Don’t We Already Have That?

I was reading this great article by Jason Tanz on Wired (via Marco Arment) about the Facebook game spoof Cow Clicker, and this paragraph stuck out to me:

Game theorist Jesse Schell took this idea to its Orwellian extreme in a presentation at yet another industry conference. He described a world in which a person’s every action—brushing their teeth, showing up to work on time, tattooing an advertisement for Pop-Tarts onto their forearm—earned points. Schell says he wanted to encourage people to think carefully about which kinds of games and experiences were appropriate to develop.

It seems to me that we already live in just such a world. The “points” are just called “money” and cheating is not only allowed, but seemingly encouraged by the rules.

Disabled Comments

I’m going to take the route of John Gruber and Marco Arment, among others, and just keep comments globally disabled on this site. Why?

Well, mostly because I’m tired of fighting the spam. Allowing random people on the Internet to “contribute” to my site just opens me up to scripting attacks, and mostly it just enables spam bots to try to post crappy spam. Akismet is pretty good, but it doesn’t catch everything.

And, for everything else? I basically agree with everything that Marco Arment said. Comments are useful on some popular blogs (like Balloon Juice and asymco, for example), but I rarely get anything useful on mine.

If you want to contact me, or just shoot me a “thanks”, do it on twitter or via email.
If you want to respond to something I wrote, do it on your own blog, and link to me.

Slow, But Not Never

So…. You might have noticed some changes around here.

I’ve been, as I indicated way back when, quite busy with the new addition to the family. Never did get around to making a real post about her, but what are you going to do. Some minor trouble with the website actually motivated me to get this thing running the way I wanted all along. I think it is looking much better now, but I’m not done quite yet.

Some notes about the switch: All of the images in my old posts are messed up, and there are some character encoding problems. I’ll get that all cleaned up in time. As it is, I’m quite happy with my new installation and look-and-feel. And I’m going to write again.

I’m also considering killing off comments altogether, but I haven’t quite decided. My site is, obviously, very low-traffic, so I don’t get many useful comments and battling the spam is a constant pain. But, I haven’t decided. When I do, I’ll tell you about it, dear reader.

Promises, promises

I’ve been a little busy lately with a new addition to the family. I’ll get a story (and some pictures) posted here soon though. I know… Excuses, excuses. This one is small but mighty though.

Et tu, Nilay?

Following Paul, Joshua Topolsky says goodbye to Engadget. And, Mr. Patel is apparently going too. Great work, AOL.

It was a good run. I’ll seriously miss the podcast with the three of them. Amazing team.

The iPad 2′s RAM and the New iMovie App

So I was scanning this MacRumors article listing a few smaller “tidbits” about the iPad 2 launch and I noticed this:

iMovie and GarageBand Compatibility: According to Apple’s iMovie page, the new universal iMovie application for iOS will be compatible with the iPad 2, iPhone 4, and fourth-generation iPod touch, but not the original iPad. The new GarageBand application for iPad will, however, be compatible with both first- and second-generation iPad devices, according to Apple engineer Danny Patterson.

Sure enough, the Apple web page linked says “iMovie works with iPhone 4, fourth-generation iPod touch, and iPad 2″.

So why not?

Of course, it could be just money. Apple just wants to add a feature to the new iPad to get people to upgrade. There is a nice Applesque symmetry to it since the devices that run the iOS iMovie app all have cameras built-in. But then why offer GarageBand for the original iPad? And since they’re actually selling the app, wouldn’t they want to use the whole platform if they could? There are millions of iPad users out there, after all, who all have original iPads.

On the other hand, maybe it is just that all the wiz-bang stuff in the iPad version of iMovie just can’t run on the iPad 1′s hardware. Which brings up a point: It is a universal app and it does run on the iPhone 4, which has a slower A4 CPU than the original iPad, but has 512MB of RAM. But then, of course, even though it is a universal app and they share a common code base, the iPad and iPhone versions really are two separate and distinct applications in most respects, and this certainly has a dramatic impact on performance.

I don’t know… Just wondering.