Youtube's 1080p Option Is Unavailable To Me In Firefox

I have spent some time trying to track down a reason for this and, failing to succeed, I am posting the question here.

YouTube is a source of near-constant problems for people because cell companies and internet service providers hate it. They hate it because it's so popular and sucks up a lot of bandwidth. Because, remember, telecom companies are generally evil, and their ideal scenario is where you give them $100 every month and then never use their product.

But I digress. I have three computers in my house, two on WiFi and one CAT-5'd into the wireless router provided by Verizon. The two computers on WiFi always provide the option of 1080p in videos that have it, but the computer that is hardwired never does when using Firefox. Chrome sometimes won't show it, but Internet Explorer will always give me the option.

I thought it was my cookie blocker, my ad blocker, my script blocker, or my security suite, but the issue persists in Firefox with all of those programs turned off. I am at a loss.

UPDATE: SOLUTION FOUND

I discovered the problem. I have a few accounts connected to Google, and a few computers, and this led to some confusion.

On one account, I had opted into the HTML5 video beta that is available at the bottom of the YouTube page. On others, I was either not signed in, or had not opted into the HTML5 video beta.

YouTube's HTML5 video option does not currently support 1080p videos. They are only available through the Flash video player.

If 1080p videos are mysteriously not available to you, click "try something new" at the bottom of the page and opt out of HTML5.

The End of Twitter? (UPDATED)

I use Twitter. I have two accounts. I still rely primarily on my blogs for publication and communication, but Twitter sees some pretty significant activity. And this is, of course, why I'm a bit concerned with the way that Twitter is evolving.

Most of the people to which I've talked think that Twitter is making a pretty huge mistake. I tend to agree. They are taking away value from users instead of figuring out how to earn money with their current value set. That's never the way to grow a business. Truly, it may be the way to actually earn money, but that money will come at the expense of growth and customer engagement. That's why real business savvy is difficult. The perfect businessperson could make money while giving everything away for free.

In olden times, this wouldn't necessarily be a problem. A company could make a mistake, correct it, and move on. But in the tech world, as we have seen, the speed with which a company can fail is blinding. Myspace fell off the map in less than a year. A year! Even being in hardware provides no protection, with Nokia going from the #1 cell phone juggernaut to losing money and on life support in less than two years.

I think that companies can make small mistakes. Importantly, as long as value grows, even a major mistake can be forgiven. But with online-only companies, a major slipup can trigger the landslide of users to something else. Not necessarily a traditional "competitor," but perhaps something different. Did Blogger and Wordpress see Twitter as a competitor? Likely not, but they both took huge hits to their active user bases because of it.

What will rise to challenge Twitter? Who knows. All I know is that something is coming, and if Twitter acts like this, they weaken themselves such that they will fall and fall quickly when it happens. This isn't a doomsday scenario, but the world of Internet software has lit a fire under the ass of every company operating within the industry because the speed with which they can fail has accelerated so much. Every company must remain humble, and this behavior on Twitter's part indicates that they are not doing that.

UPDATE: I just now thought of the best example of this threat: Digg. Digg went from being a golden boy to dead in two years. And now, Digg, under new ownership, is trying to become a "startup" again. The problem is that once you're not new, you're not new. That most recent drop that you see on the chart down there was the release of this new version.

I think that this happened to Digg but not to Facebook during its frequent clashes with users because, firstly, Facebook really only had a single competitor, Myspace. Myspace was failing far worse than Facebook ever did. Digg had an immediate and direct competitor in the form of Reddit. Secondly, Facebook only ever added features. Sometimes, users thought the features overreached or were useless, but it was still an addition. Facebook was adding value. Digg took a bunch of stuff away. What's Twitter doing?

Twitter's 'revolution': becoming an old media company (Via The Verge)

The Internet In 1969 Was Amazing!

This video shows a demo of what they thought the Internet would be like in the future. Considering that they were still looking at things from a primarily analog perspective, this isn't a terribly bad piece of futurizing.

I love the healthy dose of sexism that was thrown in for... the hell of it?

Predicting the future is the kind of endeavor into which there will always be prejudices injected. Predictions from the hyper-conservative post-war era always have technology being used almost exclusively to support extant social norms. For all intents and purposes, life is exactly the same, just with some weird gizmo doing things that people were already doing perfectly fine. Just imagine how funny it would be if their predictions were completely accurate.

"After dinner and homework are all done, the family sits down together to watch hours and hours of videos about cats. Because in the future, cats have become the predominant form of entertainment."

Facebook Is Doing It Right

Facebook will be launching a major redesign of their profiles in the near future. As always, users are flipping out. I think that Facebook has figured out precisely what they need to do to avoid becoming another MySpace.

From the late 1990's up to the Facebook/MySpace battle, we saw the launch of dozens of social networks, most long forgotten (remember Bolt.com? Don't worry. No one does). MySpace was the first one to really take the world by storm because its focus was on the profiles and direct interpersonal behavior. Social networks before MySpace had generally focused on creating group areas, games, and chat rooms. MySpace took what people had been doing on Geocities for years and systematized it.

But like all of the other social networks, MySpace got boring. It stayed the same, and I think that's why people ditched it. People have moved from network to network for the same reason that they change clothing. They like change. They might complain when it is forced upon them, but that constant updating is the only thing keeping them from jumping to an upstart competitor.

Analysts have been falling all over themselves in attempts at illuminating the drivers behind Facebook's rise and MySpace's fall, but I think that it's easy. It had absolutely nothing to do with the functional aspects of the service, it was entirely in the personality of the service. MySpace was glittery chaos, while on Facebook, no matter how trashy or horrible a person is, their profile is neat, trim, and organized. The whole service feels more professional.

But Facebook, I think, was a transitional service from the chaos of Geocities and MySpace to something more refined. Now that that role has been fulfilled, Facebook is in very dangerous territory. Facebook is explicitly aware of this situation, though, which is something MySpace certainly was not. Their frequent updates, strict image control, and constant refining of the user experience keeps them safe. Their personality remains refined, youthful, high-tech, and integral to a web-based life.

Netflix Subscribers Abandon The Service.

I find the large exodus of customers from Netflix following its price increase to be of immense interest. I've been ranting for over the past ten years that media is actually worth very little. What has been valuable has always been the medium by which the media is transmitted. Television shows weren't valuable, television itself was.

In this day and age of nearly limitless claims on our attention, no company can safely say that their media is so valuable that people would seek it out. Obviously, that is not the case. Take, for example, me. I pirate. I pirate just about anything that I want to see, which is very, very little. I haven't "stolen" a movie for over a year. The few movies that I have watched I've done so through my Netflix account. Piracy isn't the issue, it's something else.

We can argue about what's causing this, but that's an academic issue. People are, for whatever reason, assigning an ever-decreasing value to movies and television. But even I had no idea how far that had gone. The huge drop in subscribers confirms that it is much further along than I think anyone had initially assumed.

When you think about it, the price increase was actually rather small. As a function of percentage, yes, the increase was very large. But in absolute numbers, it was small. Most people are paying an extra eight dollars per month. If we place the average American household income at $50,000, that means that for 70% of American families, that increase is almost invisible in the grand scheme of their budget.

Yet, still, we are seeing an ever-growing customer loss. While those in the media industry would like to believe otherwise, I think that this confirms what basic economics would tell them: the value of media is approaching zero. ECON-101 will tell anyone that the cost of something will drop to the marginal cost of producing a copy of that thing. With data such as movies and music, that marginal cost is, near as makes no difference, zero.

Netflix is unfolding as a massive economics experiment, one that doesn't bode well for the traditionally modeled media companies.

Bartz Fired And Yahoo! For SALE?!

Carol Bartz has been fired from Yahoo!. I liked Bartz. I had high hopes. Understandably, then, this is a bit of a disappointment.

I think that Bartz should be somewhat happy about her performance, even though she was eventually fired. She was brought on as a kick-ass manager and she did kick-ass manager things. She trimmed about a metric ton of fat from the company, jettisoning winning properties like Geocities. But she also failed to bring in a clear vision for the company. Was Yahoo services? Was it content? Was it web-applications? Yahoo! does all of these things in a very disconnected way.

Yahoo!'s services are great. I like Yahoo! Mail, I love MyYahoo!, but that's where the goodness ends and the mediocrity begins. Yahoo!'s apps are terrible. They bought Konfabulator for widgets... and did nothing with it. Yahoo! Connected televisions are slow and buggy, and even if they weren't, customers seem to be less than thrilled.

Yahoo!'s content is hopelessly hosed. They want to dance the line between inert and edgy, trying to be cool while not insulting anyone, thus appearing hip only to people over the age of 65. In the age of websites like Gizmodo, Engadget, and countless smaller sites that will not mince words, the old maxim of "insult no one," forced upon mass media by the FCC, fails miserably. Instead of realizing that the world is growing up, and thus daring to use naughty words, Yahoo! has been left behind, stuck in the same weird, existential hell in which other Internet old guard like Cnet are trapped.

For evidence of this shift, go to Alexa.com. The audience for Yahoo! is basically flat for all age groups except for 65+, which is highly positive. Same with Cnet. Compare this to a youthful website such as Gizmodo. It is essentially not read by anyone over the age of 40. Even the New York Times is younger than Yahoo!'s audience. Yahoo! cannot pretend to be hip, it has to actually be hip. And being hip means pissing people off.

Regardless, listing the ways that Yahoo! has failed achieves little. It's how Yahoo! can still succeed. They are the fourth largest website on Earth. They are third in the US, behind only Google and Facebook. They have massive reach. They have four major resources that I see: MyYahoo!, Flickr, Yahoo! Pulse, and Mail/Messenger. They have two minor resources, Finance and search.

Yahoo! needs to start with their major portal, MyYahoo!, and generate as much value as possible for the end user. Value comes from integrating all of their tools as easily as possible onto a single page. Facebook, Flickr, Pulse, eBay, news, live video. Integrate Yahoo! shopping into the home page as a service and sell it on the back end as a product, just like Google's search revenue. Don't rely on companies to develop MyYahoo! content, do it yourself. Make it graphical and compelling. Hell, sell the development of MyYahoo! content.

Use Flash and HTML5 to make content boxes dynamic. It allows people to visit other sites and read news without leaving their portal page, which keeps them on your services longer. It also gives you significantly more vibrant versions of mail, messenger, and video.

Fuck your own services! If customers are using other things, let them use them. Develop high quality YouTube, GMail, and MSN boxes. Do EVERYTHING that you can with others' products. Do this because no matter how much you do, you will be able to do more with your own. Always develop, always innovate. If you are not releasing a major update once per year, you're dying.

The goal is to turn the MyYahoo! page into an "app" that people leave on for all of the time that they are at the computer. Facebook is already this for many people for social reasons. Yahoo! can become the flipside of the coin, being the portal through which people find things to share via the social connections.

Flickr is still the premier place for pro photographers. The service has stagnated almost entirely with no updates whatsoever for months, and no major updates for years. Design Flickr Apps, push Flickr integration with digital picture frames, and push Flickr onto cameras. Flickr is integrated absolutely nowhere else in Yahoo!. WTF?! You want Flickr everywhere. Make it easy to do whatever the hell a user could ever want. They still, STILL, do not have an Android app. That is pathetic.

Yahoo! Pulse will be great once they integrate it into MyYahoo!. Until then, it's a wan rejoinder to Facebook and does little to attract people to Yahoo!.

Mail and messenger are still strong platforms for communication. Again, with better integration between Yahoo!'s other services, it encourages users to use Yahoo!.

Finally, Yahoo! cannot succeed with the detached, mathematical advertising of Google. Google does it better and will win. Instead, Yahoo! needs to follow the lead of Gawker media, where they heavily integrate ads into the overall experience. Yahoo! needs to work closely with advertising partners to develop compelling pieces that are both prominent but not intrusive. The era of the ad-blocker is coming, and soon no one will see any ads ever.

Make ads a choice. Make them desirable. Think about all of the ads that are viewed willingly on Youtube. For example, have a list of "See This Week's Fliers." Companies buy a spot on the list and can also buy a "featured" position that is always at the top. The remaining list is sortable by most popular, most recent, or by category. People click on it and a big, Yahoo! designed (or customer, just so long as it looks good) flier made from ANYTHING OTHER THAN PDF appears through which the user can peruse. This provides excellent advertising data and reveals user engagement. Integrate the same user-optional advertising all throughout the site.

Finally, some of Yahoo!'s content is good. Finance has good user engagement and a decent reputation. Sadly, they are doing little with this. Other financial websites like MarketWatch and Bloomberg are blowing Yahoo! out of the water. The same goes for Yahoo!'s OMG! and Shine pages.

Basically, I think that Yahoo! should ditch the branded names scheme and create entirely new .com addresses. For example, AOL has TMZ for gossip. It is a standalone entity owned by AOL. Yahoo! needs to do this with ALL of their content immediately. Build other brands that you can then integrate into your parent brand. Don't try to grow the parent brand beyond its boundaries. OMG! and Shine are already entrenched and have good readerships, but they need much more. They need to start spewing content. Gadgets, clothing, politics, cars, environment, science. If they're not producing original content, they need to partner with someone who does.

Yahoo! can grow, but it will require significant investment in new, productive talent.

I Hate Tablets

I hate tablets. I don't like the iPad, I don't like any of the Android examples, I don't like the Blackberry. I hate them all.

I hate them because all of the tablet fanatics out there, perhaps intoxicated by Steve Jobs exaltations, believe that tablets will one day be the predominant form of computing. At least for now, this is total nonsense.

Every time you talk to a developer, they talk about one of two things: "specific considerations" of tablet development, if they're careful about the words they use; or "limitations" of tablet development, if they aren't. I prefer to use the term "limitations" of the tablet platform. Essentially, until we have neural connections with our computers, tablets are a much more limited form of communication between user and device. That is undeniable. There are simply fewer channels of interaction.

Moreover, the media community and even the tablet developers continue to make those limitations even worse! First was Apple's exclusion of Flash, which was a real bummer, since the iPad's best at media consumption, and that means Flash. Then, it was the media companies trying to block pretty much everything from the mobile browsers. Even on Android, you can't watch music videos on YouTube. You can't watch Hulu.

That is in no way a comparable experience. It's not even different. It's inferior.

When Windows is on tablets, I'll bite. That way, a tablet will be an actual computer. Not a toy.

NY Times Data Starting to Coalesce.

It's been almost a month since the NY Times paywall went live, and I think we finally can say a few substantive things about it.

First, since the paywall was so "leaky," there was no distinct drop-off after its installation. Compare this to the charts for Newsday:


Or this absolutely comical chart for the Times of London:


The NY Times' 24 month chart isn't nearly as dramatic;


but I suspect that's because their paywall is so loose. You can sidestep it by simply blocking Javascript, or downloading a little Javscript shortcut, or by coming in via Google or Yahoo, or via a link on Facebook or Twitter. Essentially, as long as you don't go to the Times via their home page, you never have to pay. Which seems to sorta' defeat the purpose of a paywall, but whatever.

Even though the leaky paywall is preventing a dramatic and newsworthy drop in readership, there are some data to be gleaned.

First off, while the Alexa Rank numbers are only mildly affected, the page views have been significantly moved.


Zooming in to the 6-month chart the effects are more apparent:


They have dropped, certainly, but they have also stopped fluctuating with the ebb and flow of internet traffic. This is troubling, since on a healthy website, growth comes from that very ebb and flow. Very tight numbers means that your audience is flatlining. While this means you have a stable audience, when you do lose audience members, it's very difficult to replace them.

If we again zoom in to the 6-month scale on the chart, we can also discern a little bit of possibly-relevant data.


Looking back on the 24-month chart, the Times was, slowly sometimes, trending upwards in readership and global rank. This trend possibly may have broken, with the Times' rank the lowest it's been since December of last year. This is troubling since the Times' most popular general audience competitor, cnn.com, has been flat for the past two years. But even on this scale, we can see that while the heavy flow of news appears to have given CNN a boost in their readers, the Times has received no such boost and has, in fact, reverted to even lower numbers. CNN might break 50 and stay there in the next few months.


If we compare the NY Times to their biggest philosophical competitor, the LA Times, we see that the LA Times are growing while the NY Times is not.


All websites exhibit a great amount of fluctuation, so this past month is not enough to extrapolate long-term trends. The important fact to take away, though, is that while other websites went up, the NY Times went down. Both CNN and the LA Times are heading towards milestones on Alexa, with the former reaching for the 50th most popular website on Earth, and the latter heading toward 300.

I still think that it's too early to call the paywall a complete failure, but those page view numbers should be troubling for the Times executives. The nature of the paywall means that large chunks of the Times' audience could suddenly leave, resulting in shocking drops in readership. I think that this is a possibility because the paywall works via some Javascript that tracks article views. After twenty articles are viewed, the page is blocked asking for payment. With five daily views via Google, and unlimited numbers from Facebook and other social tools, it will take time for people to hit the wall a sufficient number of times to annoy them enough to simply stop going. Ironically, I think that this will make times of elevated news stories problematic for the Times, since people are more likely to hit the wall quickly and repeatedly, and since they won't care to pay when options like the BBC, CNN, LA Times, and Reuters are available much more quickly, they'll more likely to leave, find that they enjoy another website, and never return.

AOL, The New York Times, And The Future of News

As is being passed about the interwebs, for the first time, the internet has surpassed newspapers as a source of news for those surveyed. Everyone is aware, even the New York Times, that print is on the way out, at least as far as news goes. This news comes as even more significant because of recent events involving the old guard of the news world and some big bets being made in regards to the emerging players.

First, we have The New York Times, probably the single most visible newspaper in the world, erecting a paywall. We've already seen the effects that paywalls have on readership. Newsday implemented one and received, after three months, thirty-five subscribers. Thirty. Five. They then took down the paywall for about a month, which caused a small spike in their Alexa numbers, which immediately went back to its pathetic standing after the paywall was reinstated.

News Corp. instituted a paywall for the Times of London, reducing its online readership by 95%. Two websites that have paywalls but remain successful are both financial, The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. What that means, I'm unsure, but I doubt that it's a coincidence. Furthermore, the "paywall" of the Wall Street Journal can be largely bypassed if you always enter through Google search. I also know that the Economist's paywall isn't absolute, since I've read many articles on their site.

Paywalls are a disaster waiting to happen for whichever publication is stupid enough to try. But on the other side of the coin, they are a massive opportunity to any enterprising competitors, which is exactly what's happening with the recent AOL purchase of The Huffington Post. First off, I think it was idiotic that Yahoo! didn't buy the Post first, but that's another story. Second... off?... we have the New York Times complaining about The Huffington Post, calling them thieves, following a similar charge levied by The New Republic (which, shocker, is also behind a paywall). It is not at all coincidental that these comments are coming after AOL's buyout.

Further evidence of the coming shakeup is the supposed "AOL Way" that is being pushed out to all of AOL's online properties, including mega-blogs like Engadget. This strategy, and truly the strategy of Huffington Post from the beginning, has only one goal: to dominate the online newscape. The number of stories being produced is going to be staggering, and even the copy of those stories will be SEO'ed. Any competitor who's stupid enough to go behind a paywall will immediately be decimated by open competitors who are optimizing their entire site to draw in as much traffic as possible.

AOL is positioning itself as the replacement to any news organization that shoots itself or otherwise fails to adapt. The AOL Way is the core of this mission. Yes, we'll have lots of boilerplate garbage, and lots of aggregation meant to do nothing more than draw search clicks; but the more of that AOL can manage, the more quality production it can afford, eventually leading to a massive, dominating news presence. What these news stories indicate is that AOL seems to understand something that the old guard is completely incapable of grasping.

AOL understands that the biggest issue is not now, nor has it ever been, people being unwilling to pay for news. Obviously, they are willing; when that access is the only game in town. That's what made newspapers valuable. For a long time, in any given area, they were the only games in town. That meant a very limited and focused pathway from advertiser to consumer. The internet has changed that. It's not piracy or entitled consumers. It's the very CORE of economics. When there are more competitors, the value of whatever is being produced goes down.

Thus, the issue is a huge drop in per-person advertising value. Theoretically, that should be more than compensated for by the large increase in the size of the audience. Each person is worth less, but there are tons of them. Instead of embracing this, old-world companies are desperately clinging to their old models. Well I'm sorry. You can no longer expect to get multiple dollars of daily revenue for each reader. Per person revenue is now measured in cents. It's Econ101. Get used to it, otherwise, AOL is going to eat your fucking lunch.

When Web Design Goes Wrong

I'm on the hunt for blogs and websites about art and design. I stumbled across one called WeHeart out of Britain. It's well-liked and has won a few awards but it fails one of the web's most important tests: the five-second test. Namely, can a user tell what your website IS in five seconds or less. If not, you have some work to do.

WeHearts website was obviously about something, but damned if I could tell at first. It took me well over a minute to determine what the navigation was, where it brought me, what I was looking at, truly, it took me over a minute to figure out what the fuck this website was telling me!

This is a website designed by an "artist." This is in comparison to Google, which is designed by engineers. I prefer the latter. If you are a website that is distributing content, like Google or a blog dedicated to content, you should be easy, readable, straight forward, and only have artistic flourishes on the edges of your design. If you're a website that is content, like sprite.com, or a band's website where the intent is to draw in listeners, feel free to have wacky-ass shit that makes no sense. But if you're trying to get words in front of people with the website as the avenue, ditch the artistic bullshit. It's annoying.

A Public Service Announcement

This is the second time that I've been nailed by a "drive-by" malware attack. The first time, I knew what caused it. I went to a website that hosted an infected advertisement, and bam, I had XP Security 2010 on my computer, which was apparently a variation of Total Security 2009. At the time, it was exploiting a hole that prevented Task Manager from opening. As such, I wasn't able to see what the name of the program was and go and delete it. That hole has apparently been fixed as no later "editions" have had this power.

This time, I was nailed while I wasn't even doing anything. I hadn't touched the mouse for at least a minute, I was reading, suddenly Firefox disappeared. Not crashed, disappeared. Then, audio started playing, and I had five or six invisible instances of Internet Explorer running, according to Task Manager. I tried to use Firefox and found my searches and link clicks being re-routed to a variety of ne'er-do-well websites like beezid.com.

I ran through all of my running programs and was able to shut down and delete most of what was running, but the virus was directly affecting both explorer.exe and wininit.exe. The modification dates indicated that neither file had been changed, so there was some addition to calls for these programs being made somewhere in the registry.

Norton's free scan worked, but since Norton sucks and only tells you about the virus, this didn't help much. I was able to learn that the virus was called the Bamital Trojan, and this variation was brand new. Very little info at Symantec, Microsoft, TrendMicro, or AVG. It prevented me from installing any antivirus except for the TrendMicro Housecall, which didn't detect it.

If your security definitions are up-to-date, Windows should detect the virus before it can do any damage. My virus definitions on my laptop were a month old. A month! That's all it took. My girlfriend's computer had fresh virus definitions when the virus attacked her computer two days before mine. It was actually pretty easy, if time consuming, to get rid of it. Windows blocked it from doing anything and a two, not-so-quick virus scans with Housecall cleaned it out. I was unable to determine how the virus was affecting Wininit and Explorer, and was going to run Kaspersky off of a USB stick, but my computer crashed completely before that could happen. Possibly because I was killing registry entries like quirky-yet-somewhat-famous actors in a Tarantino movie.

I don't know the specific vector of infection, but it came through Firefox on both my computer and my girlfriend's computer. Kudos to Chrome, which the virus was unable to hijack. Instead, it just prevented Chrome from working at all. This is insane. Back in my day (2006), you had to actually be stupid to get a virus. You had to open the "I love you" e-mail or click "yes," or SOMETHING. Now, the fuckers can just come in and rape your poor computer.

Recommendations from my experience:

• Update virus definitions constantly.


• If you're a Windows user, download Microsoft Security Essentials. It's the lightest-weight antivirus program out there, easy to use, and is completely free.


• Use Firefox and install both the Adblock Plus and NoScript add-ons. It makes browsing a bit less seamless, but you're leagues safer. You'll also get used to the control allowed you.


• If you're infected and you know things are wrong, open up Task Manager with ctrl+alt+delete and start Googling the processes that are running. Make sure you click the "show processes from all users" button/box. This will help you with the nature of the beast. Once you've determined if a program is a virus or not, try to shut it down. Usually, there will be multiple programs that will reopen other programs, just to make this even more difficult for you.


• Determine the location of these programs that were running and go and delete them. Try to shut it down in Task Manager


• If you don't have antivirus, try to install some. Try MSE, AVG, TrendMicro Housecall, Malwarebites, and Norton's free scans. As I mentioned, the Norton scan won't fix things, but it might at least tell you what the infection is.


• If the programs successfully run, run ALL OF THEM. If one of them misses the infection, another might find it. Then run them multiple times. Just accept that you're looking at multiple hours. Start up Lord of the Rings Extended Editions! Those take forever to watch.


• If you can't run the antivirus programs, even after deleting some of the running programs, you're left with either digging through the registry, which is dangerous, or running antivirus off of a bootable disc or USB stick. Kaspersky Rescue Disk is good for this.


• If this fails, you're left with the nuclear options. Combofix is a powerful tool that will leave your computer functional, but will likely kill some of your installed programs. And finally, a complete reinstall of Windows.


• If your computer is functional, copy and save all of you files to a usb stick or external hard drive. Insert your windows disc, restart your computer, and when prompted, hit a key to boot off of the disc. Then follow the instructions to format your hard drive and install Windows fresh.


• If your computer is non-functional, you're going to need to boot up an operating system from a disc or USB that will recognize your external storage. I used Knoppix. Either download or have a friend download Knoppix, burn it to a DVD, then start up your crap computer with Knoppix in the disc drive. Boot off of that disc. This will take awhile, but once it loads, you'll have a fully functional graphical operating system that will let you search through your hard drive, then drag-and-drop your files onto external storage.


• If you don't have a Windows disc, which is common with shitty pre-built computers from the likes of Sony and Dell, you might have to request a disc from your manufacturer. Just make sure to tell them that the "rescue" disc that they provided didn't work, you tried it multiple times, and the virus remains.


• You can also ask around to see if you have anyone who pirates software a lot and have them download your version of Windows again. Make sure it's the same version or your serial number won't work.


• Once you reinstall, reactivate Windows, and begin the long quest to reinstall all of your software.

Wikileaks is Great

I'm puzzled by the furor over the Wikileaks leak. For one, it actually paints the US in a surprisingly good light. It shows the US working hard to do legitimately good things. Bravo! Moreover, it has politicians saying things that we want them to say in public (like Putin is a weak leader). Second, what was released is borderline unimportant.

Wikileaks itself is also a good thing. Many seem to think that they released this information to specifically embarrass the US. If they did, they didn't release terribly embarrassing information. Even Assange has said that the goal if Wikileaks is not to embarrass, but to prove that nothing is secret. If nothing is secret, there can be no "conspiracies." That's Assange's term, and I don't like it, but you get the picture. If people think that there will be sudden, global oversight to anything that they do, people won't do some of the shit that government has been prone to do. No more secrets.


Movie Videos & Movie Scenes at MOVIECLIPS.com

Marketing People are Retarded

This subject is near and dear to my heart: Suits and ties and marketing people.

These people are the scum of the universe. They go out, get degrees in whatever, feel self-important, learn a vocabulary of impressive-sounding words, then weasel their way into positions of power

People like the guys in PBS's early 2000's Frontline, Merchants of Cool. They talk like they know what's going on, labeling behaviors, both group and individual, with semi-scientific sounding words, but their actions say that they don't. Their actions say that they don't have a fucking clue.

Why do these marketing people fail? Why do they not understand people? Well, because they're stupid. The merchants of cool have no idea what cool is because they themselves were NOT COOL when they were young. They were the freaks and geeks. That's the reason why they've become so obsessed with what is cool. They've dedicated their lives to trying to quantify the nebulous qualities that they so sorely lacked when they were younger.

Do you want to know what cool is? I'll tell you right now, and you don't even have to pay me. It's confidence and sexiness. That's it. You're selling them what they don't have. They aren't confident with themselves and they don't feel sexy. If you market like that and have a quality product, you're golden. It's that simple. Any marketing guy who says otherwise is saying so because he doesn't want to lose his job.

This isn't directly connected other than being the brainchild of retarded business people. Video game companies are raising prices and using tricks associated with online content to try and force more money out of people. Why would they be doing this? Why wouldn't they be using the wonder of the always-on digital age to try and create even more value for users? Why wouldn't they expand into services that the old paradigm of physical media didn't allow?

Because they're retarded, that's why. Books written ten years, reworked, edited, and finally published two years ago, don't have answers for the problems of today, and no matter how much time you spent in MBA school, that reality is inescapable.

For example, Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2 are two games with downloadable content that is unavailable if you buy the game used. Game companies hate the used game industry, so they're trying to step over it.

Instead of, I dunno', raising value or decreasing prices, they're trying to squeeze more money from the balls of consumers with downloadable content that costs extra or by raising the prices, thus making used games even more attractive.

What will the $15 extra, to access the online content, mentioned in this recent lawsuit do?

Well, it will immediately drop the value of the used games a further $15. This on top of the $5 discount from buying used. So $20 off. Instead of $60-$70, the game is $40-$50. And even worse, the reduced value of the used copy will reduce the value of the new copy for hard-core gamers who frequently sell back games to buy new ones, just like cars. You pay more than a Kia for a Honda, but you can later sell it for more than the Kia, either equalizing the equation or, frequently, making the Honda actually cost less.

This is not a difficult concept! This is Econ 101 at a community college taught by Sloth from The Goonies! What the fuck!

American Prudishness

There's an article over at The Register asking whether American prudishness is ruining the internet. The author's thesis is, essentially, that most of the internet is dominated by American companies, American companies are beholden to American advertisers, and American advertisers are beholden to the American people, who are morons who hate naughty words and naked bodies.

I do not take a pessimistic perspective on this. In fact, my perspective is downright Pollyanna. Even though major corporations rule the web and, in many ways, force American cultural norms onto their users, this sort of restriction is almost always fleeting. The internet has shown that it is repulsed by censorship and restriction, and while a system or company that advocates and/or uses those two tools may succeed in the short term, in the long term it crumbles. I can think of no better example than AOL.

In comparison to AOL's sleek interface, the internet of the late 1990's and early 2000's was a no-man's-land, but it won out. Not only did it win out, but by the end of the conflict, one of the world's biggest corporations had been reduced to a website. Apple is a good example that is playing out right now. Apple won over users and got them to buy into Apple's ecosystem of products with sleek design, wonderful user interfaces, and great advertising.

This had s snowball effect, where users bought one or two Apple products, but eventually bought more and more, until a god chunk of their digital life revolved around Apple products and services. But see what is happening, now. The flagship of the closed Apple system, the iPhone, is seeing its market share and dominance give way to the inherently open Android OS. Whether Android is actually open or not is open for debate, but it's certainly far more open than Apple. Once people buy one or two products outside of the ecosystem, they're far less likely to buy back in (I actually have data to back that statement up... just wish I could find it).

We can also look at cultural movements over the course of the past ten years. Remember when the Paris Hilton sex tape came out? Remember the controversy? The news coverage? We now have sex tapes released almost every month... and no one cares anymore. Or for examples more quantifiable, look at acceptance of homosexuality in America. Five years ago, a majority of Americans did not support gay marriage. Now, less than half a decade later, even in the face of ceaseless attacks from the religious right, a majority do. Staggeringly, men also now outnumber women in their support of gay marriage. Cultural shifts of this speed and magnitude have never happened before. Why did it happen? The only variable I can see that didn't exist before is the internet.

It is perhaps the "wild west" nature of the web that has made the major companies act the way that they do. The internet at large is free and uninhibited. To differentiate themselves, they hew closely to the tactful ideal, with no naughty words, nudity, or raunchiness. While I understand this strategy, I think that it's dangerous. They risk damaging their brand when cultural norms begin to accept the very activities that the big companies now censor. When that shift happens, people won't want to be associated with the companies that now represent the censorship they are escaping. Why do you think that CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, and every other old-world news service have demographics with an average age in their 60's?

So while I think that major American companies are stupid to try and censor, because of the damage it can do to their brand, I don't think that it's a problem for the rest of the world. The internet is free and freedom is better than no freedom --people like the ability to do things-- so any shift towards censorship will be isolated both in time and digital space. It is this seemingly inherent mechanism to the internet, perhaps because it's as direct an extension of the human psyche as is technologically possible, that will keep it free and will continue to have an increasingly large effect on society at large. I think that the greatest decades of cultural change are in front of us.

Love for the Nintendo Wii.

I Love the Nintendo Wii. I don't play it very often, but I love it. I love it because it is a video game system. You play games on it. You don't stream movies, or sign into massive online communities of eight-year-olds that can destroy you in Halo. You don't form Nintendo guilds of people who all play Mario together online. You just play a fucking game.

I love the success of the Wii because I see it as a celebration and vindication of the GAME. Microsoft and Sony, and even PC developers like Blizzard with World of Warcraft, have abandoned the casual gamer. The gamer who isn't willing to dedicate hundreds of hours of game time and spend stupid amounts of money on the "it" games every month.

I've felt so abandoned by the companies. I don't want to join guilds to avoid shit-head teenagers in online Gears of War matches. I don't want to spend nine hours raiding in Warcraft to get any good equipment. I don't want to play nothing but another damned first person shooter when one comes out every fucking month.

And I don't with Nintendo. They keep me rooted in the 1980's and 90's, when I simply bought a game, put it in, and played. No signing in. No leader boards dominated by guys against whom I have ZERO chance. That's what I like. You cannot just put a game into the Xbox. You cannot simply open a save file. You cannot simply jump in and out of games. Oh no! You need to create an avatar, and an Xbox Live name, and sign into the Xbox to access any save files. And if you're playing multiplayer, the person who originally signed in and pressed "start" must then be the person who signs in and presses start every time you start the game if you want to access the save file. Why not just have a simple save file that anyone can play? Because Microsoft wants to remove as much control as possible from you, because they've got designs on turning the Xbox into a set-top-box and being the Apple of the living room, where you control nothing, they control everything, and they charge you lots of money for it.

I think it no surprise, then, that Wii is outselling everyone else combined, and that I and all of my friends with whom I remember playing games back in the 80's and 90's all primarily play the Wii. I only have one friend who plays the Xbox primarily, and he is that super-gamer. He buys and sells games by the dozens every year, belongs to a gaming clan, and lives on Xbox Live. My Xbox isn't even connected to the internet and all I play is Street Fighter IV. Is the Wii for that hardcore gamer? No. Not nearly enough shooters (he says with a sly sarcasm). Obviously, Microsoft has found a model that works very well for that market. That market loves the network, the leaderboards, the sign-ins, and all of the other trappings of the Xbox. I don't. Those very same trappings do nothing but piss me off.

I could spin that market negatively. For example, World of Warcraft. The people there are similar to the people on Xbox Live. They're hardcore and the Warcraft world is their world. They derive a great deal of satisfaction, self confidence, and social interaction from this world. Is that necessarily a bad thing? Not at all. But when someone who doesn't mesh with that world comes in, they clash. Do you remember the movie Christine? It's Stephen King's evil car story. Basically, an evil car is purchased by this timid, teenaged milquetoast, and he begins to become infected by it and turns into a total asshole. One of the underlying themes is that the car didn't actually infect or possess him, thus turning him into an asshole, it's that the kid was always an asshole, he was just too much of a coward to let it come out. Emboldened with his car, we discover that the kid was never a nice kid, and our earlier empathy is replaced with disgust.

Think of World of Warcraft and other online games as Christine. There are very few nice twelve-year-olds, so just imagine the pricks that they turn into when given an epic fantasy world. As such, the consistency of this fantasy world is important. They feel badass, here, and when that is threatened, they get angry (I'm here referring to not only the tweens and teens, but anyone with that profile). I'm reminded of this trenchant comic by the guys over at Penny Arcade.


So yeah, as I think I've explained, the ever-growing online world is one that has basically abandoned me. Instead of playing World of Warcraft, I play through Final Fantasy V for the tenth time. Instead of playing Bioshock II, I play Doom II. The only new games that I'm playing are New Mario, Mario Galaxy, and Street Fighter IV. Games that have basically been around since the beginning of games.

I like games. I LOVE games. And that's why I like Nintendo. They're a game company. They make games. I appreciate that and their quasi-old-style view of the industry very much. Go Nintendo.

The Nature of AT&T

"In a fate that will soon befall the rest of the wireless carriers, AT&T has become a mere toll-taker on the digital highway, an operator of dumb pipes that cost a fortune to maintain but garner no credit for innovation or customer service."

That's Wired Magazine speaking, above. This is a short but critical point about AT&T and what is does. AT&T has always been a dumb pipe. AT&T has never received credit for innovation, because that's now what it does. You can innovate with ancillary aspects of the business, but the core remains the same.

Imagine a shoemaker who makes dress shoes. He does not innovate about making the shoes. He doesn't make Moon Boots, or things with rockets in them. He just makes shoes, and that's great! He can innovate with artistic flourishes, but the shoe itself remains the same.

Sillier still, is that AT&T is acting as though it once was an innovator, in some long-dead halcyon days. How?! Once, AT&T was both the dumb pipe and the provider of the phone. But they only provided the phone, the drab black ones that are slowly dying as a cultural touchstone, to get you access to the dumb network for which you would pay.

AT&T's business hasn't changed! They still provide phones, which they subsidize, simply to give you access to the network for which they charge. What in the bloody blue hell is AT&T thinking? No, it's not glamorous, but it's profitable and powerful.

That doesn't mean that they can't put some foofaraws on the shoe, though. Provide service to anyone who has access to the network. A valet service. Free access to just-released movies on Netflix or the like. It's never going to be the super-gloss of Apple or other hardware makers, but, again, it's profitable.


Bad Connection: Inside the iPhone Network Meltdown
(Wired.com)

Comment-ary

There's an article on Yahoo! about the Tea Party expelling some leader for, basically, saying something stupid (as though that's new?). The comments for this article, all 1,600 of them, reminds me of how great the internet is. For the first time, people can be part of the discussion instead of passively experiencing the news. Their voice can be heard. Even these people.

From Will C.

THE BLACKS, JUST WONT LET GO OF RACEISM. THEY ARE THE ONES THAT KEEP IT ALIVE. EVERYTHING THAT DOESNT GO THERE WAY IS RACIEST. I AM SICK AND TIRED OF HEARING THE BLACKS COMPLAIN. IF THERE IS ANOTHER CIVIL WAR, THE BLACKS WILL HAVE HELPED MAKE IT HAPPEN,BECAUSE PEOPLE LIKE ME HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF THERE BELLYACHING.

I added the italics, but everything else is all Will. I actually think he should be congratulated. Grammar might be beyond him, but he did figure out how to use a computer. That's something! Still, he's not as bad as YouTube comments (nothing, and I mean NOTHING, is), which YouTube has finally gotten something of a handle on with their newest system. So, bravo internet, bravo Will C., and bravo to our ever-evolving system of commentary.

MMORPG Economics

I'm always saying that the various online games are stuck in the old economics of game play. Namely, they're still operating on the concept that you make a game, package it on some kind of medium, sell it, and then count your money. Even World of Warcraft is basically that. The only difference is that you then have to pay for access to a service.

Dungeons and Dragons Online has discovered the profits possible from opening the game entirely. Previously, they were trying to operate under the same business model as WoW, which I thought was dumb then, and has since been proven to be dumb. D&D-O was heading towards oblivion until they opened the game, which immediately sent user numbers through the roof.

Still, they then followed Farmville and any number of games from Aeria in a business model built on restricting access to certain parts of the game unless you pay up. I've nailed why this doesn't work, and why Farmville and all of Zynga makes almost none of their money from direct sales, all the while gold and items in World of Warcraft sell for, in some cases, hundreds of dollars.

In WoW, everything people are buying is attainable in-game. When someone buys, there's no way to tell if they bought their way through or if they earned it. That's important. In Farmville, many items can only be purchased with real money, they thus hold no value since they represent nothing but the money behind them.

And that's the key. When something is only attainable with money, they have no opportunity cost in the game. Obviously, classic opportunity cost applies, but not virtual. In WoW, for example, you want the Sword of a Thousand Truths. You can look up online and find that you need to go through a long quest called a raid to get it. You have a 10% chance of getting it on any given raid. The raid takes 3 hours to complete. That means that you can decide if buying the item is worth a possible 300 hours of game time required to get the item in-game.

Everything or nearly everything must be accessible in-game. Only then can a user apply a value to the things for which you are charging. The developer cannot lock up anything behind money or its value becomes nebulous.

WoW may want to consider this. They need to do something, because the population appears to have plateaued at about 11-12 million.

Results From Dungeons & Dragons Online Going Free: Revenue Up 500% (TechDirt.com)
World of Warcraft- Population 11.5 Million and shrinking? (RecklessGamer.net)

The Tubes Are All Clogged!

Brilliant in its simplicity.

Googenemin Square

John Sherffius, Boulder Daily Camera