It seems that the guys at Rupture are still at it!
They just made it possible to auto generate a nice banner with the click of a button for each of your World of Warcraft characters. I think this is really funny as I had just submitted a feedback for not even two weeks ago with this exact suggestion. 
Well, everyone else has talked about it. Maybe I should too. I’ve been trying to find someone with a Rupture account by searching the website since it’s still in beta. In order to obtain an account, someone who already has one must invite you. Not as fun as it sounds. I’m really wanting to give my guild the ability to sign up for the service if they want to.
While searching the Interweb for someone with an account, I found another website which might prove to be interesting: Warcraft Social. I believe this site to be more for actually finding people to play with and announcing the presence of your characters on your MySpace page whereas Rupture is more for maintaining the stats of your characters like WoW Roster does. I enjoy the thought of being able to go to a website in order to see if any of my guild members knows how to create a certain piece of armor or perform a certain enchantment. Now I would like to enjoy the ability to do that instead of just the thought.
Overall, I believe Shawn Fanning’s new website to be a very sharp-looking piece of work. Now if they would just open the doors a little wider to allow those of us who truly want to help test the site, the world would increase in its “better place” points, if only by a few.
Google purchased writely.com, a web-based word processing application, a few months back to be included in it’s suite of productivity tools. Ever since this purchase, the interface has remained the same.
Last night, as I was wriging a paper, I noticed that a planned outage was to occure that evening. Strangely, it mentioned that it would happen an hour before I was even reading the message! Nevertheless, I periodically went back to the list of documents to reference things. One very well timed refresh of this list provided me with a brand shiney new interface!
They have merged the documents from writely into the list of spreadsheets. It looks really nice! It provides the ability to tab documents now, as you can see with my Economics papers being tagged as “ECO305.” There are a few downsides though. Things that were present in Writely but not in this new interface that I miss a lot already. That should tell you something. These include the inability to rename a document from the list of documents. One must go into the document to rename it. Furthermore, one can no longer upload a new revision of a document. It has to be uploaded as a new document, the old one deleted and the new one renamed to be the old one.
Nevertheless, overall I’ve been pretty impressed by this new interface. I’d say give it a shot! It also seems as though the old speardsheets link ‘http://spreadsheets.google.com‘ now redirects to ‘http://docs.google.com‘
Most everyone has heard of Blockbuster Video simply due to it’s nearly uncontested reign in the movie rental industry throughout the 80’s and 90’s, save for Hollywood Video’s appearance in the mid-90’s. Netflix took the industry by storm in the very late 90’s with it’s never-before-seen online rentals. Renting a movie on the Internet and having it mailed to one’s home was an uncomfortable concept for some, but for others, it was like the movie rental industry had finally reached a place where it would be able to offer services that matched their online life-styles. Blockbuster soon caught wind of this change and followed suit. So, that’s pretty much it regarding the history of each of these two rental giants. Sorry, Hollywood Video, you apparently didn’t want to play this round…
Now we come to who is better and why in what areas. Both obviously have their strengths, they are both doing quite well. Netflix seems to be doing a tad better in the market, but we’ll save that for another article.
| Blockbuster | Netflix | |
|---|---|---|
| In-Store Renting | yes | no |
| Online Renting | yes | yes |
| RSS | no | yes |
| Ability to control queue by external means | no | yes |
I’m going to be focusing on the last two parts of that chart. Why? Two reasons, which tie together quite nicely. 1) Because they are important to me and I’m the author of this blog, that and you’re not here to hear your opinions. 2) Because Blockbuster is just about ready to release the new version of their Online store. It is currently in beta and, I must say, it looks pretty slick. I have no been using it as if yet but plan to from now on.
Netflix has tempted me to try them out on a few occasions due to one thing. They have an API available which many people have taken advantage of and made software, mash-ups and widgets which allow one to control one’s queue from a tool other than the netflix website. If Blockbuster did not allow me to rent movies from their stores as part of my monthly subscription, they would have lost my business a loooong time ago. But they do, so they have been safe. It does not stop me, on the other hand, from liking what I could be doing with Netflix.
So, what does this new beta site have to do with Netflix’s API? It seems as though Blockbuster has finally come into their own and is now providing, at the very least, RSS feeds of their newest movies. They still don’t seem to have a generic feed for their customers’ queues, but I will give them a few months after the new site’s launch to see what happens. It could very easily be done securely, it’s really just a matter of whether or not they want to put forth the effort.
Originally, Nintendo announced that the Wii browser (Opera) would be an additional cost but free in Japan. Apparently this offer is also valid in the United States for a limited time. I’m terribly glad for that as there is no way I would have purchased it.
“Go here to access the Opera internet browser. In addition to supporting flash (making this a step up from the DS browser), the browser uses the Wiimote to zoom in and out. The browser will normally cost money, but Nintendo will make it available for free download until June of 2006.”
Nintendo has finally officially announced the launch date and price for the Wii. Surprisingly, for once, the United States will see the hardware before Japan does!
Release Date: Nov 19th, 2006
Price: $249.99
In other news, wii.com has opened the US portion of the site.
Nintendo just launched the Japanese portion of wii.com. Considering it was during the Japanese Wii conference, it can safely be assumed that the United States portion will be opened after the US Wii conference.
A pretty decent looking site. I’m pretty sure it will be there for hype and promo only, meaning not much actual information. More to come after the US conference…
This is awesome. I just wish the rest of the world would have such enthusiasm about web standards!
“A group of high school kids campaign to have Firefox (yes, the web browser) run for prom queen at their school. The advertising is incredible, and they’re almost successful–until the school bans browser candidates.”
This just Dugg:
“Apparently, a company in Sweden is offering file-sharing insurance - they’ll pay your fines if you’re sued by the RIAA. The /. submitter translates the link as follows: ‘For a mere 140 SEK ($19 USD) per year, they will pay all your fines and give you a t-shirt if you get convicted for file sharing.’”
Holy cow! RIAA Insurance. That’s just interesting/awesome/sad that anyone was able to think that up. That’s like jail bond insurance! Know you’re about to rob a bank? Just buy some bond insurance! That will guarentee that if anything goes wrong, you don’t have to suffer the consequences! What a world… when the law abiding corporations are the bad guys and the seemingly good guys are the ones doing something blantently wrong… again, it really comes down to what we law-abiding citizens have been pushed to. No excuses, just an explaination as to why this whole RIAA thing is so dumb.
Google recently introduced a page dedicated to bringing all of the works of Shakespeare together in one searchable place. An excelent resource for any of us who have ever wanted to get into Shakespeare’s works but have not had the time.
Despite the debate raging over Google’s indexing of copyrighted material, I personally believe that it should be maintained! It seems that, according to Techcrunch, Microsoft’s Live will be releasing a similar service. The difference will be, instead of an opt-out service, allowing authors and publishers to remove their copyrighten books from the indexing service, Microsoft will be incorporating an opt-in service.
