Everybody Votes
I’m in the middle of flipping between writing two emails and a document, and getting nothing completed, when I get distracted by the shiny blue light on my Wii. A message has arrived! What can it say? I must drop everything immediately and become distracted.
It was heralding the arrival of a new free channel called Everybody Votes. (there are some photos at Kotaku)
It’s kind of cute. You vote (with entertaining Mii graphics) on silly little questions like “Do you prefer cats or dogs?”, then predict how you think the majority will vote. Nosing around it, it looks like you get feedback on how well you predict the populous, as well as how far you verge from normal.
Joy happened to walk by as I was playing, so I got her to join in. It was fun comparing our votes, and if Nintendo were to expand it to allow you to compare with your Wii friends, I could see this becoming wicked popular, especially when you consider all the silly meme polls that flood LiveJournal and the like. People like showing off their opinion (plus comparing scores!)
If nothing else, it acts as an example of out-there thinking from someone at Nintendo. You wouldn’t see this on a PS3!
BarCampBoston2 is on for March 17th & 18th, at the Stata Center at MIT.
Wow, Record/Replay sounds useful. Similar to the Java Omniscient Debugger, but capturing the whole machine state. Looks like VMWare are doing a good job of differentiating their free and pay-for versions.
Upgrade
I’ve seen a bunch of links to instructions on how to install the Vista “Upgrade” edition on a PC without an existing Windows partition, something that theoretically shouldn’t be allowed.
I can’t help but feel that this is nothing new—It reminded me of something a friend at Uni was told by Microsoft support 10 years ago.
After a catastrophic PC failure, he was reinstalling software. He had the Office 95 upgrade disc, which required you to insert the installation disk from an earlier version of one of the Office tools to “prove” that you were upgrading. Unfortunately, he’d left all the old disks at his parents’ house.
So, after calling round friends in something of a panic (there was no doubt a paper due) to see if anyone had an old office disk (no-one did), he called up Microsoft support to ask what he could do.
“Oh, when you’re asked to point to an old installation disk,” he was told, “just point it to the Office 95 disk you’re currently installing from. That will work.”
And it did.
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