Who is Hahleq?

Things I read that I found interesting and worthy of comment July 9th through July 10th:

• New Best Buy PS3 Bundle Brings MGS4, Killzone 2 – I need to make sure I don't accidentally enter a Best Buy this weekend as this could cause me to weaken and pick one up. This is effectively a $100-$120 price drop if you like both of these games. I'm definitely a shooter fan, so KillZone 2 sounds good and I'm curious to see if MGS4 is as awfully over-rated as every other iteration has been. Both games are supposed to really show the graphical prowess of the PS3, so that would be good. I will NOT buy a PS3, the economy is not good, I will NOT buy a PS3, the economy is not good…
• How FriendFeed Could Become the Ultimate Social Media Tracking Service – Hmmm, I haven't looked into FriendFeed as early on my impression was that it was just a MySpace and Twitter aggregator of some type. Sounds much more powerful than that from this info, so time to check it out.
• How to Install Chrome and Chromium Side-by-Side (So You Can Play with Extensions!) – Mostly a bookmark for myself to check more into later. I really like Chrome and probably do 60% of my browser related stuff in it. It is wicked fast, blowing FireFox away. As I've stated in previous posts, I'm not a big extensions fan, but certainly would like a solid ad-blocker and perhaps a few other things as well.
• Ten Companies Twitter Should Consider Acquiring Next – Like I said… lots of better interfaces for tweets than Twitter. Funny that Twitter should consider buying one of these, perhaps the other way would be for some of the most popular "add-on" sites that figure out a revenue model should get together and buy Twitter.
• Ads Spotted on Twitter.com – Did You Notice? – No, I didn't notice since I never actually visit the twitter site. I use it as a transmission mechanism, not a destination I visit or a place I go to for content. Even if I was using Twitter as a content receiving mechanism, I still wouldn't use their site as there are probably a dozen better interfaces. They should just figure out a revenue stream for their communications network and trash the idea of the site altogether. Probably just me and there's a ton of money to be made from the youngun's who don't know any better… yet.
• Live Blog: The Facebook Privacy Conference Call (Jason Kincaid/TechCrunch) – I'm looking forward to seeing how this works in actual practice. Not enough information on what the "custom" setting is. This for every post or something you can set up in advance and pick from a list? That's what I want.

  My concept would be that I am different things to different people and consequently there are different things I wish to share with people that know me under any given context; family, work, long-time friends, gaming friends, public. If I can go through my friends list and put them into these categories and then when I post select which categories can see any given item, then I'm very happy. This would enable to move to a single FB account instead of managing the two I have now. One for friends and very close family where I post multiple things nearly every day and one for everyone else to which I post maybe every other week, just because I don't have the time to really participate in two places.

  I hope that's how it is going to work and if not, I'll continue with the mechanism I have today where most of the people that know me really don't get to participate in my postings and really, they aren't missing anything, but I'm sure FB would like to see more interaction and hence create more stickiness and hours "on-site" with them.

Things I read that I found interesting and worthy of comment July 8th through July 9th:

• Bing, the Imitator, Often Goes Google One Better (David Pogue/New York Times) – hmm… guess I'm not the only one with this opinion.
• Google To Announce Major Identity Initiative for 1 Million+ Companies and Schools – The reality is that for this to ever get off the ground someone has to provide the credential and ensure it is secure since OpenID natively certainly doesn't do that. Someone will need to wrap services around it to make it simple for Ma & Pa Smith to use. Someone will have to eventually step up and vet the identities behind the credentials so the claims can have any chance of being accepted by RPs. Question is who will make the right land-grab and leverage their position to be one of the dominant few? FB and Google certainly seem like no brainer guesses as to likely entrants and winners, but ya never know, PayPal snatched online payment from the obvious early and supposedly powerful entrants.
• Aspyr Announces Fighting Fantasy for DS – Note to self: Check out the reviews on this when it is released. Maybe a FF I can finally get behind.
• iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre: Methadone for the CrackBerry Addict – yeah, gotta admit that if my employer didn't mandate BB for security reasons and I was going to spend over $200 on a smartphone (debatable in this economy), I'd probably grab an iPhone now that they've fixed some of the early data-speed and functionality issues. I'd really, really consider it if it was on the Verizon network instead of AT&T… hint, hint, big-V!
• Security Guru Calls Chrome OS's Security Claims "Idiotic" – Question posed in the article: "Chrome OS can get malware…technically speaking. But won't it get less of it?" Answer: Depends on how successful it is or in other words, how many people can be pwned by the attacker.

  To the last question in the article: I don't see how calling out an obviously and demonstrably wrong statement as such is making a mountain out of a molehill. Google, dare I say it in such a PC (that's politically correct, not personal computer) climate, LIED. Period. The end. Just like Apple says their system is more secure. No, it isn't, it just isn't as valuable to target in the same way bank sites are more "valuable" and hence "vulnerable" than news sites. Anyone really want to argue that the Wall Street Journal Online site is more secure than Chase.com?

• Chrome OS Not Exactly a “Death Knell” for Windows – Ahh, a more reasonable and sober examination of the realities.
• Bing Now Bigger Than Digg, Twitter and CNN (Ben Parr/Mashable!) – I've switched the search on one of my PCs in IE to Bing and I have to say that I'm likely to change over all my PC / browser instances to Bing. Results are solid, meaning I've found everything I've wanted and no, I haven't done a bunch of side by side Google / Bing search comparisons. The big feature for me is the popup preview. This has shown to be accurate and is saving me lots of "open in new tab" work to find out which of the top hits actually is what I'm looking for. Good for MS, actually good for Google as they could use some butt-kicking and of course good for all of us.
• Sony Not Yet Interested in Games on Demand Service for PS3 – Huh? I thought Sony said they'd caught up and even passed Xbox Live functionality. These guys have done the least with some of the best hardware (PS3 & PSP) on the planet because they just flat do not get the online space. A shame, really.
• Court Limits on TSA Searches – Very good news. Time to get the brown-shirt TSA back under control or better yet turn them back into plain old ID checkers and screen for only the obvious… and let me leave my freakin' laptop in my bag. These guys couldn't spot a truly disguised destructive device anyway. Check for past stories of their inability to even catch 50% of actual guns! What can you expect from high school dropout union workers, eh?
• Sony CEO dismisses price cut chatter on PlayStation (Alexei Oreskovic/Reuters) – and thereby continues to have one less sale than he would otherwise have. My itch for a BluRay is beginning to grow faster than my desire to hold out and get it with an overpriced PS3. Xbox really missing out in not offering an attachable BluRay player as I'd go for that in a heartbeat.
• Google's Chrome OS: what it means, why it matters (John Timmer/Ars Technica) – Not really a surprise, right? Built on Linux which makes sense. Will be interesting to see if they can make Linux everyman friendly where others have failed. Also interesting to see if they can get the peripherals and driver support thing down, another Achilles heal of Linux. Oh, oh, and the security angle… good luck with that as well.

  I'm all for this regardless how it sounds above, but I suspect we'll all find out as Apple is now that its actually near or at double digit market adoption that claiming "more secure" because you aren't under attack doesn't prove as defensible when you're actually worth attacking. More competition is better and I'm all for it, but I continue to say Microsoft has done a better job than the "cool geek" crowd wants to give them credit for.

• Sony Says PSN Isn't Playing "Catch Up" with Xbox Live Anymore – uh, without consolidated identities and consequent unified friend's lists he's wrong. PSN still in catch up and without the feature mentioned above, just won't be able to IMHBAO.

Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment July 6th:

• Bullied by Media, Palin Resigns – No matter what she does, I'll continue to follow her career. I hope she can be brought to national prominence against all the odds just as the much mocked "former actor" Ronaldous Magnus Reagan did.

  Interesting to note that for liberals when someone fails, you don't point to that failure as something to learn from and continue to hold the performance bar at a high level. No, you give in and say since one person in my family failed to practice abstinence, lets be against that as an ideal. And we wonder why with liberals in charge of our education system for the last 50 years that we have nothing but a terrifying mix of anarchy and mediocrity from the vast majority of our youth.

  Good for you Sarah! Keep it up!