Techno

Forbes.com offers up a thought-provoking column on the future of social networking, concluding that Google will ultimately be Facebook’s demise:

There is an increasing drumbeat among technology analysts that Facebook is heading towards oblivion, not in days, or even months, but certainly in the next couple of years. If this seems a perverse judgment in the face of its claim to a virtual society, half a billion people strong, its underlying logic is compellingly Darwinian: The mobile web rewards increasing simplicity, and it doesn’t make sense, in the long run, to have multiple social networks, each with their own sign-ins and passwords, their own assemblies of non-collaborating address books, applications, and data, and multiple levels of interaction with other users.

But the Wall Street Journal counters with a story about a new Facebook feature:

The new “check in” feature thrusts the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social network into a geo-location arena that has been popularized by Foursquare Labs Inc. and Gowalla Inc., services that let people tell friends when they are visiting restaurants, bars, malls and other public places. Users typically get discounts and other incentives to encourage frequent check-ins.

Speaking at an event at the company’s Palo Alto facilities, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg declined to comment when asked how the company planned to monetize Places. Industry analysts have said they expect the social network to one day leverage user location data to sell more ads.

“Location is a highly monetizable variable,” said BGC Financial analyst Colin Gillis. “It’s yet another reason why Facebook is Google’s biggest threat.”

It will be surprising if Google doesn’t ultimately conquer the social networking scene. Google tends to consume everything in its path. From YouTube to browsers, it is becoming to the Web as Adobe is to print and design.

One has to wonder whether the Google brand enjoys so much firepower now that it will be essentially invincible. Take, for instance, Google’s Chrome browser. While a quick check of this blog’s August statistics reveals that Microsoft’s Internet Exlorer remains the most popular browser amongst our visitors by far (at roughly 50%, compared to Mozilla Firefox’s 23%), Chrome is catching on and may soon surpass Opera.

Yet while my peers who’ve switched to Chrome echo Google’s claims that Chrome is “lightning fast,” my own rudimentary speed tests find it to be no faster than Firefox (my favorite browser) or Mac’s Safari browser (a close second behind Firefox). Are users switching to Chrome simply because it’s branded by Google?

And then there are the Droid phones, using Google’s mobile OS, which will ultimately unseat Blackberry and the iPhone in terms of popularity. Successfully taking on the bitten-fruit company is no easy task, but it appears that Google is on the verge of doing just that. (Though even as a dedicated Apple customer, I will not wait to see whether the iPhone is coming to Verizon next year as rumored before I upgrade to a Droid X. That phone smokes.)

An interesting poll by the Pew Research Center finds that 71% of Americans believe cancer will be cured by the year 2050. That’s an optimistic response. But not as optimistic as when the same respondents were asked whether computers would be able to converse like humans by the same year; 81% said yes.

With medical advancements, brilliant minds tackling the subject and increasing amounts of money to keep them busy, one would certainly have reason to think that a cure for cancer is less than 40 years away. But I can’t say that I’m as confident as my fellow Americans. It never ceases to amaze me that we can fly a man to the moon—the moon, for crying out loud; we can develop an artificial heart; we can design tools that allow the sound of the human voice to travel on open airwaves, bounce from tower to satellite to tower, and be transmitted around the globe instantly…and yet we can’t find a way to stop a small cluster of rogue cells from reproducing.

Sunset is a distant memory and sunrise is hours away. A horse slowly plods across the open land, the rider having decided to roll out of bed and take a midnight stroll across the prairie. Buttes and mountains in the distance are illuminated by a full moon that hangs larger than life in the western sky and millions of stars light up the heavens.

The only sounds, other than the sounds of the horse’s hooves on the dirt path, are those of the night: crickets, mostly. Somewhere in the distance a coyote howls.

Suddenly a woman’s scream pierces the night. The sleepy rider sits upright in his saddle and spurs his horse into a gallop. It’s time to spring into action.

This is Red Dead Redemption. The long-awaited sequel to Red Dead Revolver was highly-acclaimed by critics prior to its release Tuesday, and it doesn’t disappoint. Rockstar has hit another home run.

The year is 1910. The arrival of the locomotive, telegraph and even electric lights in some areas have done their part to tame the American West. But self-survival is still the law of the land. Horseback is still the easiest way to travel, and a six-shooter is a man’s best friend.

John Marston is a former outlaw turned family man. But when federal agents threaten his family, Marston is forced to trade in his plow for his guns once more and bring his former comrades to justice by any means possible…or else. And so begins his journey through the dying West.

Centered around the fictional town of Armadillo, Red Dead Redemption’s open-world, sandbox-style of gameplay includes ranches, ghost towns, railroad depots and all the other parts of the authentic West. There are wild broncs to bust and stampeding cattle to herd. Cattle rustlers, horse thieves, stagecoach robbers and general ruffians are too thick to shake a stick at.

When Marston isn’t in a gun battle on the street or roping a fleeing outlaw and dragging him to justice, he might head off to the saloon to cozy up to the bar for a drink or two, or to look for a game of Texas Hold’em or Blackjack in the back room. Or, he can head down to the livery for a game of horseshoes, search for treasure, go hunting, or just explore the countryside.

Back on the open trail, Marston is riding for Tumbleweed, a ghost town that was forgotten when the mines played out and the railroad bypassed it, when he notices a saddled horse standing by the side of the trail. Curious, he stops to see what has become of its rider…and stumbles onto the man relieving himself on the side of a rock several yards off the trail.

Stumbling onto a stranger answering nature’s call might not be anyone’s idea of fun, but when Rockstar puts that kind of detail into its game, you know you’re in for a good time. There is no detail unacccounted for in Red Dead Revolver. Players will feel as though they’re actually a part of the landscape. You can almost taste the whiskey, smell the coffee perking over the fire and feel the wind as it blows through the cacti and tumbleweed.

The graphics and detail in Red Dead Revolver are second to none, and the voice acting is even better than previous Rockstar games. The gameplay leaves little to be desired. Folks who enjoy Louis L’Amour books or old John Wayne westerns and who like picking up a video game controller from time to time shouldn’t miss Red Dead Redemption. It isn’t as tame as a Louis L’Amour book or a John Wayne flick; like any Rockstar game, there’s blood and lots of it, and cursing and lots of it.

But Red Dead Redemption goes where no game in its genre has gone before, from the authenticity of the old west to the engaging storyline.

Video game designers have worn out the World War II era. And they’ve conquered most other eras as well—from medieval times to space odysseys. But one thing that hadn’t been conquered by the video game industry was the old west. Until now.

I’m waiting for the day when Rockstar decides to set their sights on a hunting game. Something like the old Deer Hunter series on PC meets the open-world, sandbox style that Rockstar has perfected. Now that would be a great game. Until then, hunting bears and cougars on Red Dead Redemption will have to do.

And don’t forget to skin your quarry. The meet and hides can be sold at the general store. With all the outlaws you’re going to encounter, you’re going to need the extra cash to pick up ammunition.

With this blog, a web design business that I operate as a sideline and a desire to put some photos online, I decided to create a personal website.

I showed it to someone yesterday and their response was, “Why do you need a website? You aren’t a musician or a politician.” My reply was that when the Internet first became popular in the ’90s, it was hip to have a personal website. And everyone knows that Scott County is always at least 10 years behind the times when it comes to popular culture, so I’m just now catching on. I may be unimportant, but someone will still sell me my name with a dot com or dot net on the end of it for $8.95 a year.

So check out my website, including the season-by-season photo sequence, which includes some of my favorites from my collection of photos taken throughout the Cumberlands region. Most of them are from the Big South Fork, but some are also from other locations, such as Dale Hollow and the North Cumberland WMA.

http://www.bengarrett.net

Everyone complains about Windows Vista. But from what I can tell, Windows has come a long way with Vista. It’s definitely much more user friendly than XP or previous versions. The story from the Mac camp before Vista was released was that Windows was ripping off a lot of the features of Apple’s OS X operating system and incorporating them into Windows. The similarities are subtle, but they’re there, and Windows is better for it, IMO. Sure, Vista uses a lot of memory. But memory is pretty cheap these days. And the laptop I’m using only has 4 GB of memory, and I can’t see it slowing down the machine any (I haven’t run any major memory-hogging applications like Photoshop or audio-video editing software, though).

That’s my observation after a couple of days back on a PC. I’m sitting here with a PowerMac desktop and my HP laptop running side by side and, to be honest, I almost like Vista as good as OS X. Almost. But, admittedly, I haven’t really rolled up my sleeves and got my hands dirty with Vista yet. So far I’ve just been transferring files back and forth. Within a week I’ll probably be cursing Bill Gates again.