The days of Sega and Sonic are sorely missed
and appear irreplaceable in its Japanese place of birth

BOX 360 is a gaming console from Microsoft, which has hit the streets just weeks ahead of Christmas. The Xbox 360 brought with it great anticipation among games enthusiasts, so sales were expected to be exceptionally high. Nonetheless, it has been revealed that Japan is reluctant to embrace the Xbox 360:

“It’s not going to be a big hit in Japan,” said 26-year-old Kentaro Okamoto, one of the first Xbox 360 buyers. “I buy every new game console… but normally Japanese customers only buy a machine when it’s made by Sony or Nintendo.”

In a similar article which comes from the BBC:

Microsoft has launched its Xbox 360 games console in Japan to what seems like a more subdued response than it received in Europe and North America.

[...]

Sales of the first Microsoft Xbox in Japan have always lagged behind Sony PlayStation 2, which was launched two years before it.

It sound as though this model will make a complete 360, having solved none of its previous shortcomings. As a publicity stunt perhaps, it is understocked on the shelves though.

On top of it all, we recently heard of some serious bugs and great trouble surrounding the Xbox 360, which perhaps was unready for prime time. Consequently, lawsuits begin to loom over, which put the product’s reputation in jeopardy.

Open Source enthusiasts might be happy to hear that a “Linux on Xbox 360″ project has already been initiated. Microsoft are actually losing money for every unit that they sell. Profit is expected to be made using games sales. Having said that, units that are sold in vain give game programmers the illusions that the Xbox is popular, which urges more involvement. It is a similar case to Windows workstations that are wiped clean to give way to Linux, yet are still counted as Windows sales.

Related item: Is Nintendo Dying?

Tabs corresponding to separate E-mail messages in Thunderbird

ABBED views in E-mail applications (also referred to as “mail clients”) are a brand new idea as far as I can gather. Thunderbird developers are now said to be going down this unprecedented route. From the recent article:

A developer has added tabbed browsing of e-mail messages to Mozilla’s Thunderbird e-mail client, mimicking one of the most popular features of the Firefox and Opera Web browsers.

Tabs corresponding to separate RSS feeds in Owl

I have seen tabs in feed readers before, namely in RSSOwl (shown above). Nonetheless, I believe that incorporation of tabs into E-mail/newsreaders would be uncalled for. Much-familiar applications like Thunderbird would prove confusing to many users unless tabs are shrewdly hidden, thereby protecting users from their freedom.

Tabs make the controls finer, maybe unnecessarily so. E-mail, as oppose to feed readers, is used by merely everybody (assuming Webmail is put aside for the sake of the argument). Not everyone who uses Outlook (Express) can handle higher levels of complexity, let alone those who are new to E-mail altogether. Overall, tabs can make the entry barrier even higher. In firefox, tabs do not appear by default until/unless a second one appears. This makes tabbed browsing a function which is easy to enable if/when the user feels confident. Yet, owing to smart UI design, it never contributes to unnecessary clutter.

Thunderbird and RSSOwl are of course Open Source projects that are not bound to desires of large companies. According to Wozniak (AKA Woz), who is co-founder of Apple, the worst applications come from the large companies, Apple included. To quote Woz, “Microsoft, Apple and AOL, they tend to turn out the crappiest products, you know, software-wise”.

A shrunk-down screenshot of Thunderbird
‘dressed’ with the CrossOver theme

Wikipedia will never collect dust on the shelves

A story that has hit many headlines speaks of Wikipedia closing a few doors, making it slightly more difficult to contribute content.

For more details, select your favourite source:

• ZDNet: Growing pains for Wikipedia
• CNN: Online encyclopedia tightens rules
• Associated Press (via Yahoo): Wikipedia Tightens Submission Rules
• CNET/Slashdot: Wikipedia to Restrict Creation of Articles

Related item: Wikipedia Statistics

In this era we live in, there is a mounting fear among journalists. No longer is it only books and papers that are able to reach people’s attention. Nowadays, people can get delivered content that they most desire by using search engines. People also discover ways of getting high-quality, credible information without paying a penny.

Realising that adaptation to change is needed — somewhat of a new status-quo — newspapers begin to penetrate the Internet. All the same, they fail to make profit that they have become accustomed to over the decades. Sooner or later, methods similar to eavesdropping are employed. Yet again, the grim outlook for the press seems inevitable and ever irreversible.

Rupert Murdoch has forecast a gloomy future for newspapers with the growth of the internet, saying he doesn’t know “anybody under the age of 30 who has ever looked at a classified ad”.

The owner of the Sun, Times, Sunday Times and the News of the World, who once described newspaper classified advertising revenue as providing “rivers of gold”, now says: “Sometimes rivers dry up”.

The media is not alone in this. The Royal Society attempts to keep science off the Web, arguing it could harm scientific debate.

The Royal Society fears it could lead to the demise of journals published by not-for-profit societies, which put out about a third of all journals. “Funders should remember that the primary aims should be to improve the exchange of knowledge between researchers and wider society,” The Royal Society said.

ARGE quantities of Red Hat-based terminals are expected to reach the African people. This comes a month or two after Microsoft refused to give Africa cheaper software, arguing that skills were needed rather than more software.

South African news site Tectonic is reporting how KDE terminals are Giving South African Farmers a Leg-up.

[...]

The government’s IT manager said “People’s perception of open source is that everything is command-based, text-based. Our pilot projects are meant to address that perception.”

On the same topic: 100 Dollar Open Source Laptop

T is no secret that violent video games lead to crime. It is also a commonly-known fact that war games motivate people to join the army, thereby making their computer-born fantasies become real. More unusually, however, the BBC confirms that war games became an army initiative and are used as a training tool.

America’s Army is one of the most popular computer games on the planet and like many games, it is a shoot-em-up, get-the-bad guys kind of affair.

But unlike other games, America’s Army is truly a product of the US military. The Army first released the game a few years ago as a recruiting tool.

When one comes to think of it, this is a form of brainwash. The association with ‘war culture’ is a worrying factor as this is no longer flight simulator, whose aim differs.

Related item: RPG Fantasy World

OR the past 4 months I have been syndicating 7 distinct news feeds. The feeds contain search results for keywords of interest, which pertain to computer vision. I syndicate from a couple of sources, which makes the scope even broader; the total number of feeds is 14 at present.

I needed to keep myself regularly informed about developments in computer vision. That field is not only important to my research. It it also serves some required content, which enables me to extend The Computer Vision Digest. For the task of news ‘digestion’, I have been using RSS feeds from Google News and Yahoo! News. Both merely serve as aggregators, encapsulating and centralising news from agencies from all around the world, niches included.

As much as I respect and even fancy Google, I am disappointed with their news service. I am almost reluctant to say that their news aggregation is filled with (if not plagued by) commercial sites that attempt to sell stuff rather than provide news items. It is not only implied by the .com suffix, but also by content, which is glaringly promotional. This is of course a real deterrent, which becomes appalling at times. Others have noticed similar issues, so it is not a matter of coincidence, but a recurring pattern. I have come to take every link that spot in Google News with a grain of salt. Rather often it leads me to what can only be described as news spam — an attempt at sales that is shrewdly disguised as a news item.

To syndicate news, import any of the following templates into your feeds reader. Replace KEYWORD1 and KEYWORD2 with keywords of interest and isolate keywords using a plus (the + symbol).

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=KEYWORD1+KEYWORD2&ie=UTF-8&output=rss

http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p=KEYWORD1+KEYWORD2&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&x=wrt

This time, for a change, my warm recommendation goes to Yahoo. They simple manage to isolate real news from the ‘noise’.

Related items on feed-based services:

• Google News Feeds
• Yahoo RSS
• Search Results as RSS
• Weather RSS Feeds