Breakfast Links: Brain Control, Restaurant Reviews & Wii vs PS3
This article is cool, exciting and scary all rolled up into one, like a rollercoaster ride! Some big brains implanted a tiny computer chip into a quadriplegic’s brain that allowed him to type 15 words per second, mouse around a screen and remote control a tv. What’s even better is that they think that soon they won’t have to actually implant the chip, you’ll be able to wear it in your headband or in your ear (Ender’s Game style). How awesome is that? MMOG’s won’t be the same! Strap one of those on, get one of those VR glasses and pow, Snow Crash style all up in the hizzouse! Of course the flip side is, if they know so much about your brain, will they reverse the process so that they can start controlling you? I read Interface, too, and that scares me just a bit.
Now for those of us living in NYC, SF or LA, apart from being the few cities fancy enough for their own acronym, they now have BlogSoop! It’s a restaurant review site that pulls it’s rating from restaurant reviewing bloggers - it aggregates them, organizes everything and presents things to you in an pretty simple format. It’s pretty good, I wish the advanced search was a little more advanced with things like minimum rating, minimum number of reviews, etc… but you know it’s a nice site that brings restaurant review power to the people! I’m not quite sure how it works since there’s any number of restaurants that have several reviews but no ratings - I think that they aggregate the blogger reviews but for the rating only search for people who have rated it on the site. That’s kind of a problem since their interface suggests that the rating is based on the number of blogger reviews. I.e. Hummus Place shows in the main listing 8 reviews with a rating of 5. Wow! Everyone gave this 5 stars? But no, if you look on the detail in the right, 1 person reviewed it on BlogSoop itself with a 5 which is where the 5 comes from. In the blogger reviews it’s mixed with 2-5 stars. A couple kinks I hope get worked out, but the sites’ pretty good despite it all.
And to wrap it all up we find out that the Wii hasn’t just been crushing the competition in the States, it’s been crushing the PS3 in Japan as well. Last month it outsold the PS3 by more than 5 to 1. Five to One. I’m a big fan of the Wii and the simplicity of game that it implies. So when Kutaragi said he wanted “for consumers to think to themselves ‘I will work more hours to buy one’.”, does that make the Japanese lazy or the PS3 a flop? I know where my money is on that one… That’s what Sony gets for putting politics (*cough* Blu-ray *cough*) before engineering. Who knows maybe that Blu-ray thing’ll work out in the end, in the meantime, they’re killing their money making gaming franchise. Just like when they killed their monopoly on music devices (remember when the Walkman was anyone could possibly want?) for their music wing. Good times.
June 6th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Well, price difference aside, the main problem with the PS3 is that it’s got zero compelling games right now. Kinda hard to sell a console system that has no interesting games. They’ve got some in the pipeline for this year that look promising but until they do come out, expect the PS3 to continue eating it big time.
August 5th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
I think the ps3 sucks becuse sony entertainment copied xbox360 and the wii and psp blu-ray disks are never needed.The graphics are the same as xbox360 but the xbox360, wii, and lastly the psp.Those all make the ps3 for $600 or $500.This is why it sucks it was sonys fualt.
August 5th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Plus brain control from sony the nintendo ds is better lol