Digg’s “Possible Dupes” for “Five Firefox Extensions That Should Be Built-In”

• Wedding Favor Lip Balm
• Can English Be The Official Language
• How Much You Count On a Free Dating Site?
• 10 Lies You Really Shouldn’t Try On Your Next Resume
• Itches You Shouldn’t Scratch
• iPhone Firmware Update 2.1 Coming Soon
• HOW TO ENABLE COOKIES
• Gateway to Green Living

Honestly, I can’t figure out what kind of “magic” is going on in their algorithms that would connect my post with any of these. “Itches You Shouldn’t Scratch” or “Can English Be The Official Language” really?

The really funny part was that two of the “possible dupes” it suggested were actually submissions of the exact same link, with the exact same title. Apparently their dupe checker didn’t help out on that one. When I checked on submitting some of my older posts that had already been submitted to Digg from a site I used to cross-post at it didn’t suggest a single possible duplicate. Go figure.

This is just reason number 53 for why I don’t really use Digg anymore. Here’s a screen cap of the full dupe checker results if you’d like to see them yourself.

At the end of my last post I was waiting to be contacted by a woman from billing about the problems with my service. She did eventually call me, and I did receive a credit on my account to offset the issues I had been having. They never got my service working properly however.

The local Comcast manager ended up contacting me. It was pretty funny because as I started explaining my issues and mentioned that he was calling me because a blog post I had written got read by some Comcast VP he told me “I know about the post, I have it up on my computer right here.” In case you haven’t read the previous post, it is a bit of a sarcastic rant on Comcast. You know, the kind of rant that you’d rather not have a Comcast employee read while they are talking to you.

He ended up trying to do some tests and was convinced I must have a signal problem. A technician came out to check things out and lo-and-behold my signal was fine. I can’t remember all of the different tests that were run, but eventually I just gave up because I was leaving in two weeks. When this all started I had three months left until I was moving out of Indiana. Apparently that wasn’t enough time for Comcast to deliver the service I paid for.

After my own experiences I can’t say I was surprised at all to see more news coming out about Comcast’s atrocious customer service. I know that fixing my problems had to be a pretty high priority considering that I had a VP at Comcast emailing me about it. That is what makes it so bad, it was a high priority and they couldn’t even fix it. They couldn’t even figure out what the problem was actually. You know that those cheeky DirecTV commercials are aimed right at Comcast.

Standards behind the “free and open Web”

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this statement, but using a term like “free and open” is such utopian propaganda. After all how could you be against “free and open” right? A brief look at the web standards groups might illustrate the real root of the problem though.

The W3C (World-Wide-Web Consortium) is the main standards body for the web. To say that they have a reputation for being slow is an understatement; their last XHTML/HTML recommendation (XHTML 1.1) was in 2001. That was seven years ago, or almost eternity in Internet or dog years.

Eventually it got so bad that some people from Apple, Mozilla, and Opera forked off into their own group called WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) in 2004. They started, and are still working on, the draft of HTML 5 which has finally been adopted as the starting point for the W3C’s new HTML working group. Unfortunately, according to the WHATWG editor for HTML it doesn’t look like HTML 5 will be done until 2012; eight years after the WHATWG was formed, and eleven years after XHTML 1.1. That sounds like a rapid pace of innovation to me.

The real culprit

This may seem like a forgone conclusion to many of you after seeing the W3C’s development timetables, but the real reason Flash and Silverlight exist is because the “open web” people dropped the ball. HTML simply can handle what Flash and Silverlight can do. It has become increasingly stale for modern web development needs.

Here is some perspective, HTML5 has finally added a tag for handling video. Flash 6 came out with video support in 2002! Where is the HTML version of Line Rider? It is in Flash and Silverlight now. If you want to see something really interesting check out Hard Rock Cafe’s memorabilia page (Silverlight 2 required) and tell me if you’ve ever seen something like that with HTML. (Here are some other interesting examples)

I actually hate Flash, but I’m not going to blame Adobe for the fact that so many people and companies have decided to use it. It isn’t like Adobe is paying people on MySpace or bloggers to use Flash widgets. Youtube could have really only happened using Flash too.

AJAX to the rescue?

What about AJAX and all of those Web 2.0 sites though? They seem pretty sophisticated right? In short AJAX is a kludge of various technologies that were never intended to work together in this manner. It can work, but AJAX development is a pain. It gets even more complicated when you start to mix in other aspects of the “free and open” Web like SVG or CSS. It is anything but a cohesive set of technologies.

The real weak spot is in the development tools for “free and open” technologies. There are no AJAX development environments that can compare to the tools available for Flash and Silverlight, and the latter has only been out for one year. It is so bad that people made a big deal over a framework to make AJAX development a little easier.

Honey and Vinegar

I’m not against the idea of a “free and open” web, but obviously there is an increasing demand for a richer experience than that offered by the W3C’s dated technologies. After all there isn’t just one, but two major competitors to them.

If the web is going to steer clear of these proprietary environments the proponents of the standards will need to create the technologies that enable innovative new online experiences instead of just copying implementing features that have already been done before elsewhere. Complaining about the proprietary web won’t do anything, after all you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

The rep I talked to mentioned the data transfer caps when he was telling me about the difference between a couple of the plans he was talking about. I mentioned that I was surprised they had caps and said what they were. He was surprised I said that and nonchalantly said that everyone does it. I mentioned that it has been big news that Comcast is acknowledging their network management practices including bandwidth caps, and applauded the rep and Cox for being more straight forward about their caps.

After getting off the phone, I went to Cox.com to see what all of the caps were and surprise, surprise, I couldn’t find it. Their Internet service page lists upload and download speeds, the type of IP address you’ll get, whether the plan has “PowerBoost” or not, how much webspace you get, and even how large the e-mail accounts can be, but it doesn’t list caps. I looked all over the site and couldn’t find it anywhere. So I searched Cox for download caps using Live Search a few times and it came up.

Turns out it is <sarcasm>really easy</sarcasm> to find. Just click on the 4pt font “Policies” link at the bottom of the page, then click on #13 “Bandwidth, Data Storage and Other Limitations” and then in the middle of that paragraph click “Limitations of Service”. Isn’t it so obvious? The Policies page is the only page on Cox.com that actually links to the caps (that I could find). To be fair, once you finally find it, the page is quite clear on what each service plan allows.

For the record, I am not against the idea of consumption caps actually. There are just three major problems with the current implementations I’ve seen in the marketplace.

#1: They are very unclear to consumers. On Cox.com it is buried in a series of pages that only attorneys would be attracted to. The consumption caps need to be shown on the same pages as the bandwidth speeds.

Comcast is even worse than Cox, they don’t even say exactly what the caps are. How much data is 40 million e-mails really? While their examples are a little more understandable to average users, they really need to list the actual cap.

Oddly enough when I used their benchmarks with the averages for my files/emails to calculate their caps, their caps are much higher than Cox’s, so you’d think they wouldn’t be shy about it. Although the difference between the examples is a joke. The effective cap is about 64GB/month using the photo example with my pictures (and I have an 8MP Canon 20D so my pictures are actually quite large), but it is a whopping 4TB (yes, terabytes) if you use the 40 million e-mail example. Talk about unclear.

There also needs to be a way for consumers to check their consumption. There is no place (at least that I could find) where consumers can see how much they are consuming (ala cell phone minutes). Even if you track your own consumption somehow (DD-WRT can do it on a number of routers) the ISPs conveniently don’t recognize anyone’s numbers but their own.

#2: There is a wide disparity between plans (at least at Cox). This is really a byproduct of #1; they don’t make it easy to find what each plan allows.

When I recently signed up for Internet with Cox they tried to sign me up on some combo promotion deal for Cable TV and Internet. It included their Value Internet plan (1.5Mbit/256kbit @ $29.99/month). I opted to upgrade to the Preferred plan (7mbit/512kbit @ $43.99) mostly for the higher uplink for online gaming and VoIP.

It turns out that the Value plan only includes 4GB of downstream and 1GB of upstream traffic per month versus 40GB and 10GB (respectively) for the Preferred. So for 47% more per month I get 1000% more transfer allowance. Who would think that the difference would be so large?

I can easily download 2-3GB in game demos in one day over Xbox Live on a regular basis. I would have blown past my cap in less than a week for sure. I wouldn’t have known the difference until my Internet got cut off or I got a threatening letter. Hence the need for clarity in listing what is included in the Internet packages.

Some examples at Cox are even worse. They have Preferred on a special for $19.99 and Economy (the lowest tier) for $14.99 right now. Economy only includes 3GB of downstream traffic. For an extra $5 you’ll get over 13 times more download capacity. Why can’t this be more obvious?

#3: The caps are ridiculously low. I analyzed how much you could utilize your connection for 24 hours a day, and for an adjusted day of 16 hours (to account for sleep) and here is what I found. I looked at what I call acceptable average utilization (AAU). It is the average bandwidth expressed as a percentage (acceptable speed / rated speed of plan) you can consume without exceeding the bandwidth caps imposed by an ISP.

Every plan allows less than a 2% AAU rate at their rated speeds. On the Value plan (read: not even the lowest tier) you can only average 13kbps! If you account for sleep (not that BitTorrent or my backup software sleeps) then the top adjusted AAU rate of any plan is still only 2.7%.

To put that in perspective, on the higher Preferred plan, streaming music from an online radio at 192kbps constantly everyday would use up your entire consumption cap by itself. If you live with a couple of other people who stream music too, then you can each only do 8 hours per day. In my book that is hardly “excessive usage” for someone paying for the second highest tier plan.

I think I’ll have to check out what DSL and Fiber are offering in my neighborhood to see if I can find a company who agrees.

*Here is a link to my spreadsheet with all of my numbers in more detail.

**Looks like the caps are already causing problems.

First award winner goes to DRM (digital restrictions rights management) for “How not to create a sustainable business model.” I don’t know how many of you consumers out there saw this, but Microsoft has decided to turn off the DRM services for the MSN Music Store. This means that anyone who bought leased music from MSN is effectively screwed. The music will still play on the machines they have authorized already, but when the computer stops, so will the music. And just like musical chairs, anyone who paid for that music will be left without a chair.

Now you may be saying to yourself, “Well who bought music from MSN? I want to know who these two people are.” But this has already happened with Google Video, Major League Baseball, MTV URGE, AOL Music Now, and Virgin Music Club. Somehow the mainstream technology media isn’t quite catching on to the realities of DRM. I don’t think that there is a sustainable business model for music ownership that includes DRM. Music subscription services are an exception because they don’t ever act like you own anything. Maybe that’s why I get my digital music elsewhere.

If DRM was the winner of the anti-business model, so-called 3G wireless service is the runner up. ComputerWorld recently reported on 3G data networks and while most of the review is generally positive there was one thing that stood out to me. AT&T and Verizon both cap their services at 5GB of data received per month, and word is Sprint will be following suit (they are actually capping it at 300MB if you are roaming!). At first 5GB might seem like a lot of data, but when you break it down that is not the case.

If a business user were to use the 3G service for 8 hours a day only on weekdays, they could average only 29MB per hour of data without going over. Considering that the TechCrunch homepage is 1.8MB by itself or about 1/16 of the hourly quota for a business user. Or put another way, your connection can only average 8KB/sec or you’ll go over. That is for only 20 days a month, for only 8 hours of the day. Heaven forbid someone used it everyday because then that is only 169MB for the whole day!

Last but not least is Playstation Home, which is soon to join Duke Nukem Forever as the world’s most famous vaporware (yes, I’ve heard some people have actually seen it, supposedly). For those not familiar with Playstation Home (also referred to as just Home), it is Sony’s total copy interpretation of Second Life The Sims Online a virtual world. It was originally announced in March 2007 and scheduled to come out in open beta in August 2007 and public release in October 2007.

Now I’m not really good at math yes I am but August is only five months after March, and we are now about fifteen months past that date, and there still hasn’t been a public beta. Later they promised a “Spring 2008″ delivery, only to announce in Spring 2008 that it would be coming out in Fall 2008. I don’t know if there is a solution to this problem for Sony other than to ship Home sooner rather than later, but you have to wonder what they were thinking when they made the announcement(s) about Home’s development timeframe. Any takers on it actually coming out in Fall 2008? Much less whether it will have been worth the wait?

The really amazing thing is, through all of the troubles the PS3 has gone through (and it really couldn’t be much worse) it is still a system people will consider buying. Talk about a powerful brand.

I know this will seem like another “me too” post after the well publicized Comcast story at TechCrunch, but I actually wrote about 95% of this a couple of weeks ago, mostly while I was on hold with “tech” “support.” I was going to wait until the issue was resolved, but I’ve decided to post it now. This is my story of how Comcast took over the cable services of my lowly regional cable provider, and how bad things can get worse. Read the rest after the jump.

I am currently attending grad school at Purdue University, which is located in the relatively small town/city of West Lafayette, Indiana. When I first moved here the cable provider was Insight, and I thought they were terrible (relative to my last cable company Cox). Latency (ping times) were high, channel selection and quality of service (bad picture, dropped sound, extra-crappy DVR) were a joke, and the prices weren’t great. I did however get close (~95%) to the advertised throughput of the Internet package (10Mbit/1Mbit) I paid for.

That changed when Insight sold the Indiana area to Comcast. Initially I was looking forward to a bit larger company hoping the selection and quality of service would improve; it didn’t. Literally the day Comcast took over the network (as shown by the IP address range and DNS servers I was pulling down) my max download speed dropped to 4,250 kbit/sec (less than half the speed of what I was paying for).

I could test at a variety of sites (Chicago, New York, Dallas, etc.) over different networks (Sprint, Speakeasy, etc.), and they would always max out at 4,250kbit/sec usually within a 6kbit/sec variance. Look like my connection is being capped? Yeah, that’s my hypothesis. Oh, and FYI, I don’t use any P2P; I actually buy my music (shock!).

When I first noticed the problem, I tried calling Comcast. Their system would try to transfer me to a customer service representative (CSR) for about 30 seconds and then just tell me that they were all busy, try again later, click. I couldn’t believe it would just hang up on me. So I tried it a few more times and it happened every time, even if I requested cable TV support instead, even the next day.

It was after this that I went to Comcast’s website and filed a complaint. It is worth noting that their feedback form says it sends an e-mail to “Rick Germano – SVP Customer Operations, Comcast.” I left a brief complaint basically stating what had happened and that I’m not happy with it.

After a day or two, I got a phone call from a “local” (they left the local number, but it just went to the same system as the 800 number) Comcast employee. She sounded like her short-term job security depended on taking care of my issue. Unfortunately she called in the middle of the day, so obviously I wasn’t home. When I would get home, however, their call center would already be closed. They called two other times (yeah, still in the middle of the day) and left messages.

Finally, they sent me a letter saying that if I didn’t call within the next two or three days that they were going to consider the matter rectified. I don’t know how they really thought anything could be rectified, as I still hadn’t been able to talk to a single Comcast employee.

The next day I made a point of getting home early to call Comcast so that my issue wouldn’t get swept under the rug. What happened next really surprised me. I encountered the two least qualified IT people I have ever dealt with, literally. As a very competent network guy, I’m used to knowing more about the problem than the first line support, but this was a new low.

The first “tech” would interrupt me every time I said something because she heard a slight echo. The first time was fine, after the twentieth time I was losing my patience. She would not check anything out on my connection unless I first:

1. Plugged straight into my cable modem
2. Turn off my firewall
3. Clear my browser cookies (yeah…seriously…those cookies can drop your speed by 60% or more…)

She said that I wouldn’t get my rated speed if I had a firewall on. You know, because modern dual-core CPUs can’t handle a 10Mbit/sec connection through a firewall, right?

To top it off, as I use VoIP for my “home” phone service (which I was using for the tech support call), I would have to use my cell phone. Problem is, they can’t call out, so I had to call back in and wait on hold to get another technician.

Before I ended the call she asked me if it was raining, because that could affect the speeds. I told her it was perfect blue skies outside. Then she asked if it had rained at all lately to which I replied that it is Indiana, it rains at least once a week. So she said that was probably the problem. <sarcasm>That explains why the Internet is always so slow in Seattle.</sarcasm>

So I called back in, and the second “tech” asked me which site I had performed my speed tests on (dslreports.com, flash and java versions). He then went to the site to run a speed test. He didn’t want his speed though, he was trying to check my connection’s speed through dslreports. He was completely puzzled that it kept returning the speed of his connection.

He actually couldn’t run any tests basically. He could see it was connected and that was about it. He told me that a technician would need to come out to check the wiring outside, and that the soonest they could schedule me for was in a week-and-a-half.

I’m moving in about 6 weeks, and I’m about 95% sure it isn’t the wiring outside, so it would just be a week-and-a-half delay to finding the real solution. I told him to forget it, I would just downgrade my service so that I at least wasn’t paying extra anymore.

These two people were by far the least qualified “tech” “support” people I have ever encountered (even worse that my worst Dell experience). And before you jump on the “India Tech Support” crap, realize that these people were all American.

I want to make it really clear that both reps acted like they really wanted to help me, but they were completely incompetent. It really was a lot like when a two-year-old wants to help you cook in the kitchen. I don’t blame them for their failings however, I blame whoever hired them. My mom could give me equally good bad good bad good (read: bad) tech support tips, no joke.

After waiting for about ten minutes, I finally got transferred to someone in billing who could downgrade my service. When I explained why I was downgrading (incompetent techs can’t fix my connection) and explained some of the “techs” actions, she was completely dumb-founded. She said she doesn’t know anything about computers, but even she knew you can’t do a speed test of someone else’s computer via a website like dslreports.com.

Turns out there is a 6Mbit/sec down 1-2Mbit/sec up package that would cost me $15 less per month. As the uplink is still good (my uplink gets maxed out a lot between online gaming, VoIP, Orb, Foldershare, FTP, XMPP, and Mozy), I decided I would switch. She told me it would probably take 15 minutes to become active and after that I would need to power-cycle my cable modem.

She called me back (apparently billing can call out?) about an hour later to inform me that she looked into things further, and my issue had to be escalated. There was some problem with “the codes” for my account or something. It sounded like my account never got provisioned for the right service level (which is what I suspected all along). She said she would call me back in a week to see how things were (which didn’t happen). With the exception of her not following up a week later, she was the only helpful and qualified person I dealt with.

I mentioned my issues in the post about Comcast rewarding you if you publicly complain and two Comcast employees made comments and one has contacted me via e-mail. I’ll do a follow-up post on the outcome.

UPDATE: Here is my follow-up post.

Well, CanSecWest’s PWN 2 OWN contest has just shown that Mac OS X isn’t “inherently safer” and that clearly it is possible for a user to open an e-mail on a Mac and have it join a spam botnet.

For those not familiar with CanSecWest or their PWN 2 OWN contest, here is the scoop. CanSecWest is “the world’s most advanced conference focusing on applied digital security.” And for the last few years, they have been running a contest during the conference to see which operating system is the most vulnerable: Windows Vista, Mac OS X, or Ubuntu Linux.

If you can hack (run arbitrary code) the laptop running the OS, you get to keep the laptop and a $10,000 cash prize. It is important to note that the “hacker” does not get physical access to the machine, and the laptops are in their default configuration. If you want more details please check out this link.

For the second year in a row the Mac was the first to fall, and Charlie Miller is now the proud owner of a MacBook Air with Mac OS X 10.5.2. Charlie is best known for being the researcher who first hacked Apple’s iPhone. It may be rude to say, but it is kind of vindicating for us that clearly we weren’t out on a limb when it came to Mac security. Within two minutes of the start, he directed the contest organizers to a certain website that executed his exploit.

Although the winner cannot publicly disclose details of the vulnerability, it is safe to assume the problem is in Safari. This comes after Paypal started recommending to their users that they ditch Safari due to security issues. And for the icing on the cake, Apple has started to use some under-handed methods to trick fool scam swindle con hustle sucker encourage iTunes/Quicktime users to install their underdog browser.

What can the nay-sayers say now?

For all the Vista users out there, I recently stumbled across an awesome program for the Vista Sidebar. It is called Amnesty Generator, and basically it will take the code for any web widget (think Google Gadgets, ESPN, etc) and turn it into a Vista Sidebar compatible gadget. It is a simple program, but works great; I use it to display the NBA.com live sports scores on my desktop. Check it out. There is also a Mac OS X version, but I have not used it.

Next up on the block is Nintendo’s forthcoming Mario Kart release for the Wii. Forget Zelda or Metroid, Mario Kart may be the most important franchise Nintendo has made in the last decade or two. All three people Everyone who had a N64 or Gamecube had Mario Kart; it is probably the only game I really played on Gamecube. It single handedly kept Nintendo in the console business, IMHO.

The formula is simple, easy and fun racing antics for you and your friends. Really it is about playing with others and yelling at them when they use a power-up on you. “Damn you Carl! That was the luckiest turtle shell ever!” The problem is that Mario Kart for Wii will not have voice support for online play (of course you can still taunt in person :)).

Maybe it is just me, but I don’t get it. Why doesn’t Nintendo come out with a headset for the Wii (it uses Bluetooth after all)? They made a steering wheel for Mario Kart, and I would think that another accessory to buy would fit perfect with Nintendo’s current accessory fetish strategy.

Mario Kart online won’t be half of the fun it could be with voice support. I understand that they may be concerned about the unwanted jagged words you often hear on Xbox Live, but limiting voice chat to friends-only by default would take care of that. When I read posts like this of people using Xbox 360s to do voice chat while they play Wii games, you know something is wrong.

Lastly, and certainly not least, why do people care what Kevin Rose says or does? (This is a real question, feel free to comment). I know he runs a website that is almost as popular as TechConsumer (ha!), but really, why do people care? It was the Kevin Rose 3G iPhone rumors post about back-to-back webcams that really pushed me over the edge. It got coverage on AppleInsider, Gizmodo, Techmeme, and of course Digg.

Kevin Rose has had one good idea in his life so far (which appears to be easy to copy and make better), and that’s it. Digg initially thrived under the so-called “wisdom of crowds” but it is now languishing under “mob rule.” Interestingly enough, the mob has a fancy for Paris Hilton, all products from Apple, and stupid ugly cats (and squirrels). More people on Digg read what Kevin Rose says than what Ben Bernanke says (even with this “recession”). Rose’s predictions were way off on the iPhone 1.0, so why would I listen to him now? He doesn’t work with or for Apple (actually his business relationship is closer with Microsoft).

So again I ask, why does anyone listen to Kevin Rose? If you can actually give me a good reason why, I’ll be surprised.

I am going on record that, unless Mozilla changes the direction they are heading, Internet Explorer will push Firefox back to single digit market share within three years. I’m sure a lot of people will flame me that Microsoft could never pull that off, but try telling that to Netscape. Each incarnation of Firefox since at least version 1.5 has not been a significant improvement on the previous version. Yeah, they claim all sorts of new features, but really, what is going on with Firefox 3?

Sure it is supposed to use lower memory, but the user interface is seriously going downhill. They seem so insanely focused on the underlying technologies (which isn’t necessarily bad) that they don’t spend any time on the UI. Look at the new download manager; functionally it actually works a lot better, but I’ll be damned if my parents (or any other average user) would ever figure out how to use the new features it has.

Then there are the areas where they have changed the underlying system dramatically (database driven history and bookmarks) that really don’t work any better than the old way. I ran FF3 Beta 3 for about a month, honestly the new bookmarking/history features adds about 5% benefit (it does the search in the location bar instead of in the history sidebar) but at a cost that every extension written for bookmarks or the history don’t work. That is a major deal breaker for me. Maybe Firefox 3.5 will actually expose more useful functionality for this feature, but it isn’t that great right now.

My real problem is the direction that Mozilla is taking Firefox. Their handling of adding features and juggling extensions is a joke. They consistently seem scared of adding a new feature that would be genuinely useful to the average user. I have seen this first hand on Bugzilla with a feature request for save to PDF support. Firefox 3 has the built-in underlying technology (through Cairo) to save web pages to PDF, but they don’t want to add it as a feature. They just say that it should be delivered through an extension (which exists). The code is all there except for a user interface to expose the functionality to the user!

Every user has to go out and find the extensions though. Why can’t Firefox have official/recommended extensions (maybe weather, gmail, etc) that can optionally be installed with Firefox? Or why aren’t there different versions of Firefox? Just think, they could make a Firefox Developer Edition that would come with many common web developer extensions like Firebug, Web Developer, or HTML Validator.

The biggest problem with extensions is that they never work from version to version. Firefox is a terrible platform in this regard. It is ridiculous that by far most extensions won’t support FF3 it before it launches. But the Mozilla folks seem to believe that that doesn’t matter. Why is it that extensions constantly have to be redone for new versions of Firefox? Hell, even Firefox 1.0 extensions didn’t work on 1.5 but “add-ons” for Internet Explorer 6 still work on version 8!

This finally gets me to Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1. The bottom line? I kind of like it. They are actually going in a direction that I’m interested in with features like Webslices and Activities. Basically, Webslices allow you to subscribe to a portion of web page; similar to how you sign up for an RSS feed. It fits a very different usage scenario than RSS feeds though. A Webslice could be a eBay auction you are following, the status of a friend on a social network, or the latest news headlines. Here is a link to Microsoft’s page and a video on Webslices.

Internet Explorer Activities allow you to select text (anchors can be embedded in the page too) and get context sensitive options. The most obvious example is selecting an address to get a map. The cool part is that the activity can show information (like a map) without leaving the page (see image below). Any website can create activities for IE8 as well; it isn’t locked down to just Microsoft services.

The best thing about Activities and Webslices? They just come built-in to IE8. They aren’t some “great” extension that only one in twenty users of a browser with 15% market share have. So with Firefox the feature will be so uncommon (3% of web users) that no web developer can really target it. Within a year of IE8 coming out it will have more than 50% of the market. Consequently, websites will actually implement Activities and Webslices.

Another illustration of where IE8 is going is that it includes a Firebug-esque development tool built-in. The Mozilla people need to come to grips with the fact that a huge amount of the “value” of Firefox to users is found in the extensions. They try to position Firefox as an extensible base platform with a rich ecosystem of add-ons, but the add-ons break between every single version. That is, if the average user has even found or realized that they can add those add-ons.

Bottom line: I haven’t switched to Internet Explorer yet, but if Microsoft and Mozilla keep the trajectories they are on I can’t rule it out in the future.

*Disclaimer: I have been using a Mozilla browser as my primary browser for six years. First Mozilla (aka Seamonkey) v0.95, and then Firefox when it was known as Phoenix 0.6. I have been exposed to some of the development activities on Mozilla’s Bugzilla too. So I don’t want to hear that I’m just some Microsoft fanboy.

The Good

Lean: Overall Firefox seems so much leaner this time around. Even after hours of browsing with dozens of tabs open Firefox 3 is using about one-third less RAM than I typically see Firefox 2 use. The RAM savings didn’t come at the sacrifice of performance though, everything is notably quicker. Going back to previous pages, opening new ones, even the auto-completion when I typed in a URL seemed quicker. Even Google Maps seemed more responsive.

Features: While there is an entire list of changes in Firefox 3, Mozilla has added a notable one. The history and bookmarks have been combined into one database driven section called Places. Don’t be worried that the the UI has changed too much, on the surface most users won’t really notice the difference; it is more of a back end thing. They did add a new “Places” folder on the bookmark toolbar which can show recently viewed pages, tags, or starred pages. In addition, there is a completely revamped bookmarks organizer that will allow you to search your current bookmarks or history as well.

Some of the changes are much more subtle. The search box has been changed so that you can now resize it to any arbitrary size you want. When you scroll through tabs when there are more than can fit on the screen, they have added some animation to make it more clear what is happening.

If you zoom in or out on a webpage (ctrl-plus or ctrl-minus) you will notice that the whole page zooms now instead of just the text. While it is a nice feature in practice, the images look horrible when scaled up. I am still waiting for a browser that will do a smooth (read: bicubic/bilinear, not nearest neighbor) resize of a scale image. If the images looked good, this could be a major feature for those with old eyes that would just like everything to be bigger on the high DPI screens being sold today. It should be noted that version 3 also remembers your page-zoom settings on a site-by-site basis now too.

The Bad

Extensions: It can be summed up in one word, Extensions. While the extensibility of Firefox is a major feature (I probably like my set of extensions more than I like Firefox really), they are a huge problem when it comes to upgrades. Out of the eleven extensions I use, only one works with Firefox 3. That means, no weather, Gmail, Google Toolbar or Bookmark Sync, Image Zoom, Firebug, etc. Now I know some of these will probably be compatible by the time version three dot zero is released, but I’ll bet most of them still won’t. And until 95% of them work, I won’t be upgrading to Firefox 3.

The Verdict: Firefox 3 is a solid, but progressive upgrade. I won’t be adopting it though until at least six months after its release. I don’t know what the technical solution is for the Extensions, but Mozilla needs to figure out something with this. It is unacceptable that one of the biggest features of their product is incompatible from version to version. It happened when 1.5 came out, 2.0, and now 3.0. This is an area where Microsoft has typically excelled.

* Disclaimer: If you plan on checking out Firefox 3 for yourself, make sure you backup your Firefox user profile first.

That said, they introduced a new feature that I think is really cool. When you are watching a video in Joost you can click on a button (see screenshot below) that will copy a link to the video into the clipboard. You can then paste the link in an e-mail/blog/IM. When someone clicks on it, it will take them to Joost.com where the video can be launched into the Joost player. They have added a lot of content, and I decided that I would share some of my favorites here. Especially don’t miss the video of David Letterman interviewing Paris Hilton.

They have also added widgets. That’s right….widgets. I don’t know how I feel about this one. There is a widget for RSS feeds, to post video to a blog, and they even have a GoogleTalk/XMPP/Jabber instant message client widget. One of the more interesting widgets is a channel chat widget. You can chat with anyone else watching the same show that has the widget open too. I don’t think I need my RSS being delivered along with my video, but it might be interesting if you are watching on a home-theatre PC.

With more than 15,000 shows on tap and the service open for everyone, Joost is the spot for free video over the internet. Even with the bugs I’ve encountered, I would recommend that everyone check out what Joost is offering.

Joost Videos:
David Letterman interviewing Paris Hilton
Oscar the grouch makes Craig Ferguson an honorary citizen of Sesame Street
Transformers (old skool animated series)
G.I. Joe

Something has surprised me more than the twists and turns of the plot though, and that is Bungie’s Halo 3 website. It is a whole new level of game and interweb integration. Dare I say it, it is almost a social network.

The Old

Halo 2 already had quite a bit of interesting integration into the web. You could check your all-time stats, look at where each of your deaths took place, and even check out where the person was standing who killed you. But that was pretty much where it stopped.

The New

Stats: Halo 3 ups the ante on the stats, offering far more comprehensive stats. I especially like that they have added emphasis to the kill to death ratio for those players who make you lose the game by 3 kills when they get 25 kills, 35 deaths, and still feel they had a good game. You can look at your stats for each map, for each game type, and for each weapon you use even. So far my weapon of choice (in one multiplayer game) is the Heavy Machine Gun (turret).

Forge: There are two new modes in Halo 3 that are quite unique: Forge and Theater. The Forge allows you to customize all of the multi-player maps. Weapons, spawn points, vehicles, teleports, and more can all be altered. It will be incredibly interesting to see what the Halo community comes up with in the Forge.

Theater: The Theater lets you watch recent games from anywhere in the game, Forge, Multiplayer, or even Campaign; and when I say recent, that is a relative term. The Theater will keep the most recent “25 films, or about 400MB worth, whichever comes first.” My 360 still has every minute of my entire campaign. You can also save films to your library if you don’t want them deleted. Obviously you probably wouldn’t want to relive an entire campaign (unless that is your thing) so the Theater is about more than just replaying games. You can make brief clips or take screenshots (the picture above is actually one of mine, click on it for full screen) of any of your video.

Sharing is Caring: What good would all these custom maps and screenshots of major pwnage be without a way to share them with the world? That’s where the Halo 3 file sharing comes into play. It isn’t the illegal P2P type of file sharing most people associate with that name. It is the place you can put up any content, maps, videos, screenshots, gametypes, etc, you create in Halo 3 for anyone to download. Friends can find content through the game, but you can even download stuff via your web browser onto your Xbox 360. Just find the content you want on the site, click download, and next time you play the game… Violá, it downloads it.

The Social Network: As you may have noticed above, I was initially going to say it was almost a social network, but looking into it further I realized it is really a full-blown social network…for a game. Think about it, you have your profile, a message center, a friends list, a people finder (to find other friends on Halo 3), a forum, and even groups (formerly Clans). That sounded like a social network to me, but it was when I saw what clans had become that it pushed me over the top.

Groups: Clans (now called groups) have moved far beyond just a bunch of people to game with. Each group now has its own homepage (see below), forum, articles and FAQ sections, news, announcements, links, and of course an RSS feed. This is going to build a whole new level of community in many groups, particularly competitive ones. It will be really interesting to see if Bungie expands the feature list to allow group file share. I can envision groups just for machinima with episodes on their homepage.

Finding new groups has been expanded too. It used to be that if you played with someone on Xbox Live and had a good time, you might ask them for an invite into their clan, or maybe you had some friends at school that had a clan. Now you can search for groups based on location, the founder, or even just the name of the clan. I have already found one in my zip code and one dedicated to my university.

The Finale: So needless to say, I’m feeling pretty good about the return on my gaming dollar for Halo 3. I think Bungie has created something that will be mimicked by a lot of other studios, and that it has the potential to revolutionize the community aspect of gaming. If you have an Xbox, you owe it to yourself to get this game. With the solid campaign and multi-player, along with innovative features like the Forge and Theater, I’m giving this game a 10/10. Ask anyone who knows me, I don’t give out tens easily; I can nitpick with the best of ‘em.

In addition to the comments below, if you are on Xbox Live, drop me a message or game invite. My gamertag is peskyNOSPAMpescado. Just take the nospam out. Don’t ask about the name, it is a long story.

More Screenshots (courtesy of me, click for full screen):

*Those are real in-game graphics.

Purdue spokesperson Jeanne Norberg said: “As an Internet service provider, Purdue will forward these letters when the user can be accurately identified.” “Purdue will not voluntarily provide names to the RIAA. However, should those notified choose not to pay the settlement, the RIAA may obtain court-ordered subpoenas to obtain the individuals’ names.”

21 subpoenas were issued this summer out of the 37 who received settlement letters last semester. “Purdue [provided] the names of 19 individuals, and subsequently the RIAA reduced its total request for names to 17.”

Am I the only one who is just a little disturbed by the line “…should those notified choose not to pay the settlement?” I do not condone peer-to-peer sharing stealing of music, but I think the record companies’ resources would be better spent working on a new business model that leverages digital music and the Internet instead of suing four-dozen kids in one of their key customer demographics. Hopefully we’ll see some more creativity in music distribution business models such as SpiralFrog, and more consumer-friendly technology advancements like Microsoft’s new watermarking technology in the future.

Full Disclosure: I am a grad student at Purdue. See our previous coverage here.