Lots of you guys use Facebook. Facebook is notoriously hard to back up. Although I’m not aware of any large server outages, if you post a lot of pictures to Facebook its good to have the important ones saved in a secure place. There are a number of programs you can download that scan through the Facebook directories and download each and every file individually, they’re hard to use. There’s a simple solution.
The 8 bit NES homebrew/modding scene is at it again. Not content at modding an NES to fit in to a Genesis, or modding an NES to fit in to PC, some guy got to hacking a breathalyzer in to an NES cartridge. You’ve been blowing on the cartridges forever (the only way to make them work, duh.) I already know that the only time you feel like playing Zelda is when you’re drunk (or depressed. You want to feel a sense of accomplishment, so you beat Zelda in 3 hours, for the 93rd time. But you’re depressed, so you’re probably drunk too.) So modding a breathalyzer in to an NES cart is actually a good idea. Function and form come together in perfect symmetry, yet again! This is actually sort of impressive because he coded a cartridge to display your score etc. Getting the “party frog” is the equivalent in getting the Soyuz rocketship in Tetris. Hah! Not really! Getting the “party frog” only tells your friends what they know and you’re hopelessly in denial about: You’re a drunk!
In motorsports, if you’re not cheating, you’re probably not winning. Safety regulations have really made it so that from F1 to NASCAR, the best cheaters DO win. Cars are so similar that minute changes will oftentimes determine whether or not you’re placing 1st, or 15th. Lots of times these minute changes come from creative interpretation of the rule book. (That’s not to say that sometimes teams will completely chuck the rulebook away. Remember: its not cheating unless you get caught!)
In the early 1990’s Toyota Team Europe, TTE, was winning. They were racing in rallysports and they were winning. They had a pretty decent car, a Celica GT-Four. The GT-4 was a car that had got them through about six years of racing, and was winning more races every year. They had won the manufacturer’s championship and driver’s championship every year since 1990. For a world-wide company like Toyota, this translated in to MAJOR sales for the Celica. There’s an old NASCAR motto: “Race on Sunday, Sell on Monday.” (This only applied up to the 1970’s when NASCAR cars were actually some semblance of being the ‘stock’ models you could purchase at a dealership.) Toyota needed to maintain their edge, at all cost.
Rallying is inherently a dangerous sport. Drivers race around unpaved roads, through treacherous terrain, trying to beat the clock. Rallying fans stand inches away from cars making hairpin turns around blind corners. There’s always a fight between racing governing boards who want cars to be safe, and everyone else who wants them to be fast. Oftentimes this results in cars having their speeds artifically restricted. You can’t tell a racecar driver “Hey man … could you please not drive over 120 mph?” You need a piece of technology (or anti-technology) to artificially limit the speed of the cars.
In 1995 the FIA (Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, the major governing body for motorsports) decided that cars racing in the upper echelons of WRC would be fitted with “restrictor plates” on the turbo units of cars. All combustion engines produce power when they combine gasoline with oxygen. A spark ignites the gasoline and oxygen mixture which pushes a piston that drives a shaft that drives the wheels. Limiting the amount of oxygen taken in by the engine will limit the theoretical amount of power a car can produce. Thus restrictor plates. They are literally plates, a piece of metal that partially blocks a pipe that draws air in to the turbo part of an engine. A turbo is basically a fan that blows air in to an engine, so it would be like putting your hand in front of a fan … it blocks the air from reaching you. The restrictor plates, in theory would block a standard volume of air from reaching the engine. Restrictor plates were mandated for every car, and after the race officials would take apart certain components to make sure no one was cheating. This in theory would limit the top speed of the cars but do so in a way that every team would have the same exact limitations imposed.
Toyota has some of the best engineers in the world. Every car is inspected before the race by the governing body to make sure that the restrictor plate is installed. Toyota engineers figured out how to allow air in to the turbo intake that completely bypassed the seals around the restrictor! In addition, when the car was moving and the turbo was engaged, the restrictor plate would be moved back a couple of inches completely nullifying the effect of the restrictor plate. Some of the best judges and techs had gone over the car to make sure shenanigans like this weren’t taking place. In fact, the engineering was so good that when the turbo was disassembled post-race for inspection, judges couldn’t find any evidence that extra air had passed through the turbo. Toyota had manufactured special springs and clips that would move the restrictor plate back from the air intake, but when the turbo was disengaged the springs would pop it back in to position making it appear that everything was kosher. Like a sprinter, the more the engine could breathe, the faster it could go.
Max Mosley, the president of the FIA at the time said this: “Inside it was beautifully made. The springs inside the hose had been polished and machined so not to impede the air which passed through. To force the springs open without the special tool would require substantial force. It is the most sophisticated and ingenious device either I or the FIA’s technical experts have seen for a long-time. It was so well made that there was no gap apparent to suggest there was any means of opening it.”
The device gave the car an estimated 25% extra air coming in to the turbos, which added an extra 50 BHP (brake horse power)to the car. The cars raced in WRC at the time had about 300 BHP, an extra 50 BHP gave the car a HUGE advantage. The FIA quickly moved to ban TTE from racing that year. Toyota lawyered up, but they were eventually banned for the rest of the 1995 and 1996 season.
In 1998 TTE placed second in WRC, and in 1999 they won the manufacturer’s championship. That was the end of Toyota’s rallying history, they soon moved on to a pretty lousy F1 team.
With rallysports starting to get big in America, it kinda makes you wonder what cool technology is driving those brutish cars. Companies like Toyota use events like WRC as a testbed for new technologies that eventually make it in to their production cars. When your odometer clicks over to 300,000 miles in your Camry, a lot of that durability comes from testing in extreme conditions. I know that the guy in the Monster energy hat probably doesn’t seem like he’s got anything worthwhile to society, but engineers are going to tear his car apart after the race and find out how to improve upon their existing designs. They may not have anything as mechanically sophisticated as a cheat designed by Toyota engineers, but he’s probably got something if he’s winning! If its as good as their previous hacks though … we may never know …
Snoop Dogg, prolific gangsta rapper, crack dealer, pimp, dog fighting breeder, felon, Norton Internet Security spokesman? Yes.
That was the OLD Snoop Dogg. 19 years later, he’s teamed up with Norton to bring you the “Hack is wack” contest, where if you spit the best rhyme on why hacking is “whack” you’ll win a free laptop (Loaded with Norton Internet Security 2011!!!!) a trip to LA to meet Snoop and his management, and tickets to a Snoop Dogg show! (2)
OMG HOW STOKED DOES HE LOOK IN THAT VIDEO?! Really, my life is complete. Snoop Dogg has legitimized heuristic discovery of suspect processes, polymorphic software, and x86 stack overflows. I can now walk through Watts and have street cred!
Creep with me as I crawl through the drive,
Maniac, lunatic, pay the bills to stay alive,
Did you know that your precious pictures, videos and email live in a cloud and could disappear at any time? This week Google accidentally lost data for 40,000 to 150,000 users (reports vary) and is trying to restore the data. Flickr is well known for deleting photos and Facebook might remove your art photos because some old cat lady is a prude who is just thinking of the poor children. Usually photos are on your computer since you had to retrieve them from your camera, but email often exists only on your provider’s servers. Cnet has put together a video showing how to backup your data from Gmail and some other tips for backing up your other data.
With the recent success of the PLAY! concert series and a Grammy win for Civilization IV’s theme song “Baba Yetu“, it would seem that video game soundtracks are finally beginning to be taken seriously as music. But whether this heralds an era where video games themselves are considered a legitimate artistic medium on par with film remains to be seen. After all, the pieces of video game music that have received the most attention so far have been the classical and New Age-style compositions of Civilization and Final Fantasy rather than the iconic looping synthesized tracks that have long been admired by video game nerds, spawnedcountlessremixes, and influencedandinspiredvariousmusicsubgenres.
It is the firm belief that these are just as deserving of recognition that inspired me to create this list. And while it would be pretty easy to throw together a list of the most well-known and acclaimed pieces, I wanted to highlight some amazing tracks you may not have heard from some rather obscure games, lesser-known sequels to classics, and Japan-only exclusives. In the spirit of my own generational prejudices, I’ve also attempted to limit the list to games from the nineties. Some of these games are great, others are laughable, but all of them are rockin’.
*****
10. Captain Commando: Enemy Spaceship
Conceived as a brilliantly cheesy homage to classic pulp sci-fi and B-movies, this Capcom beat-em-up featured a mummy, a ninja, a mecha-piloting baby, and the titular Captain fighting hordes of scuba divers, aliens, cross-dressing samurai, mad scientists, and fire-breathing homeless people. This invigorating track follows the common trend at the time of video game composers mimicking the sounds of progressive rock and 80’s metal, which is a pretty good fit for walking down the city streets and beating the crap out of everything you see.
9. Skyblazer: Storm Fortress of Kh’lar
Aside from being one of the best games on the Super NES that no one played, this criminally overlooked action-RPG was one of the few games of the time to utilize a Middle-Eastern motif, which made for some amazing boss monsters and a uniquely beautiful score, particularly here and in the end credits.
8. Alisia Dragoon: Stage 1
This beautifully designed game was animated by a little studio called Gainax, later responsible for a little series called Neon Genesis Evangelion. Although the repetitive and limited arcade-style gameplay didn’t quite live up to the quality of the art, ethereal fantasy-themed tracks such as this one did wonders for the game’s atmosphere.
7. The King of Dragons: Cave of Hydra
The music in this completely cliched and thoroughly enjoyable fantasy hack-and-slash is exactly what you’d expect, which is to say it’s awesome medieval-style fanfare that will make you want to draw your sword and charge forth into battle.
6. Gourmet Sentai Bara Yarou: EXBunny
In this bizarre game that only the Japanese could make, an odd assortment of flamboyant villains has taken over the world’s food supply, and you must defeat their hordes of walking light bulbs and giant heads that sneeze on you in order to obtain ingredients that you will then give to your robot cook to turn into delicious meals. Here I am fighting a playboy bunny that turns into a power ranger that turns into a giant tanuki, complete with giant testicles, all set to a keyboard-laden speed metal soundtrack. There isn’t much more I can say about this.
5. Eternal Champions: Character Bios
Some of you may recognize this track as the one sampled by a certain Bone Thugs-n-Harmony in their song “Eternal“. In fact, they loved this game so much that they sampled another track from it for the more well-known “Crossroads“. Not only was Eternal Champions chock full of great tunes, but it boasted a great storyline, unique characters, a complex fighting system, and a Sega CD remake with gruesome fatalities that made Mortal Kombat look like Sesame Street.
4. Streets of Rage 3: Yamato
While the first two Streets of Rage games are considered Sega classics, few cared for this final installment, released late in the 16-bit era and lacking the stylish spark of its predecessors despite having superior graphics and a wider variety of moves. One of the main targets of criticism was acclaimed composer Yuzo Koshiro’s decision to shift to a more aggressive electronic industrial sound rather than the upbeat and melodic club disco tracks that had made the first two games so memorable. Nevertheless, there are a few gems in here, such as this killer Japanese-flavored techno track that serves as the theme for one of the game’s most annoying bosses.
3. Segagaga: Final Battle, Part 2
If you so much as think about making a Lady Gaga joke, I will end this article right now. I’m not kidding.
A strangely prophetic game released in Japan shortly before the Sega Dreamcast’s unfortunate demise, this simulation RPG has the player attempt to guide a failing Sega Corporation back to market dominance, though I’m not sure why that would involve blasting your own company’s gaming systems. Anyway, this sweeping neoclassical metal track was originally written for the cancelled Dreamcast release of Thunderforce VI, later released on the PS2. Listen to this every morning when getting out of bed and be inspired by the notion that even if you fail in your endeavors, you probably won’t fail as badly as Sega’s last two consoles.
2. Guardians/Denjin Makai 2: Stages 1 and 2
Both the best and most obscure game on the list, this stylish mid-nineties arcade beat-em-up boasted seven selectable characters and more combos and special moves than any fighting game of the time. The stage 1 and stage 2 BGMs at 0:14 and 3:35, respectively, perfectly complement the insanely fast-paced futuristic anime-style gameplay with dueling guitar harmonies and wailing crescendos.
1. Golden Axe 2: Boss Theme
Though this console-only sequel failed to attain the classic status of its predecessor, it was an improvement in almost every sense, including the soundtrack. This hair-raising boss music will immediately make you dread the coming battle. The only drawback is that they will probably never make a boss epic enough to deserve this dramatic an introduction.
*****
Well, that’s it. I hope you enjoyed reading this list as much as I enjoyed making it. Just remember – no matter how good these tracks are on their own, they are almost always better combined with the sounds of you kicking the enemy’s ass.
Who decides what an e-book book costs, the retailer or the publisher? This is the question at the heart of the debate on e-book pricing. Previously many publishers sold e-books to retailers for a fixed rate and the retailer decided what to charge the end user. If the retailer wanted to make a small profit, big profit or even a loss it was up to them. Amazon seized this model since they can sell e-books for near, at or even below cost and still make money by selling other products. Amazon’s loss-leader strategy paid off and the Kindle is their best selling product ever.
However, Apple would rather that the publisher set the retail price and give the retailers a fixed 30% margin. Even though this is blatantly anti-free market nobody seemed to care in this case because iPads are very shiny and people are impressed when you have one of these fondle-slabs. Apple doesn’t sell anything at a loss or even at low margin so this model fit better with their philosophy.
Today Random House became the last major publisher to switch over to the agency model that Apple prefers.
When you listen to Apple talk about the iPad 2 tomorrow just remember what it costs you and what it costs the market.
If we can agree on nothing else, let us at least agree to agree that POLITICO (All caps, please. K THX) is absolutely terrible. Politico is the Qadaffi of websites. No… Politico is the Charlie Sheen of websites. Unhinged, incomprehensible, obsessed with meaningless bullshit and you need a chlamydia test after fucking with it.
So why don’t we throw a little contest for the Crasstalk Army:
Let’s prowl Politico in search of the most execrable, mundane, pointless or otherwise awful article on the site today and post a link in the comments.
Tomorrow we’ll announce the winner. The prize is a very special Crasstalk post, written by me, extolling your virtues and affirming your place in history. Who wouldn’t want that?
First of all, stop gushing on Obama, GOP. Also, you can’t just put “Smitten:” at the front of a headline and expect it to make any sense. Usually you do something like that if you want to attribute the statement to someone. Like for example, “Scientists: Charlie Sheen Not Actually a Real Drug.” See, that would make sense.
To prove the writer’s point that the GOP is gushing on Obama, it goes on for about two solid paragraphs with a lukewarm Haley Barbour quote and then wraps up with this:
In his typical overly-Texan tone, Perry said the president is “a good talker” rather than communicator.
Perry though made clear that he thinks the Obama may like to hear himself talk, frequently mentioned how “long” the president took to answer some of the governor’s questions.
WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN? GAHHHHHHHHHH POLITICO. WHY DO YOU TEASE US WITH SUCH BULLSHIT????
Google has been around since 1998, and ever since they came online, people have been trying to exploit its algorithm to make it so their pages appear first on Google’s listing. Have you ever gone to a website and seen a bunch of terms at the bottom of the page, or sometimes hidden (only visible when you highlight them with the mouse)?
The site was trying to artificially bump its search ranking. Google has “robots” that search the web and extract pertinent words. Loading your site up with descriptive words is one of the oldest tricks to try to get in to Google’s index. Google keeps their search algorithm secret, but they do disclose some information about how their bots work.
J.C. Penney exploited Google’s search algorithm through site links. Lets say you’re selling tires. If a bunch of automotive-related websites link to yours, Google takes that in account and assume that your site’s content is highly relevant and deserves a high rank. The more sites that link to yours, the better.
Google is smart enough to rank sites in terms of overall importance, so a link from someone’s tiny blog might give you +2 points, but if a site like Walmart links to you (they’re big, and get a lot of traffic) – you’ll get +10 points. The more points, coming from relevant sources, means a higher rank. You’re probably thinking “who cares if you’re #1 vs #2 on Google’s search ranking?” but the exact position matters. A lot. Researchers have done studies that say most people are proportionately more likely to click on the #1 link. If you’re a business as big as J.C. Penney, millions of dollars are at stake.
J.C. Penney decided to hire a shady SEO (search engine optimization) company to register thousands of websites whose sole purpose was to link to J.C. Penney. The SEO company would fill these sites with commonly-used search terms, and links. For an example, here’s a link to a Huffington Post “article” that was published before the Super Bowl:
See how most of the “content” is short, simple paragraphs which seem to be factoids (at best)? This site is designed to be indexed by Google so that someone searching for “What time does the Superbowl start?” will be directed to the HuffPo page. This is way more advanced than J.C. Penney’s stunt. (Their pages are so un-interesting they’re not even worth linking to, unless you like looking at lists of household goods.) This HuffPo page isn’t really an article, it’s not really a “listicle” … its a page designed to drive traffic to the site.
Simple tricks like this have been vetted by Google since its inception. Since Google relies on bringing pertinent search terms to people, they really frown on stuff like this. A couple of years ago BMW in Germany decided to post a bunch of invisible text on their website (terms like “cars, auto, which car is the best?” etc) and Google de-listed them. They removed BMW from any and all Google searches! (BMW changed their site and got re-listed.) Every couple of months someone will come up with a “super ninja SEO technique” to drive traffic to websites. Generally any “super ninja SEO technique” will work for a couple of weeks, until Google changes up its algorithm. (Look in the “computer” section of Craigslist, and you’ll find all sorts of ads from people with “super secret SEO techniques.” It’s mostly bullshit.)
In response to J.C. Penney’s deceptive tactics, Google changed its search algorithm. Sites that used techniques like J.C. Penney lost a ton of traffic. In fact, Google came out and said that approximately 12% of their search rankings have changed in the past week. That’s a ton of upheaval!
Here’s another thing: Web users should be aware of how search rankings are calculated. The number one link in Google might not be the best result for you. If you run a website, its really deceptive to get traffic like this. As someone who buys a lot of stuff online, be wary of links!
