing place, with the Internet one of the contributing factors to a more inter-connected world. Providing access to the Internet, and at high speeds, is just the start of what will likely be a long process as the Internet’s role is redefined in society. It’s already one of the most useful tools available to us, and that alone is enough to justify it as a basic right.
Video Games: Sequels, Expansions, Remakes
October 9, 2009 by Ceetar
Filed under Video Games
Video game sequels are some of the most anticipated products in the market. They can be more anticipated than television premiers and sell more than blockbuster movies. Franchise games like Halo, or Grand Theft Auto are among the more popular, and more highly anticipated, video game sequels. Both have released games that have broken all sorts of records for video game sales. The first day these games were on the market they made more money than record-setting movie Spiderman 3, and more money than record-setting book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
The problem is some games are billed as sequels when they’re nothing more than expansions. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 is one of these games. The game was a lot of fun, it was beautiful looking, and it had a good amount of playable characters and a great storyline. I enjoyed playing it a lot, but it felt too simple. There was very little added to the game that wasn’t in the first one. The customizable aspects and powers gained on each level were watered down a bit, but the way to use your character was a little simpler. The graphics were better and the camera movement was much better, but all of this basically makes the game seem very similar to the first, with a different story.
I enjoyed the storyline; I went out and started reading the Civil War comic books that it was based on. There is a choice that has to be made in the game that branches it into two separate set of levels before they reconnect later, which gives the game a pretty good replay value. The cast of characters is nice, but there are always more superheroes you can add. It’s neat to be able to control some of the supervillians in this game, due to the nature of the Civil War story line.
Another troubling trend in video games is the remake. This seems to happen more often with Nintendo and the Wii. A couple of weeks ago I picked up Wii Punch Out!! which is a remake of the old Mike Tyson’s Punch Out on the NES. The game, obviously, has superior graphics. It has the benefit of modern controls and animation. Even some modern day toasters have more power than the NES system. All this makes for a very nice game. However, the problem is that anyone interested in the game is probably only interested in it for nostalgia’s sake. It doesn’t contain a ton of new content. It almost felt like cheating, because I knew all the tips and tricks to play the game.
This isn’t all bad. You can get a lot of enjoyment out of playing a game spruced up from an old classic. Franchises such as Madden NFL, NHL 2K10 or MLB: The Show release what is basically the same game every year and do wonderfully. The difference is that these games put a lot of work into doing what they can to be at the forefront of video game development. These sports franchise games, unlike other remakes like Punch Out!!, know they have to make people want to buy a game that is basically the same game they bought a year ago. Keeping up with one of these games is like tracking the evolution of the video game industry as they add new features and better graphics and utilize everything they can think of. MLB: The Show added weather to their games, Madden 10 introduced an online franchise mode and improved tackles. The graphics and animation get better every year, and they’re getting to the point that at first glance you could think you’re actually watching the real thing. The Madden franchise doing this for 20 years suggests that remakes, if done properly, can be very successful.
Video games have taken huge strides in the entertainment industry over the last decade, competing with many of the other top products. With the market and technology available to them only growing video games will continue to be a top seller. Whether it’s remakes, franchises, sequels, or expansions, people are buying them at record rates.
Photo Sharing on the Internet
There are a lot of websites out there to share photos. They all have different features and prices and everyone has a different favorite that they use to share photos with friends and family. There are a couple of things I look for when I review a photo sharing site. I like to be able to order prints from the site. I like to be able to download the photos I like that aren’t mine. I want to be able to navigate through the pictures and look at them all, whether by slideshow or individually, and it’s also nice if it’s easy and simple for me to upload my own pictures.
Flickr is Yahoo’s photo sharing service, and it’s a popular one. Flickr allows you to friend people and follow their albums and updates as well, which can be interesting if you know someone that regularly takes good pictures. However, Flickr is more of an online photo share site, in that it seems to be designed to show and share pictures and albums across the internet, but no so much for personal albums. You can order prints, but only through a couple of third party sites. These third party sites encompass everything from book and mugs and postcards and prints, but it means having to pick and select from a variety of choices and compare prices. Flickr provides a variety of viewing options. You can sort your photostream into different sets and galleries, and join groups where you can have multiple photographers contributing to an idea, which is a great idea for weddings to have everyone upload their pictures to a common album. If you are looking to download a picture for your own use, Flickr only provides pictures up 1024×768, which is only marginally acceptable. One of my biggest knocks on Flickr is that it limits you to 100mb of photos a month, which is another reason why it’s not great for sharing photos of events. With the rising megapixels of cameras a picture can be multiple megabytes and this limit will limit you to a couple of dozen pictures unless you sacrifice quality and make them smaller. Overall, Flickr is good for online collaboration of different types of photography projects, but if you’re looking to share photos of Grandma’s birthday with family across the country, you’d be better off elsewhere.
Snapfish is Hewlett Packard’s photo site. HP is known for printers, and as would be expected it’s easy to order prints from Snapfish. They provide a variety of sizes as well as borders. They have poster prints if you need to blow up a picture. Mousepads, mugs, ornaments and clothing are just some of the different things you can get printed with Snapfish. Most of the complex stuff you need to have shipped, but for basic prints and posters you order them online and pick them up at a local Walgreens, which saves on shipping costs and allows you to pick up your pictures in less than a day. Viewing is a simple enough process, as photos get uploaded to albums and you can scroll through each picture or view them via the slideshow. Snapfish also has it’s own program you can download to aid in uploading pictures directly from your camera or memory card. However it’s not possible to download photos on Snapfish without paying a fee per download. It’s not much, but if you’re talking about an album of 300 pictures, it can add up, especially when you can ask the person who uploaded them to email them to you for free. Snapfish is a great service to use when you plan on printing physical copies of photos or ordering mugs or calendars, but if you actually want to share your photos over the internet with friends and family there are better services.
Shutterfly is perhaps a less commonly used service than some of the others, but it does have what you need to share pictures. Once you upload the pictures onto their site, it is organized into albums, and then you can share specified photos out of that album with friends. When your friends and family view the photos you’ve shared they have the option of saving them to their own album. The printing process is also pretty easy with Shutterfly. You can select which photos you want, with a variety of size options, and have them either mailed or pick them up at Target. They also have some photo books, calendars, and other products. The website itself feels a little older than most of the other sites, and it runs that way too. If you’re looking for a digital copy of a photo in an album, whether a friends or your own, you are out of luck. The only way is to right click and save it, but that gives you the photo in a rather small size. Shutterfly is an okay service, but it feels like it hasn’t changed in years or grown with the times. This definitely wouldn’t be my first choice of photo sharing services.
Google has their hands in everything, photo sharing on the internet included. Picasa Web Albums blows the other services away, offering more in just about every area. They offer up to one gigabyte of photo uploads per Google/gmail account, and you can upload them at the original photo size, or a streamlined version. There is a downloadable app that will upload and organize your pictures for you, and it’ll even search your hard drive and update albums as you put more pictures on your computer. You can then use it to upload to a web album viewable to friends and family, just you, or everyone. It’s a static URL so it’s easy to find all the albums by one user, and everyone that has access to view the file can also save it, at the size it was uploaded. After you upload the photo to the web, you can tag it, link to to it, embed it and caption it as needed. You can also print the photos in your Picasa albums. You can funnel them through Snapfish, Shutterfly or a couple of other sites, or you can print directly to Walgreens. If you’re going to print to a mug or something it’d probably make sense to upload directly to Snapfish, but otherwise Google’s Picasa is the way to go. It also has a tab where you can search through recently uploaded photos as well as search by tag for any public image across all of Picasa.
Of all the photo sharing services I’ve used over the years, Google’s Picasa is definitely the best. Snapfish and even Flickr have their uses as well, but Picasa is my first choice.
Addicting Facebook Applications
Five of the most addicting Facebook applications your friends want you to play.
Bejeweled Blitz may be the most addictive game on Facebook. It’s a common internet game that you’ve probably played before. You get one minute to match up three of the same kind of jewel in a row to clear them for points, getting bonuses for speed and for four or five gems in a row. As is standard for Facebook apps, it keeps a high score list of all your friends and sends you notifications when someone tops your score. The most addicting part of this is that it’s only a minute to play. It takes almost no time, until you repeat to yourself It’s just one more minute 30 times and before you know it you’ve been playing for an hour. The high scores reset every Tuesday morning so even if you’ve set a comfortable score and have stopped playing, as soon as you see your friends setting new scores, you’ll be right back at it.
2. Mafia Wars
Mafia Wars is a popular game, and it’s title basically tells you what it is. You create a mobster and have a long list of jobs you can do as well as fight other mobsters. As you gain levels you can do more complex jobs, put hits on people, or expand your empire to Cuba. Your mob is basically your Facebook friends that also play Mafia Wars, and like every other app, it publishes to your news feed to alert your friends you need help with a mission, or gain a level, or reach a new kill total. The game is less demanding than others because you have energy and strength meters that can really only be refilled over time. You likely won’t be able to sit there and play it non-stop for an hour, and can have fun just checking in occasionally and doing jobs with your refreshed energy. The game will continually exploit peer pressure to get you to return. It’ll send you notifications whenever one of your mob reaches a milestone that you haven’t, and will offer little rewards for you to claim when your character is used in a fight by one of your friends.
3. Farmville
Farmville by the makers of Mafia Wars is another addicting game. It’s a guilty pleasure type of game though, as many that play it feel ashamed that they do so. It’s also one of the more annoying games for your friends, because it publishes updates and requests to your wall more often than most. The game itself is very simple; you run a farm. You need to do nothing more complicated than click. You set up the ground, pick crops to grow, plant trees and buy animals. Then after a set amount of time you can sell your crops or harvest milk or apples to gain money which you can then use to turn around and buy more. Your friends become your neighbors, and after a while you can make your farm bigger. It almost becomes a decorating game of arranging your farm and trees and animals and fences to look nice. It’s one of the few applications with music playing. You’ll find the music becomes both irritating and catchy as you are playing.
MindJolt Games is a collection of hundreds of different games. Most of them are quick and easy games, and some of them aren’t even very good. Most of them are simple, fun, and addicting. They are always adding more games as well, and they’re all simple enough to be intriguing without having to learn a lot of rules. Today I played Smiley Collapse, a game where you have a smiley that you have to navigate downwards past rising platforms. There are strategy games and card games and solitaire games and pretty much anything you can think of. It keeps track of all the high scores of your friends so you can follow them to their best games and try to beat them. There are reflex games like SplodeyMan where you simply have to hit the space as fast as possible upon command. While you are in the application, it’s always suggesting five or six different games for you to play on the sidebar, and it’s very easy to get drawn in to check out another game that sounds interesting.
5. Farkle
Farkle is a dice game. In each of 10 rounds you roll six dice and try to make combinations that score points. Three of the same number score points, as do one of each number and three pairs of numbers. A one or a five can score points on its own. After you pick up the dice to score, you have the option of holding your score for that round or rolling the remaining dice. If at any time there is no scoring opportunities, you get a Farkle and don’t score any points for that round. The game is mostly luck, but there is just enough decision in when to hold and when to roll that keeps you coming back to try to beat your, or your friend’s, high score.
Twitter and the Evolution of the Internet
When Twitter was first created many people couldn’t understand the point and proclaimed, Twitter sucks!. Many still don’t see the point of it. It’s ridiculed as lazy blogging, pointless drivel, a waste of time, and the end of the world as we know it. With things like potted plants and grocery stores tweeting, the derision of Twitter grows.
Many things that break new ground are often misunderstood or greeted with skepticism. Twitter has begun to evolve into a huge part of the web, and more and more people are using it for all kinds of things. The skeptics just haven’t found their niche yet, or are too stubborn to open their eyes and see what’s evolving. They’re distracted by the noise, spam and useless information; All common problems across the Internet. There have been polls that suggest 40% of all Twitter traffic is basically useless information. Is this out of character for the Internet? Look at all your emails for a day; how many of them are spam, newsletters you never read, and forwarded chain letters? Poke into any random forum post about any topic and you’ll likely find 40% of it is just reiterating what’s already said, unrelated tangents, and one line agreements with the the original post. If you just take a quick glance at a couple of twitter pages and don’t find the information to your liking doesn’t mean that there is no value there. Tweets are fleeting, and they reflect present time much more than they provide any archival value.
Even what’s deemed useless information or a waste of time might be helpful to someone. Maybe checking out what others are having for lunch will help you make your own decision about what to eat. Maybe you’re in a basement somewhere but noticing tweets from people you know are nearby about the crazy thunderstorm that just rolled in reminds you to bring an umbrella when you go out. Other people’s meaningless tweets could serve as restaurant reviews, traffic alerts, or a note about a nice sale at the mall. Twitter is by no means the be all and end all of social media. However it’s an important first step in what will eventually be one big integrated redevelopment of how we use the web.
Twitter reflects the stream of consciousness of the Internet, and sometimes the Internet contains noise, spam, and junk. There is also value if you know where to look. If you are tuned into Twitter, news will come to you without having to search it out. Once you build a solid group of followers with a diverse subset of interests stories and news and information that is actually pertinent to you will come across your Twitter screen. Instead of having to hunt down information, often when you don’t even know that something has happened, you check Twitter and everything is there for you. Rather than have to listen to news reports or radio stations, news and events that may be relevant to you or your day can be accessed via Twitter.
Twitter is just like what you would discuss at the water cooler in the office, except you’re discussing it with everyone, at every water cooler, at every office, in every part of the world. If a major sporting story, such as a no-hitter in baseball or a player getting traded, chances are you’ll first hear about it on Twitter. If a celebrity dies, a new movie trailer comes out, or a band adds a tour date to their schedule it makes it’s way around the world via Twitter and everyone that’s interested finds out about it. For those further interested, a simple search on Twitter will reveal all sorts of chatter and discussion around the topic. You can here anything anyone has to say about it, instantly. You’ll see statistics mentioned, highlight plays, discussion on the player’s attitude, and just about anything anyone has to say. On a broader scope, you could follow big events like the NFL draft, a presidential press conference, or the World Series of Poker as they are happening. This is what’s called trending topics, which are basically the hot news of the hour. If you search for these trends you’ll see a continually updated stream of people weighing in on the topic. Some of it will be from experts or authorities on the topic, and others will just be the thoughts and word of mouth of other people that are interested in what’s happening. Instead of tuning to a news channel or going to one news website, you’ll be tuned into the stream of consciousness from interested parties around the world. If someone 3000 miles away happens to hear a tidbit of information in his own corner of the world, he can instantly tweet that data and suddenly everyone knows it. This information gets propagated and retweeted throughout Twitter until the insight of one individual is carried across the globe.
From a marketing standpoint, Twitter can provide some instant feedback on your product. You can conduct surveys and interview people and find out what people are thinking, or you can type in your product’s name into Twitter and find out what people are saying. One quick search can tell you what people think about a new movie release, a new commercial, or a new piece of software. Faster than any RSS reader Twitter can alert followers to a new post on a blog.
Twitter is a part of the future of the Web. Even people that don’t tweet are affected by Twitter because it’s become a concept more than any one site. It’s about the propagation of information, and that propagation continues beyond the website when users repost what they’ve learned into IM away messages, email, IRC chat rooms, Facebook, or by word of mouth to the person sitting next to them. This concept has been there all along, and Twitter just streamlined it. As more and more people and companies start using Twitter it’s only going to continue to redefine how we use the web.
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